Republicans bashing Kerry for his post fighting opinions is ridiculous. Remember, these are the same people who compared a war hero in Max Cleland, someone who lost three limbs fighting for our country, to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. They clearly have no scruples when it comes to partisan politics. Could you imagine the uproar had the DNC compared Bob Dole to either of these men? They sicken me.
Nice timeline at bottom of article, not reproduced here didn't format well, for those of us too lazy to read and cross references all the docs so far. http://slate.msn.com/id/2095256/ Yeoman of the Guard AWOL? Probably not. A draft dodger? No question. By Josh Levin and Timothy Noah Posted Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2004, at 4:39 PM PT The documents released by the White House on Feb. 10 (available here, here, here, here, and here) don't clear up all the questions surrounding President Bush's whereabouts when he was in the Air National Guard. There are still zany discrepancies between documents and discrepancies between documents and the recollections of National Guard officials, and there are still periods when President Bush's whereabouts remain weirdly difficult to establish. (Slate's Josh Levin has produced what we hope is the most comprehensive Bush-National Guard time line available anywhere. See below.) Nonetheless, the documents do narrow the period of Bush's apparent absence from Guard duty from one year to six months. They also establish that, if you use the most generous measure available, Bush squeaked by with enough service "points" to justify his honorable discharge. His early discharge in October 1973 to attend Harvard Business School still seems undeserved, given his poor attendance record, his apparent failure to meet the minimum-training requirement, and his suspension from flying (for failing to show up for a physical) during much of his time in what was, after all, the Air National Guard. Taken together, though, these documents indicate that it's probably unfair to state, even metaphorically, that Bush went AWOL. Bush's Guard service merits a D, not an F. Important caveat: Chatterbox is assuming these documents have not been tampered with. Given their mysterious appearance now rather than four years ago, when the Boston Globe's Walter V. Robinson put this story on the map, it isn't completely paranoid to question their authenticity. (For what it's worth, the National Personnel Records Center says it has no record of any changes being made.) We should further remember that the early 1970s, when these documents were first filed, was a golden age of executive branch corruption. Taking these factors into consideration, Chatterbox estimates that there's a 5 percent chance that the White House-released documents are phony. A less rude way to put this is that there's a 95 percent chance the documents are genuine. So that's what we'll assume. To say that Bush squeaked by on his National Guard requirements doesn't mean that he served his country in any meaningful way during the Vietnam War. The Republican National Committee and the Bush White House have been struggling mightily to change the subject from Bush's truancy to the disrespect Bush's critics are showing for the National Guard, from which the Army and Air Force currently have 100,000 troops mobilized. The Guard has already sent more than 60,000 troops to Iraq, and many more will follow. It's a serious fighting force worthy of gratitude and respect. "I would be careful not to denigrate the Guard," Bush warned Tim Russert in his Feb. 8 Meet the Press interview. It's fine to go after me, which I expect the other side will do. I wouldn't denigrate service to the Guard, though, and the reason I wouldn't is because there are a lot of really fine people who have served in the National Guard and who are serving in the National Guard today in Iraq. But what really denigrates the National Guard of 2004 is to compare it to the National Guard of the early 1970s, when it was a haven for people who wanted to avoid the Vietnam draft. Not the cushiest haven, perhaps—not as good as divinity school, for instance—but a haven nonetheless. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen confessed on Feb. 10 that, like Bush, he joined the Guard to stay out of Vietnam. ack then the Guard was where you went if you did not want to fight. That was the case with me. I opposed the war in Vietnam and had no desire to fight it. … I did my basic and advanced training (combat engineer) and returned to my unit. I was supposed to attend weekly drills and summer camp, but I found them inconvenient. I "moved" to California and then "moved" back to New York, establishing a confusing paper trail that led, really, nowhere. For two years or so, I played a perfectly legal form of hooky. To show you what a mess the Guard was at the time, I even got paid for all the meetings I missed. … The National Guard and the Reserves were something of a joke. Everyone knew it. Books have been written about it. Cohen's hooky was not, in fact, legal, but it wasn't something you had to worry much about being punished for. During those waning days of the draft (and the war), National Guard officers weren't eager to baby-sit draft-dodgers, so the ones who agitated to leave often got their wish. Out of a total combined force of roughly half a million, the Guard sent 8,728 troops to Vietnam during the entire war, of whom 83 died. These deaths were tragic, but they weren't large in number. To put it crudely, the mortality rate for National Guardsmen during the Vietnam War was lower than the mortality rate for rock-throwing antiwar protesters and bystanders in the Prentice Hall parking lot at Kent State on May 4, 1970, when Ohio National Guardsmen killed four of them. It does the current National Guard no disservice to say that the Guard of that earlier era was not exactly Charlie Company. But it does John Kerry a serious disservice to deny that President Bush evaded the draft during the Vietnam War.
Announced today: Bushies will finally release all records. I will say thank you George Bush for following through with your promise to release on your records. Hopefully he is still not holding something back.
I guess Bush is feeling some serious pressure on this one... Bush Orders Release of All National Guard Files By Steve Holland WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush, trying to stamp out a political firestorm, ordered the release on Friday of all his National Guard files during the Vietnam War to answer election-year charges that he shirked his duty. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said many pages of documents would be released and that a pool of reporters were allowed to see his medical records from that period. "We received the entire file this afternoon and the president felt everything should be made public," McClellan said. "There were some who sought to leave a wrong impression that there was something to hide when there is not." The White House hoped to put an end for good to accusations from Democrats that the Republican president shirked Vietnam War-era military duties. Bush was the son of a U.S. congressman at a time when National Guard service was seen as a way for the privileged to avoid being drafted for Vietnam War duty. Questions over his record resurfaced this year as Bush seeks to cast himself as a "war president" for his effort to win re-election in November. Bush, a member of the Air National Guard, was suspended from flying in 1972 because he did not take a physical and was honorably discharged eight months early, in October 1973, to attend Harvard Business school. The White House was put on the defensive when Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry MacAuliffe accused Bush of being AWOL and Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) of Massachusetts, a decorated Vietnam veteran and Bush's likely Democratic opponent in the November election, said Bush must answer questions about his service. LONG ABSENCES Two sets of documents were put out earlier this week about Bush's service by the White House in order to prove he was in Alabama during part of his Guard duty. The first batch was pay and service records, and the second was a copy of a Jan. 6, 1973, dental exam complete with a chart of Bush's teeth that was performed when Bush was at the Dannelly Air National Guard base near Montgomery, Alabama. Those records showed long absences during Bush's final two years of service -- a period in which he worked on a political campaign in Alabama. Democrats and other critics said the records were inadequate. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Friday said Bush is at a low point in public approval, his popularity depressed by questions about the Iraq war, continued economic frustration and public interest in his leading Democratic rival. It said Bush's overall job approval rating had fallen to 50 percent and his rating for honesty and trustworthiness had fallen to 52 percent, down 7 points from late October.
A contemporary of Bush, Dean Roome, a former Texas Air National Guard fighter pilot, was Bush's roommate when they were flying in Houston. He said that during the first half of his career, Bush was a model officer. During a telephone interview with USA TODAY in 2002, Roome described Bush's career as mercurial; the first three years were outstanding, the final two troubled. "You wonder if you know who George Bush is," Roome said. "I think he digressed after awhile," he said. "In the first half, he was gung-ho. ... Where George failed was to fulfill his obligation as a pilot. It was an irrational time in his life." Why Bush stopped flying remains a mystery By Dave Moniz and Jim Drinkard, USA TODAY ------------------------------------------ "He was a hell of a good pilot," one of Bush's former commanding officers, Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, recalled in December 2000, shortly after Bush was elected president. In 1971, he rated among the top 10% of fellow pilots. The positive descriptions of Bush's military service make his sudden decision to quit flying in the spring of 1972 - two years before his pilot commitment was up - all the more puzzling. An examination by USA TODAY of all the Bush records released to the public and interviews with pilots, Bush's Guard comrades and military personnel experts suggests Bush was treated differently from most pilots: Bush was accepted into pilot school even though he scored in the 25th percentile on a standardized test. The test was given to all prospective pilots and there was no specific score that disqualified a candidate. In addition, Bush had two arrests for college pranks and four traffic offenses before applying for pilot training. Former and current military pilots say it was uncommon for an applicant to be approved for training with such a record. There is no record of a formal procedure called a "flying evaluation board," which normally would have been convened once Bush stopped flying in April 1972. Bush's records do not show he was given another job in the Air Guard once he quit flying. Pilots and Bush comrades say his records should reflect some type of new duties he was assigned. Asked for an explanation about why Bush stopped flying, the White House said Bush "served admirably"... After Bush stopped flying fighter jets in April 1972 and did not take an annual physical examination required of all pilots, the Air Force should have required a hearing known as a flying evaluation board to determine his fitness to fly. Because the federal government spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to train each pilot, it typically did not allow them to stop flying without a formal proceeding. Bush's records do not mention a flying evaluation board. Pilots who stop flying are given other Guard duties. In Air Force jargon, it's called DNIF, or Duties Not to Include Flying, which is a written order. There is no indication in Bush's records that his supervisors assigned him another job. Aides say Bush has told them that once he stopped flying, he performed "odds and ends" for commanders whose names he can't recall. Bush's last flight physical, taken in 1971, expired on July 6, 1972. He did not renew it, as required of all military pilots, which is noted in his National Guard records. He was suspended from flying in August for missing the exam. Full article: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=676&e=2&u=/usatoday/20040216/ts_usatoday/whybushstoppedflyingremainsamystery
But Basso has assured us that Bush has a reasonable explanation for why Bush missed his physicals and was grounded.
I know! it's like a microcosm of this board, that exact same stuff has been posted here, almost verbatim, from the usual supsects. I'm pretty sure that's Trader Jorge and Basso in there at the bottom left.
Photo source rushlimbaugh.com hmmmmmm... Lies, damned lies and photography: how the camera can distort the truth By Paul Vallely 18 February 2004 Everyone knows the saying that the camera never lies. What is less well-known is that the man who coined the phrase, almost a century ago, added a rider. "While photographs may not lie," the great American documentary photographer Lewis Hine said, "liars may photograph". They have been at work ever since, as was seen this week with the fake snap of John Kerry which caused a stir in the United States. It purported to show him associating in the 1970s with the film star Jane Fonda, who is still widely reviled in the US for her visit to the enemy capital, Hanoi, during the Vietnam war. Many still see it as the act of a traitor. This was not the kind of publicity the Democrats' leading presidential candidate needed. It was, we now know, doctored. But it fooled many US citizens and some British newspapers. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=492418
two different photos. the one the article refers to is the one of them at a podium together, not the one at the rally pictured. fonda has admitted they were both there, and in fact both spoke at the rally.
They were both there, and they both spoke. This was PRIOR to Jane going to Viet Nam. Kerry by the way has criticized that move of hers. So linking the two is a nice attempt at smearing Kerry but it holds no water.
