Please see my subsequent post (#11, above).
Oh, I missed this line before. You’re lucky we’re not in the Pit or I’d rip you to pieces for that one. You have no idea of what it’s like to be in the military, obviously, or you would never have disrespected virtually every single member of the Guard (and for that matter the military) with that last crack. Oh, but the Guard never does anything, does it? :rolleyes:
-Senior Airman David Cartwright, veteran of Iraqi Freedom, recipient of the Air Medal for 16 combat missions, and member of the Air National Guard.
I still don’t see the debate. It’s either: Does an honorable discharge mean the dischargee was never AWOL? Which has a factual answer and could be posted in GQ. -or- Does Bush lie everytime he opens his mouth? Which is certainly debatable, but would end up being sent to the Pit before you could say “Honorable Discharge”.
How about a one sentence description of what topic you want debate?
I think this is the OP’s point as well – an Honorable Discharge means dick. Even when the President and his Press Secretary offer it up as some sort of proof for some sort of point.
And I acknowleged that. But the comparison made by the author (and the one quite obviously supported and endorsed by the OP) is absolutely disgusting.
Further, he’s implying that everyone who gets an honorable discharge is a scumbag when he says
when he states right from the beginning that you can’t tell anything about a person from their discharge. Neither the OP nor the author of that article know any of the circumstances surrounding the discharges mentioned, but they were obviously placed together intentionally to make a connection between the two. That is reprehensible.
Once again, this is a case of someone who had a potentially decent point overshadowing it with absolutely disgusting generalizations and allusions. And I will not sit here and let him do it. No self-respecting servicemember will let someone who clearly knows jack make such ignorant statements with impunity, least of all me.
And frankly, if that IS the OPs point (would have been nice if he had of come right out and said it) its not very interesting, is it? In essence what the OP is saying (I suppose…I never was too good at this coded messages stuff) is: An honorable discharge (I always thought HD meant Horn Dog…guess not 
) in and of itself means nothing. And the Republicans have spun that to make it seem to mean something benificial to their case. While the OP must think this is facinating and ground breaking news (the Republicans SPUN a story???), I fail to see the debate…still. If thats it, this should be in GQ…and its already been answered.
Now, if the OP wants to debate his other assertion (i.e. Everything Bush says is a lie and/or he’s a serial liar) then again this should be in GQ…and its easily answered. I’m sure we can find ONE thing that Bush has said that was true in his life time on the record, thus proving the OP wrong.
Well, guess thats it. Glad we could wrap this one up. 
-XT
Tough single guy/gal. No implied smears please… we are all stacked up here.
I think the OP is just showing that an HD is not necessarily evidence of honorable service. The Sniper was just an extreme example to make a point. He wasn’t saying that an HD proves anything dishonorable but that it doesn’t prove anything. The point is that if someone with as lousy a service record as John Muhammed got one then why should we be impressed that Shrubya got one?
W and his minions have been waving his discharge papers around as if they constitute evidence that he couldn’t have gone AWOL. Obviously they don’t prove that at all. It’s no trick to get an HD, even I have one.
You seem to be not getting any traction with all the nay-sayers around here; may be I can help. Why do we know about Mr. Muhammad’s transgressions? because NG kept records of them. Mr. Muhammad got HD, Bush got HD. Where are records of Bush transgressions? Obviously, there must have been some. One doesn’t steal presidential elections and invade sovereign countries all of a sudden. There must be a pattern of nefarious misdeeds traceable back into Bush’s past. Yet, we can find none. NG doesn’t have any. What does that tell us? Expunges, cover-ups, tremendous powers emanating straight from the ninth circle of Hell,… need I go on?
Hope it helps.
I didn’t get the same impression, but I can definitely see where you’re getting it from. I’m going to assume that Antiochius was just a little sloppy with his rhetoric, simply because I can’t possibly believe that HE believes that everyone who ever served in the NG is a scumbag. When he said, “Doesn’t that put the guard’s HD in the proper perspective?” I read it as “Doesn’t that put the guard’s honorable discharge of Baby Bush in the proper perspective?” You’ve obviously taken it a different way, as evidenced by your blown gasket. Whatever, I could be wrong, the OP could be that much of a… well… anyways…
Still, it seems the consensus of everyone in this thread is yeah, it’s stupid for the White House to claim that an Honorable Discharge settles the matter. Great, now someone just needs to point Our Non-Statistician, Non-Fact-Checking, Non-Predicting President this way. There also seems to be near-consensus that linking Mr. Asshat Sniper with Dubya is a guilt-by-association, similar to the Jane Fonda-John Kerry picture of last week. Eh. They’re both silly, but at least this one had an underlying point, albeit one that we’re almost all aware of.
Has anyone on this board actually tried to use his current evil as evidence of his past delinquency? I call strawman.
The record of Shrub’s transgressions include his being grounded for blowing off a drug test and his CO’s statement that he never showed up for duty in Alabama. The lack of a record of service in Alabama also constitutes evidence that he was derelict in his duty. Because of his daddy and his money he wasn’t prosecuted but he could have been and probably would have been if he was a poor black kid instead of a rich boy politician’s kid.
But apparently no one else wants to address the concepts somewhat more elegantly stated in my prior post (IMHO).
Let’s see if we can move beyond the following type of exchange:
1st Post: He’s an ass! See link
2nd Post: You’re the ass! How dumb!
3rd Post: Oh, yeah!? Well that’s just assinine!
4th Post: [Moderator Hat On] The proper forum for ass messages is ----> way[Moderator Hat Off]
Which doesn’t include Airman Doors, USAF, btw, who did attempt to be a bit more elegant after his first post.
In hopes of making this discussion more civil and more to the point, let me offer a personal example in place of the example of John Muhammad.
I joined the Air Force in 1975, and washed out of basic training. Though some of the paperwork said that I didn’t “meet minimum standards for retention in the USAF,” there’s no hint of that on my Honorable Discharge. (Frankly, I’ve never understood why, given the circumstances, it wasn’t an Administrative Discharge. But I won’t complain.)
So, simply stated, the point being made is that an Honorable Discharge is not necessarily an imprimatur of distinguished service; thus, Mr. Bush and his supporters are being a bit disingenuous when they point to his HD as if it proves that he was a good little boy. It doesn’t. Nor does it indicate that he was, like me, a fuckup. That question will have to be decided on other grounds.
[And to forestall that question, no, I won’t tell you why I washed out. I ain’t running for public office, so it’s none of your beeswax.]
I really don’t understand how somebody could have come to the conclusion that Antiochus was implying any such thing. There is a certain reading comprehension level implied by being poster at the SDMB and I fear that anybody who concluded that Antiochus or Gallagher claimed any link between Bush and Muhammed would not have attained that level. As for any direct comparison between the service records of the two Gallagher, and Antiochus’ lack of commentary implies, though does not state, his agreement, only wishes to call attention to how little an honorable discharge can reflect on the dischargee’s service and he uses an extreme case to make his point. While Antiochus could have been clearer in the point he was trying to make this does not seem Moderator Hat territory, though I appreciate your consistent and clear use of your hat.
As a side note, Lee Harvey Oswald was court martialed twice by the Marines, who didn’t change his Honorable Discharge to Dishonorable until he defected to the Soviet Union. Just what do you have to do to get bad paper in this country?
Well, thank you.
Now that I’ve had some time to sleep on it and think about what the OP is hinting at, I’m still clueless. This topic has been done to death (in fact, Scylla started a four page thread about it in GD right now). The only new thing in this thread when compared to all the other ones is the comparison of Bush to John Muhammad, and I’d like to think that I took care of that somewhere in my flurry of somewhat vitriolic posts.
So basically I’m forced to come to only one conclusion: this thread is a well-covered topic with the only twist being comments calculated to push some buttons. And that explains my barely restrained fury about it.
To me, this is the equivalent of an abortion thread where the OP starts off with “murder”, and we all know how well those go down here. Why should this be any different?
Then better be prepared for unbridled speculation!
Hmmm, 1975? Drugs? Bedwetting? Hit on his CO? DIDN’T hit on his CO? 
…and people say we never do anything worthwhile in GD.
For God’s sake, there was no comparison of Bush to Muhammed, just an illustration of how little an honorable discharge proves about honorable service. Airman, I KNOW you’re smart enough to parse that out. I understand why you’re sensitive about it but you’re reading it the wrong way, you really are.
(16 combat missions? Holy shit. Well done, Airman. I wish they would give you guys more when you get back. It sucks that you would have to hunt for a crappy subsistance job after that. You deserve better. You deserve a giant bonus, all of you do).
…you can punch out an officer, be court-martialed for it, and still get an honorable discharge?
Wow.
Check Scylla’s thread in GD, where you will find numerous hints that absence of documents trail must hide very serious offences by Bush during his NG years. When strawman arrives, you answer the door.