I don’t mind long comments. I know how to scroll.
While the seven minutes he waited to get up and leave were extremely disturbing, I do understand why they stayed in the air and moved around. Air Force One is one of the safest airplanes in the world. They have every countermeasure known to man, and I can only assume they flew high enough that any shoulder-fired missile would never reach it (their range isn’t great). We should also assume he had a fighter escort as soon as he took off. In any other undisclosed location, he’s a sitting target, and most of those undisclosed locations aren’t all that hard to guess or impervious to a 747 falling on them or flying into them. Those fighters would have shot down, or got in the way of, anything threatening that got in the way.
The President was visible because he was the public face of the country, of “law and order” and he had to show strength in the days after 9/11 to try to calm everyone down. I don’t know about you, but even though I don’t agree with or like the guy, his address on the evening of 9/11 was extremely helpful.
There are a ton of other reasons to criticize the administration. I don’t think his flying around on 9/11 or keeping Cheney in an undisclosed location is one of them.