You don't want this or this. A President is going to have to make BIG decisions that have life and death implications. Knowing where they stand in regard to utilizing our military is pretty important stuff imo.Still not convinced it's that much of an issue.
Yeah, its one of those things that isn't an issue until its an issue.
I've got to agree with cgod on this point :
We could sustain several 911's a year and they would do less damage to our freedoms and budget than the response to 911 has caused.
For sure. The aftermath of 911 was/is a mess. I never said otherwise, in fact I mentioned it was a reason to know how a leader feels about military might. That said, we may be able to sustain those types of attacks financially but there are other implications. Remember the national psyche after 911? It was awful. Absolutely awful. I'd rather never experience that again. Certainly not several times a year.
Actually, I don't remember it. I'd moved away from the USA about 3 years before, and from the outside, it looked like a lot of media-driven knee-jerk over-reacting (after the first few weeks anyway). Maybe I'm not being 911-sensitive enough, but damn man - you guys allowed what should have been a simple one-time tragedy to become an ongoing tragicomedy of errors which helped to further ruin a country already on the skids.
The first weeks sucked. Then we went to Afghanistan and had the world behind us. Then "W" decided to go after the bad guy that tried to kill his daddy. Imagine a plane takes out the Q1 tower and then the Eureka tower and nothing like it has ever happened before. It would have an effect on you.
I do know a little about those emotions, though. I lived in Oklahoma City in 1995.
BTW I'm gonna pretend you said "Sky Tower" and, um, hmm - some other big building in NZ.
I had to google those two towers to see what you were talking about :-)
HA! I swear I googled largest building in New Zealand. edit: Imagine a plane crashes in to the shire
Google, being helpful - "NZ? Really? Are you sure you didn't mean 'tallest building in Australia' ? I'm pretty sure that's what you meant, so here's your search results!"
What specifically do you want a leader to do to ensure a 9/11 doesn't happen again?
I don't have a specific answer, but I would hope that our president take the appropriate steps to monitor terrorist networks and their intentions. I am not an expert in these things, but I would hope our president would be. Income equality, climate change and campaign finance are all big and important topics that need addressing but our president will still have to protect our nation. There are those that say Bill Clinton specifically warned Bush about Bin Ladin and Bush didn't take the threat seriously enough. I would hope our president not be naive or myopic in their agenda. I know that as a liberal it's not cool to say that national security is important, but it is.
Well, to ignore the point of your argument here (sorry about that), a sizeable portion of people say Bush was warned about Bin Laden and didn't follow closely enough because it was politically uncomfortable for him with the personal ties his family had to Bin Laden's network. Keeping military and surveillance tabs on his friends was ironically something he avoided before explosively expanding NSA programs to do just that post-9/11.