No, that still quite applies, Sam. There is, as I’m sure you know, a considerable physical component to being a pilot. This was even more so in those days, when there was more direct physical control by the pilot. Apparently, it is in this regard that GeeDubya’s skills were minimal, but acceptable.
We have, however, considerable testimony that GeeDubya was a pretty fair pilot, nonetheless. But do you really think he would have been in a position as he was if his last name were not Bush?
Svin:
I don’t see any way in which you can claim to judge the man’s character in 1973. Personally, I think it says a lot about you, and letting your personal feelings interfere, that you feel it necessary to attempt to create (out of whole cloth mind you, since you have not the slightest shred of evidence to the contrary,) a scenario whereby Bush’s charity work was something other than generous and altruistic.
It seems to me that that’s the basic concept of partisan knee-jerkery; your personal preconceptions are not malleable. Your judgement of the man’s character is an article of faith, not of evidence.
It’s major cognitive dissonance. The Bush family, and Dubya have been charity minded for a long time.
Yeah, Elucidator linked to it a page or so ago. I thought it pretty reasonable evidence that Bush family strings got George his place in the Guard.
Elucidator:
Wise move. That and the fact that the original records have been kept according to Lloyd’s system and not your Lieutenant’s pretty much put the kibosh on your argument on this.
I’m not really seeing anything else new here.
Surely Bush’s Basic Attributes Test results were included in the white house’s complete records dump ? 
elucidator said:
Where do you get the notion that Bush scored ‘minimal but acceptable’ on a physical test? The AFOQT is a written exam. The 25 that Bush got was on the ‘pilot’ aptitude part, which as I understand measures things like spatial relationships.
Is 25 a low score? I don’t know. Perhaps 25 is a fairly high score, and most people who want to be pilots don’t make it and wind up as navigators. What I know about the exam I summarized above. But the fact is, Bush could have made pilot with much lower scores on that exam, especially in navigation, verbal and quantitative skills. Plus, his leadership score was very high. I fail to see why anyone would consider this exam to be a marginal qualification - it looks to me like he beat the required minimum scores by a wide margin, scoring only the minimum acceptable on one section out of five, and scoring much, much higher than required on the other section.
Look at it another way: the minimum cumulative score that you could get on that exam and make pilot was 60. Bush scored 225. Or if it was an average percentage (not sure if ‘25’ represents percent or a raw score), then the average required was only 22%, and Bush scored 56%.
Either way, would you not agree that saying, “Bush only scored the minimum on his pilot test, and they let him in anyway!” to be a misleading statement? Given the minimum scores required on the AFOQT, if you were an evaluator and you saw Bush’s score, plus his degree from Yale, would you not consider him to be a good candidate?
And in any event, the people in his squadron who have spoken of him all say that he was a better than average pilot, and was known as the ‘smart one’. That might give you pause the next time you call Bush an idiot.
Now why does the mere fact that Scylla says something make me immediately suspect that it’s not true?
I ain’t either.
Sam:
Not at all.
To begin with, you are gratuitously mixing up two completely different categories: pilot and officer. With regard to the latter, Bush’s scores appear quite good, especially his verbal score (which isn’t surprising really, considering he had just graduated from Yale). But here we are concerned with the former, i.e., Bush’s pilot score. And it appears that, precisely as reported, Bush scored the lowest possible in that category, a 25. Had he scored but one point lower, he would have been ineligible for pilot training, regardless of the remaining results of his test. Yet Bush skipped to the head of the line for flight training, anyway. He cut in front of people who had scored a 50 on the pilot section and 25 on the navigation section. He cut in front of people who had scored a 50 on the pilot section and a 50 on the navigation section. He cut in front of people who had scored a 75 on the pilot section and a 50 on the navigation section. And so on.
Okay, I forgive you.
Neither I nor the White House Press Corps has “dredged up a whole bunch of 30 year old hearsay and innuendo.” I’ve asked perfectly reasonable questions about mysterious deficiencies in Bush’s service record and history. Bush himself has been stubbornly reticent about these questions, and evasive in the extreme. It is entirely reasonable to ask, “Why doesn’t he just come clean?”
By the way, you haven’t debunked the “Bush scored the minimum necessary to be a pilot,” crap floating around; you’ve confirmed it. Congrats.
Oh, I see. First you characterize Calhoun as a “very strong witness,” and go on to state there is “plenty of evidence that Bush WAS in Alabama.” Would that not indicate that you believed Calhoun’s testimony to be a “slam-dunk?”
But when I point out the weaknesses in Calhoun’s claims, suddenly we backtrack. Is Calhoun a “very strong witness” or not, Sam? And riddle me this: if Calhoun has such a clear memory of Bush, sitting alone in his office reading flight magazines months before he had even been assigned to the unit, then why is it that Bush can’t seem to remember him? Why doesn’t Bush confirm Calhoun’s statements? In fact, why hasn’t Bush simply provided us with a list of people whom he knew or met at that base during the time he served there? You mean his memory is so bad that he can’t remember the name of a single person he met during this period, who could confirm his story? Why didn’t the Bush administration contact Calhoun before he came forward, and why don’t they stand behind his testimony?
That’s possible. Why doesn’t he just come out and say so, in that case?
I would certainly consider him to be a good officer’s candidate; I don’t know whether or not I would consider him to be a good pilot candidate. Your arguments rely on blurring the line between these two very different categories.
Actually, it gives me pause in my belief that pilots are smart.
Scylla:
Well, a couple three points.
First off, I know nothing about Bush family charity. Bush is not known for his charitablity – he ain’t exactly Mother Teresa now, is he? – but of course I concede that he might be extremely charitable. It’s entirely possible that I just haven’t heard about it.
Secondly, it simply strikes me as curious that George would suddenly embark on a period of community service at one point, never before having shown an interest in such service and never offering it again, afterwards. But, sure, maybe he got religion, or the spirit of God moved him, or something.
Finally, there is the conjunction of factors. At precisely this period, the information in Bush’s file becomes sparse and contradictory. Important documents such that one might reasonably expect to find in his file for the period in question are missing. Bush fails to appear for his physical, which is by most accounts an important requirement of his service; this oversight should have led to the initiation of either an investigation or an explanation from his commanding officer, but neither the one nor the other is to be found. Other important service documents, like his DD – 214, are absent. And here, lo and behold, we have a witness who claims he saw members of the TANG removing “embarrassing” documents from Bush’s file in 1997, when he was governor. Bush himself is incapable of giving a coherent account of his whereabouts during the period, and witness reports are sparse and contradictory. At the same time, Bush is performing community service for the only time in his entire life. And I know that in some cases, minor legal infractions (like a DUI, for example) can be punished by a sentence of X number of hours of community service.
Taken together, all of these facts seem to point to possibility that something fishy was going on in Georgie’s life between May and November of 1972, something which has since been covered up. We have what Whewill called a “consilience of inductions,” all of which appear point to a conclusion of which we have no direct knowledge (this was the method Whewill recommended for reconstructing the fossil record). Given this, we must nevertheless remember that induction is an imprecise and sometimes misleading instrument. In other words, there might be completely reasonable explanations for the discrepancies mentioned above.
Bull pucky. I’ve been watching Bush operate as president for over three years now; I’ve accumulated a great deal of evidence with regard to his character. You yourself have freely admitted that he lied with regard to Iraq’s “WMDs.” Rather, it seems that it is you who have “faith” in Bush’s character, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Really?
Cite?
Your first and second points are at odds. If you know nothing about Bush and charity than how can you state he’s never shown an interest in such things before and never again?
At this point, it’s becoming silly. You can’t in good faith read a drug conviction into an absence of information. You just can’t. You should no better to make such arguments. You can talk it to death, call it a consilience of induction, but it’s nothing more than a speculation. Move it beyond the speculation phase and offer something tangible and then we can deal with it.
www.dougwead.com/charity/Bush.htm
(Bush favorite charities, honoring of Neil and Mrs. Bush)
www.ashbrook.org/events/memdin/bbush/home.html
http://www.barbarabushfoundation.com/
http://www.charitywire.com/charity18/05272.html
It’s also my understanding that George I and Barbara have been pretty big in Leukemia work (they had a kid that died) and that George’s charity work has basically been continuous throughout his life in the private sector, gifting, sitting on the Boards of charities, etc etc. I think his tax returns are available for scrutiny should you wish to examine specifics, but I think this is enough to identify and support Bush family charitable activities.
Well, yes, but on the other hand, no. Charitable activities are rather common amongst the rich, this is hardly news. You have presented us with a number of charitable activities of the Bush family, but D for diddly-squat to show that the gallant Lt. Bush was, himself, so moved. And keep in mind, this is rather a different variety of charitable activities, this involved Lt. Bush trucking his pampered white butt down to Funkytown, in person. Now, if you could show us that he was active in that sort of charitable activities, you would have a point.
And while it is true that a lot of this must remain speculative, it is speculative primarily due to the absence of records, an absence that continues even after loud and effusive statements that all the relevent records have absitively and posolutely been released. But as the redoubtable Big Svin has pointed out, the records are by no means “complete”. If they were complete, there would be no speculation.
Great, Scylla. How many other times in his life did G.W. Bush actually perform community service? When were they?
No. But I was asked to cite it. Desmo’s cite says the Bush family isn’t charity-minded and Svin asked for a cite on Bush family charity.
The cite requested was for Bush family giving. That’s what I gave, and there are some details in their of George and Laura, and this is all available on line. Should you be so minded to inform your else, you can chronicle Bush’s charitable activities from 1973 onward. That can be your task.
I am simply supporting my contention that there is a long and significant history of Bush family charity activities.
Really? Are you sure of this? I don’t think anybody’s cited the nature of Bush’s activity with this group yet. Why don’t you find out what it is first, and then we’ll compare it to other things?
I really don’t have a point. I am trying to examine evidence reasonably and find the best conclusion I can.
If you wish to prove or suggest that Bush’s community service was a result of a drug conviction, you actually need something other than speculation, otherwise it is a completely unreasonable assertion.
The closest you or anyone else has come is by asserting that Bush is not charity-minded, therefore he must have been sentencedto do this work. This is a faulty argument on two fronts. First, it is simply not logical. There are many conceivable reasons to explain Bush’s involvement even if your premise is true. Their is no rational reason to select “drug conviction.” Second, the premise isn’t true. Bush et al have been charity-minded.
You’ve told me many times that you are not stupid. Surely than, you understand that you cannot construe guilt from an absence of evidence. It’s an argument from ignorance, and it’s a basic fallacy. You need rational reasons to make your case, not an absence of them.
Perhaps people aren’t coming forward regarding the drug charges because… they’re afraid they will be KILLED!!! See the cautionary tale of J. H. Hatfield, who committed suicide after revealing information about Bush’s cocaine conviction!!! http://dir.salon.com/politics/red/2001/07/20/blue/index.html
Bum bum BUMMMM!
elucidator, Mr. Svin, you guys still okay out there?
It’s like that Living History book Hillary Clinton recently published.
It’s widely known that Hillary was the last person Vince Foster spoke to before he was shot. Up until the publication, Hillary never revealed the substance of the conversation.
In Living History though, Hillary tells us what the last thing Vince Foster said to her was.
“Please, don’t shoot.”
Sorry, I’ve been too sick to get back to this. Anyway, the answer to that question is yes. I could move to Alaska if I felt like it, but unless I took the steps to transfer to a Guard unit in Alaska I would have to come back to Pennsylvania to fulfill my obligations until they were up. If I transferred to Alaska, I would have orders following me there, one set being a release, another set being orders indicating when I should report for duty. Also, my medical records would follow me to wherever I went.
In my career thus far, all two years of it, I have been issued about six different sets of orders, for BMT, Tech School, both Survival Schools, the Altitude Chamber, and my deployment, and my name is on the Form 781 of every flight I’ve ever been on as a crewmember or passenger. There’s paperwork for everything, and we’re encouraged to keep records of all of it for verification purposes.
I find it hard to believe that there is no paper trail for one Lt. Bush, Texas ANG somehwhere. There should be substantial evidence for anything you could possibly want to know. Hell, DFAS should have his address of record for pay purposes still AFAIK. If you know what to look for you can find anything out about anyone, and with the paper trail the military makes you leave it should be easy to check out.
Cite? How many other people out there wanted to be pilots in the guard and got better marks than Bush? For all we know, that 25 is very hard to get, and the prime ‘weeder’ of pilot applicants. Maybe the ranks of navigators are made up of people who wanted to be pilots but couldn’t manage that 25.
Or, let’s say there were lots of people who scored better than 25 - who’s the better candidate, one who scored 35 on the pilot section but 10 on the nav section, or one who scored 25 on the pilot section, and 50 on the nav? Pilots in single seat fighters have to navigate too, y’know. That ‘navigation’ section is important too, and Bush scored five times higher than he needed to.
And who would you rather take, a guy who scored high on the ‘pilot’ section, but the bare minimum scores on everthing else, or a guy who scored the minimum on the pilot section, but extremely well on everything else?
As for the ‘pilot’ section, here’s what the AFOQT pilot section is about:
One of the things they are looking at here is whether the candidate has previous flight training and experience - that can be a mitigating factor if your scores are otherwise low on other sections of the test. So it’s no surprise that Bush wouldn’t have scored well on this, since he had no previous flying training. Since we don’t know the exact makeup of the scores on that section, we don’t know HOW he got a 25. If he killed on all the stuff that measured aptitude, and got wrong all the specific questions about aircraft systems, an evaluator might just shrug and go, “Well, that’s expected - he’s never flown”. For what it’s worth, I know LOTS of people who were accepted into pilot training in the military without any previous experience in aviation.
The bottom line is that we don’t know how Bush’s results stacked up against other candidates at the time. Maybe his test scores were just average, maybe they were fantastically good. My argument was that it is extremely misleading to tell people that Bush scored the bare minimum required to be a pilot. He didn’t. Looking at the test as a whole, he scored way, way higher than he needed to. Only on one grouping out of five did he score the minimum, and since that group tests previous aviation knowledge, this should not have been a surprise to anyone.
Actually, having read more about the AFOQT, we CAN tell what Bush did poorly on in the ‘pilot’ composite, and it turns out I was right. Here’s what the test description says about the ‘Navigator’ section:
The AFOQT is made up of 16 sections. There is no ‘Pilot’ section or ‘Navigator’ section. What those scores are is a composite of the sections deemed most important for a pilot or navigator.
Bush scored five times higher on the nav section than necessary for a pilot, and twice as high as necessary for navigator. The composite for navigator contains many of the same categories as for pilot, except that it leaves out the stuff on previous aeronautical knowledge. But it replaces them with sections on spatial and visual ability and general science knowledge.
Since Bush scored very well on that, we can see where he bombed - he didn’t have any previous pilot training, so be bombed on the aircraft-specific questions. But all of his ‘aptitude’ scores were plenty high. In my experience, this is far more important - you can teach the knowledge to smart people, but you can’t make people without aptitude into good pilots. And as I said, I personally know plenty of people who got into military aviation without any previous flying training, so clearly the lack of specific aircraft knowledge is not considered to be disqualifying - especially since did get a passing grade on the ‘pilot’ section despite not knowing anything about airplanes.
Scylla:
Point the first: charity giving is not the same as community service (as others have in this thread have already pointed out).
Point the second: okay, I should have been more precise and written, “Secondly, it simply strikes me as curious that George would suddenly embark on a period of community service at one point, never before having shown an interest in such service and never offering it again, afterwards, to my knowledge.”
I’ve certainly not suggested that what we know about this question thus far indicates a drug conviction. I keep trying to tell you that I agree that all we have thus far is speculation. I can speculate that Bush was involved in a DUI, for example, but that’s nothing more than a speculation. You can speculate that Bush was just a lovin’ guy, and suddenly felt like giving, but that’s nothing more than a speculation either.
Now, I personally feel that a number of factors point to something mysterious going on in Bush’s life between May and October of 1972. That “something” could be a drug bust, a DUI, a religious conversion, or a simple paperwork snafu. Judging by the manner in which Bush and his various handlers have tried to deal with this something, I suspect that it’s a rather unflattering something – trouble with the law, perhaps. Beyond that, I fear, I have absolutely nothing to offer.
In the first sentence of my first post in this thread, I stated that I was loath to get involved in this debate, precisely because I thought it would end like this. I have no concrete evidence to point to, only a nagging dearth of evidence, evidence that should be there. For example: Bush should be able to remember at least one person he served with when he was in Alabama, even after a lapse of thirty years. That person should have be able to confirm Bush’s story. But consider this exchange between Helen Thomas and Scott McClellan at the Feb. 13th Press Gaggle:
Now, you might note from the exchange above that McClellan seemed anxious for members of the press corps to read a certain article in the Boston Globe that morning; he mentions it not less than 7 times, by my reckoning. And what did that Boston Globe article contain? Well, in part, it contained Calhoun’s testimony that he had seen Bush 8 to 10 times between May and October of 1972. Enterprising journalists read the story after that morning’s gaggle, did the math, and decided to ask about it later that afternoon at the White House Press Briefing. Notice how McClellan suddenly backtracks:
In other words, first McClellan insists that the reporters read this Boston Globe article; but, when it turns out that Calhoun’s story doesn’t make sense, time-wise, McClellan’s disavows any knowledge of Calhoun whatsoever. Now, I’m wondering: Calhoun supposedly spent 8 to 10 days hanging out with Bush in a room, reading magazines. Calhoun claims to remember this quite clearly. Yet Bush has no memory of Calhoun at all, apparently. He can neither confirm nor deny Calhoun’s story. Doesn’t that smell just a little bit fishy to you?
There should have been some paperwork regarding the physical Bush missed. In Airman’s words:
The lack of such paperwork is puzzling. The lack of paperwork also fits like a glove with Bill Burkett’s story that “embarrassing” documents were removed from Bush’s file in 1997. And so forth.
Bush promised to release his entire file, but as the last exchange between McClellan and the reporters quoted above makes abundantly clear, the White House only released what it considered to be the “relevant” documents. So Bush has once again reneged on his promise. He could sign a simple waiver, release his files into the public domain (as John McCain has done, for example), and put an end to the entire mill of rumors surrounding these questions, yet he refuses to. Why?
Goodness, Scott McClellan has got to be the worse press secretary ever.
I’m a bit confused on that issue as well, Svin. I have the distinct impression that a statement was offered to the effect that all the records had been released, with the exception of medical records, which the press were permitted to examine, but not to copy or remove.
But when I stop to think, I don’t recall any specific statement:“This is it, this is all there is, you got what we got and we didn’t withold or redact anything.”
Its possible, I suppose, that if they came across anything solidly exculpatory, they could release it and claim that they had never specificly said that everything had been released. Further, I have to wonder about those medical records. How much time was permitted to read them? Has anyone said “I’ve checked them all out, and there isn’t anything there”?
Another niggling doubt: it has been remarked here as to the lack of any documentation regarding official response to GeeDubya’s missing his physical. Which, by all accounts, should be there if we are to regard this collection as complete. Might they have been included in the witheld "medical"documents since, by a very generous interpretation, they might be construed as being documents that bear on a medical matter, however indirectly.
Is that what Bush did at Pull? What made it so different than sitting on the board of a charity?
If you’re going to characterize Bush’s activities, you need to know what they were. Cute?
You’ve indicated that you don’t have any knowledge concerning Bush’s previous charity work, or his charity work after Project Pull. My point is that if you have no knowledge, saying “to my knowledge” really isn’t that impressive a disclaimer. It’s like a virgin saying "there is no such thing as a penis, to my knowledge
Big whoop.
Again, what he actually are left with is that in your mind you feel something is going on. Correct me if I’m wrong but you’ve already admitted to having a strong predilection against Bush, so in the face of your admitted bias I really have a lot of trouble accepting your faith-based rationalizations.
No. Not at thirty years removed. Not concerning a few nonnotable days of service. 13 years ago I worked in two different boardrooms. In each case I sat in an open cubicle (no walls in the cubicle) for over a year. In each case there were 8 adjacent cubicles. For the most part they were continuously occupied by the same people. I think I can envision maybe 8 of these 16 people (actually it’ more like 20 since there was some turnover.) Those three I can name because something significant happened in each case to make it memorable with those people. Everybody else is a blank. We’re talking about 5 days a week for a year and a half. So, if we’re talking about 3-4 unnoteable occasions thirty years ago, I’m not surprised at all.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; You can’t construe anything from a lack of evidence. The Guards notoriously poor record keeping has already been cited. This dog doesn’t hunt.
We’ve been over this already, just as we’ve been over the McClellen thing already.
Actually, I thought Mr. Svinlesha was referring to the actions of McClellan, not Calhoun, as being “fishy.” (Pardon if I’m wrong.)
Then again, that might just be typical polticial smokescreen-ing. But that’s how I interpreted that part.