"The Pet Goat" (popularly known as "My Pet Goat") is a children's story contained in the book , by Siegfried Engelmann and Elaine C. Bruner (ISBN 0026863553). The book is part of the thirty-one volume Reading Mastery series published by the SRA Macmillan early-childhood education division of McGraw-Hill. It uses the direct instruction teaching style.

The story has gained notoriety because U.S. President George W. Bush, as part of a photo op, was reading it to Florida schoolchildren at the time he was informed of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and it has become an important symbol to Bush's opponents both in the United States and abroad.

Bush's 2001 reading of the book

Bush's critics—notably Michael Moore in his film Fahrenheit 9/11—have argued that Bush's continuing to read the book after being notified of the attacks shows that he was indecisive in the face of the terrorist attacks. His supporters, on the other hand, contend that he was able to project calm in a crisis; the class teacher later praised Bush for his comforting treatment.

Shortly after Moore's movie opened in theaters, Amazon.com sold out of all copies of the book, with a one-month backorder. Some anonymous jokers wrote satirical reviews of the book, for example: "Presidential material, through and through! [...] The tempo, the choice of words, and the layout on each page captured my imagination so much that it took me about seven minutes to recover my bearings." (Amazon has since deleted these reviews.)

Osama bin Laden made reference to the story in a videotaped speech released just prior to the 2004 U.S. presidential election:

"We had agreed with the (Sept. 11) overall commander Mohamed Atta, may God rest his soul, to carry out all operations in 20 minutes -- before Bush and his administration could take notice. It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American forces would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone at a time when they most needed him because he thought listening to a child discussing her goat and its ramming was more important than the planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers. This gave us three times the time needed to carry out the operations, thanks be to God." [1]

Plot

"The Pet Goat" is the story of a girl's pet goat which eats everything in its path. The girl's parents want to get rid of the goat, but she defends it. In the end, the goat becomes a hero when it butts a car robber into submission. A sample passage:

A girl got a pet goat. She liked to go running with her pet goat. She played with her goat in her house. She played with her goat in her yard. But the goat did some things that made the girl's dad mad. The goat ate things. He ate cans and he ate canes. He ate pans and he ate panes. He even ate capes and caps.

References

• Engelmann, Siegfried, and Elaine C. Bruner. Reading Mastery II: Storybook 1. Rainbow ed. Worthington, Ohio: SRA Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, 1995.
• "Full Transcript of Bin Ladin's Speech". Aljazeera.net. 1 November 2004.

External links

• A Google Answers discussion of the issue
• Article in The Oregonian
• A video of Bush reading 'The Pet Goat'