For as consequential and world-altering as Sept. 11 was, one would think members of the press, of all people, would remember the details better.
NBC News published an article Tuesday detailing Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s latest political disaster. Photos taken last week show an unmasked Abrams at a campaign stop at an elementary school in Decatur, Georgia, where teachers, school staff, and even schoolchildren were required to wear face coverings. One such photo was even posted to social media by Abrams’s campaign team. Criticism soon followed.
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The Abrams campaign deleted the photos it initially uploaded to social media. Abrams, who had previously called Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s ban on mask mandates “immoral,” responded personally to the blowback, accusing her critics of racism. Her campaign has also listed a job posting for a new social “platforms director.” Someone is being thrown under the bus for her conduct.
Over at NBC, reporter Alex Seitz-Wald attempted Tuesday to make sense of the Abrams mess. However, tucked away in the story’s third paragraph is a passage more curious than even the report’s subject. It reads, “Abrams visited a Decatur elementary school to promote reading and Black History Month. But not since George W. Bush continued reading ‘The Pet Goat’ to Florida students on Sept. 11, 2001, has such a benign event turned into such a political blunder.”
This comparison is not rooted in actual history.
The Pet Goat incident was not viewed at the time as a “political blunder” for Bush. In fact, his approval rating soared to 90% in late September 2001, up from 51% before Sept. 11. Voters clearly didn’t care that he finished reading the book even after learning of the attacks. Bush’s approval rating remained in the 80s and 70s for a full year after Sept. 11. He then went on to win his 2004 reelection bid against then-Democratic nominee John Kerry. Put more simply, The Pet Goat was no Howard Dean scream or a Dukakis-in-a-Helmet moment.
Bush’s juggling of the news of Sept. 11 with his scheduled appearance that day at an elementary school became a negative talking point only several years later, thanks to left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore. Indeed, The Pet Goat incident became a “gaffe” only retroactively thanks to Moore’s retelling of Sept. 11 in his 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11. It’s no coincidence Bush’s approval rating finally slipped back into 50% territory at around the time of the 2004 presidential election.
(By the way, the book is called The Pet Goat, not My Pet Goat, as Moore claimed. It is telling he didn’t even get the title correct.)
The Bush-is-so-incompetent-he-kept-reading-a-children’s-book narrative is quite literally a left-wing meme that Moore and other Daily Kos types willed into existence, complete with photoshops and other misleading claims, nearly three years after the fact. That it became the prevailing narrative, accepted to this day in corporate media circles, says something about the strength and staying power of left-wing agitprop in popular culture.
It’s rather telling certain journalists today live in such a bubble that their memories of Sept. 11 were formed by Moore and not by the events of the time.
As with the New York Times’s smear of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin regarding the 2011 Tucson, Arizona, mass shooting, the people at NBC have confused what actually happened in 2001 with a left-wing commentator’s version of history.
If the network really needed a comparable school-related political flub, it could’ve just referenced Dan Quayle misspelling the word “potato.” That was at least a real-time “political blunder.”
