Hot Cocked
On Wednesday afternoon, I was sitting in a hushed, carpeted room in one of the National Science Foundation towers, in Bollston, Virginia. I was on a review panel, and we were quietly deliberating the relative mertits of a stack of proposals.
One of the reviewers, who was in constant touch with her staff and the ever-so-important world of Washington politics through her cell phone and CNN headlines, snorted loudly and exclaimed "Oh my God! They're evacuated the Capitol! One of my staffers was told to run for her life!"
A curious event to us at that point, but it did little to interrupt our deliberations.
Later on, we heard more of the story, about how everyone had gotten all excited by this little plane that got too close to the big white house so everyone got really, really concerned and started following protocols. Oh my.
Curiously, the President didn't know about any of it. He was over in Maryland riding his bike. Anyone (i.e., liberals) who wonder whether he shouldn't have been in the loop are reminded that even President Kennedy — a democrat — thought exercise was important.
How could this happen (by which I mean, the President wasn't told, rather than the equally compelling: how could he stay on his bike)? Well, it's not clear, and one suspects that he just wansn't in the loop because wouldn't have had anything useful to contribute. Of course, that can't be the official line, so this is the view from the corner that Scott McClellan painted himself into during a press conference the next day:
Q: And wasn't there a possibility that a plane headed for the White House, that this was the leading edge of some broader attack, isn't the president concerned that maybe he should have been alerted to the fact that this could have been the beginning of a general attack?
McCLELLAN: That was not the case, and I think the Department of Defense yesterday indicated that they didn't sense any hostile intent on the part of the plane, so again —
[…]
Q So if it was assessed that there was no hostile intent on the part of this aircraft, can you tell us why 30,000 people — 35,000 people were told to run for their lives?
McCLELLAN: Because of the protocols that are in place, John. We want to make sure that the people in the area of the threat are protected. After —
Q: But what was the threat? You just said there was no threat.
[Excerpts from "McClellan Spars With Press, Says No Need to Notify Bush", Editor & Publisher, 12 May 2005.]
Boiled down: there was no threat so we didn't have to tell the president, but we terrorized all the people in specific non-threatened places by telling them to run for their lives, according to our established protocols. (In another answer during the same press conference, McClellan tried the gambit that the president actually was "involved" because he had once approved the protocols that were being followed.)
All in all, a fascinating look inside the working of republican "logic".
In a related story, here's a bit from the beginning of an interview at CNN with one of the F-16 pilots who got to be one of the much-admired "first responders":
[CNN's Kyra] PHILLIPS: First of all, Colonel ["Lt. Col. Tim Lehmann, one of the two Air National Guard F-16 pilots who responded to the unauthorized aircraft"], great to have you with us. We appreciate you [sic*] talking to us. Why don't you tell us how it all began yesterday?
LEHMANN: I'd be happy to, Kyra. I actually was just about finishing my lunch when our alert klaxon went off. And we ran to the jet, and all of our F-16s, which you see in the background, are hot-cocked, and that means all their switches are ready to go. So we jumped in the airplane quickly and we rolled very quickly and are in the air. I can tell you that yesterday we were in the air at 11:57, to begin our intercept.
[from "F-16 pilot: Intercept 'a difficult period' ", CNN.com, 12 May 2005.]
I know it's tacky of me, but sometimes I think about trying to establish this as a gay blog, which means that I really need to show more of the expected nudge-nudge wink-wink behavior that demonstrates my presumed obssession with sex.
This made it way too easy. I mean: "…all our F-16s … are hot-cocked, and that means all their switchers are ready to go."
It gives me goose bumps just to hear the Colonel say his equipment is all "hot-cocked". Whew!
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*I know, I can be a bit of a grammar queen sometimes, but I really hate it when people who are supposed to have a professional relationship with words demonstrate that they've never been within a country mile of a gerundive in their lives. Tsk.