"GWB: Well, a wonderful man named John White asked me to come and work with him in a project in the 3rd Ward of Houston called Project P.U.L.L.; it was a mentoring program. "
…"But with nothing to do until then, his father decided it was time to give this restless young man some broader exposure to real life.
Shortly after Christmas, Bush began working as a counselor with black youngsters in Houston’s Third Ward in a program called PULL (Professionals United for Leadership) for Youth. The brainchild of the late John L. White, a former professional football player and civic leader, it was set up for kids up to 17 in a warehouse on McGowen Street and it offered sports, crafts, field trips and big-name mentors from the athletic, entertainment and business worlds."
Well, that seems to explain why Bush was involved. As for what he did:
Thanks for putting this puppy to rest, unless of course, we have something to contradict this account?
I really don’t see any contradiction between your first cite and your second one. The first says White invited him, the second says Bush’s father arranged it. Apparently, White and Bush Sr. knew each other, right? The two scenarios are not mutually exclusive, you know? Bush Senior has hard words with son, calls White, White contacts Bush Jr. and off he goes. That’s what these two articles seem to be saying. You have a problem with this scenario?
Well, before you injure yourself in an enthusiastic victory dance, perhaps best fit to a younger man… No, I have no problem with the scenario, it is one of many offered to provide perfectly innocent explanations to questions of varying importance. I left off the utterly touching stories and the bountiful expressions of good-guyness because I thought them irrelevent.
You asked for a cite to prove what he was doing, and I gave it to you. Which it does. It also offers a perfectly reasonable scenario of paternal guidance. I am quite familiar with that, my own son hews to my guidance in general and particular, I am sure this is the nearly universal experience of fathers everywhere.
I don’t think it proves anything, especially. But you didn’t ask me to prove anything, you asked for a cite.
As to the McLellan Dance of the Seven Evasions, this is par for the course, no? There is a certain grotesque elegance about it. But bottom facts remain.
If the Bushiviks could slam dunk all of this TANG shit, they would have. So we may be reasonably sure that no exculpatory documents have been witheld. Then we are left with the other question: do incriminatory documents exist? Apparently not, but assurances must be tempered by the knowledge that a great big gob of stuff…stuff that from all testimony should be there…is absent.
(Maybe the dog ate them. Maybe that’s why they snuffed him.) Or maybe the record keeping was poor. But if it were poor record keeping, why is the poor record keeping so time specific? Again, the salient feature of the doughnut is the hole.
Its just as the man said, “fishy”. Not certain. Fishy. To high Heaven.
Wait, wait. Scylla, you’re making a specific point about Bush’s drinking and driving, running over neighbors garbage cans, all prior to his father getting him involved in community service? The picture this anecdote paints is an ill-spent youth, an unbridled mustang who only needed his father’s firm hand to find his calling in service to young black children. In fact, it says:
Nothing to do? He’s a jet fighter pilot in the National Guard!! Constantly preparing to defend the country, laying around reading technical manuals and talking about planes with his comrades. No, wait, he’s a lovable but misdirected gad-about who would have no direction without his father showing some tough love, drinking, driving and running over neighbors property. No, wait…
Clearly serving one’s time in the Texas Air National Guard equates to “nothing to do until [going off to Harvard Buisness School].”
Ooops.
The Humpty Dance is your chance to do the Hump. Do me baby, do the Humpty Hump.
[ASIDE: Isn’t it an odd coincidence that we’re really focusing on a lack of knowledge as to events of 1973, and the Straight Dope has been fighting ignorance…since 1973!!! Bum Bum BUMMM!]
Really? They brought tears of joy to my eyes to read about this fine promising young man who would come to lead us.
[quote]
You asked for a cite to prove what he was doing, and I gave it to you. Which it does.[/qute]
So you have. I have asked and you have given.
Of course, and I expect nothing less from my daughter, and am sure she will obey my benevolent guidance in all ways.
Yeah, it is par for the course. It’s kind of why I’m surprised when the Enemies of Bush say “A-HA! Look at this! We have here a cite of a White House Press Secretary being evasive! Can you imagine such a thing? Clearly this is such a rarity that it must indicate some horrible conspiracy!”
Well, no. This scandal is being prosecuted in pretty similar fashion to the whole Harkens debacle in which case wrongdoing was pretty much ruled out, you’ll recall. Based on the timeline we constructed there was no way Bush could have done what he was accused of. It simply wasn’t possible. I suppose the Bush people could have proved this if they wanted to get out there and put together the documents and lay the case out logically.
I suppose that they thought then and think now, as I currently think. Innocence doesn’t need to be proven. It doesn’t need to be explained. Guilt does. Those making the accusations or suggesting the wrongdoing need to make their case.
It doesn’t appear to be time specific. It appears to be location specific. It looks to me like there are complete and consistent records for Bush’s time in Houston, and sparse and incomplete records for his time outside. Maybe Houston had a better filing clerk. Maybe the Guard naturally took better records when people were at their home base than when they were transient. Maybe a dog did eat. Maybe there was a fire. Maybe the babykilling documents were scrubbed from the file by Men in Black. I dunno. Neither do you. Speculation based on any of these scenarios is simply stupid and irresponsible. You can’t found an argument based on a lack of evidence to support it. It’s just dumb.
You’ve said this three or four times and it’s starting to annoy me, because while it has catchiness to recommend it, it’s simply not true. First off, a beignet has no hole and it is a donut. Neither do jelly donuts or Boston cremes. Munchkins are similarly holeless donuts (the statement that they actually are the holes of other donuts is an outright lie.)
A donut without a hole is still a donut.
On the other hand, a hole without a donut is just a hole. A tire has a hole, but it’s not a donut. If you don’t beleive me, try to eat one. Similarly, the hole in your sink isn’t a donut either.
If you plug the hole in a donut, with say, a finger or other suitable appendage you are still left with a donut. It retains it’s donutness when plugged.
So, it is not the hole that is the salient aspect of the donut. It is the fried confection which encircles the hole that is the salient aspect.
With your argument, it is the same.
You are trying to sell me a hole and claim that it is a donut. I ask you where the fried dough is, where the frosting is, and you look at me disdainfully as if I don’t know donuts and tell me that the hole is the donut.
My four year old wouldn’t fall for it. Why should I?
Come back when you have fried dough, and for the recor I like toasted cocunut glaze.
Now it’s fish? I thought we were talking donuts? I’m flexible. As you sit there, in the desert, rod in hand, I suppose you are going to tell me that the absence of fish you have produced is evidence to suggest that there must be a lot of trout out there in the sand just waiting to jump on your hook.
You can’t noodle for catfish with a hole. You need a noodle.
First off, the list of charities you posted previously, three of which are linked to Barbara Bush alone, didn’t really impress me. Sorry.
Well, obviously, actually getting down and working with people face to face, in a mentor program, is different from sitting on the board of charity, deciding what to do with money others have donated. No?
:shrug:
If you say so.
And you’ve demonstrated repeatedly on these boards that you have a faith-based predilection in favor of Bush, one unshakable even by matters of fact – since you continue to support him despite your admission that he lied his way into a war. So what can I say, if I demonstrate serious weaknesses in Bush’s story only to have you reject them as proof of nothing?
Of course, I concede that by this point I’m not very fond of Bush. (The smarmy Washington Post biography linked by e turns my stomach.) This certainly clouds my judgement, perhaps to the same extent that your unwavering love for Fearless Misleader clouds yours.
But consider how low the bar is set already. Even you no longer object to the argument that Bush used family connections to avoid the draft and get a cushy position as a National Guard fighter pilot. While the real heroes of Vietnam were fighting and dying in the mud, George was mulling his options:
Gee, shame we all don’t get to make choices like that.
So luckily, George didn’t have to go to Vietnam. Instead:
Way to sacrifice for your country, Georgie.
Had this been Clinton, would you have been so complacent, I wonder? So quick to dismiss questions regarding his service record as an expression of partisan muckraking?
Hmmm….
I don’t know. It seems to me that he would have remembered someone. Calhoun certainly remembers him, or claims to at least, from 30 years ago – bravely defending the US in Calhoun’s little cubicle, reading flight magazines. Not that this already shameful record of military service matters, of course: no indeed, before I can say anything bad about little Georgie, I must present you with proof positive that he was wandering around with a spoon up his nose. Or maybe even that doesn’t matter either? Maybe he has to be a child-raper and a heroine fiend before I am allowed to pass judgement on him, or question his selfless record of public service?
And yet Bush was able to launch a war on it. Strange how the standards shift from one situation to another.
And gotten nowhere. As far as I can tell, you don’t have an answer for my question.
I’ll concede it’s possible Bush began working at PULL in exactly the same manner as its been related, above – that is to say, on his father’s initiative. But why doesn’t McClellan simply say so, and be done with it?
That’s simply not true. If you recall, regarding the Harken discussion, I was the one who proffered a scenario which eventually solved the entire mess. I told you then that I wasn’t out to pin anything on Bush that he wasn’t guilty of, and that still holds. Bush could be a true-blue war hero, for all I care, and I’d still dislike him and disagree with his politics.
Like the Harken “scandal,” Bush’s military record leaves much room for doubt – at least at first glance. However, unlike the Harken “scandal,” we have no way of determining the truth of falsehood of those doubts. If you could proffer an explanation of Bush’s behavior in the TANG that was as water-tight as your explanation of his role at Harken, then I would agree with you that we are on something of a snipe hunt. But you can’t. It’s as if you think it’s not even okay to ask critical questions of the record, prior to knowing the truth one way or the other. And face it: had we not asked such questions regarding Harken, we would never have been able to eventually dismiss the accusations leveled at Bush so completely. The issue hasn’t even been brought up again, thanks to the solid answers we received to our critical questions. You pretty much put that puppy to rest.
I would also agree with you if my claim was: “Bush did something wrong when he was a Guardsman. I know it!” followed by a repetition of the deficiencies in his military record. That is not my claim. My claim is that those deficiencies raise legitimate questions, and are fishy. They therefore merit deeper investigation. That’s all.
Now: when somebody comes up with a defense of Bush’s activities in the Guard that is as watertight as your defense of his role at Harken, I’ll shut my pie-hole. But until then, I have every right in the world to ask the questions I ask, and to approach the issue with a critical frame of mind. And I am allowed to be suspicious.
On the other hand, no one in this thread is arguing we have proof of wrongdoing on Georgie’s part. That’s been your set-up from the get-go: prove George did something wrong or shut up. With that attitude, we’d never have caught the simplest maffia- boss; almost like we’re expected to possess evidence before we’re even allowed to start looking for it. As I tried to point out a couple of pages ago, that’s hardly a level playing field.
Indicative of nothing more but that he would very much prefer not to answer the question. Or perhaps he engaged in the long evasive manuever simply for the rhetorical excercise, or force of habit.
Well, not exactly. But if that is how you cherish the memory, it would be churlish of me to demur. Be that as it may, your comment is pointless. The Harken incidents of the blameless Mr. Bush is still years in the future, his gentle treatment at the hands of the SEC merely echoing his years of valiant service. (This guy did more skating than Tanya fuckin’ Hardon…)
Well, I dunno. But that looks like a Big Svin morsel, he can probably tear it up pretty quick, and he needs the excercise.
(I’m going to just skip over the entire digression into doughnut holes. I suspect you’re probably embarassed about it now, and it would be ungenerous to bring it up.)
There is one very telling comparison to the Harken Death March, and that is this: you seem to be content, even victorious if you can march out proudly under a banner that says “Not Indictable!” Which is entirely your own judgement, and welcome to it. From where I stand, the bar has been lowered to a point reminiscent of Monty Python’s “Upper Class Twit of the Year” sketch.
This is simplistic as it is false. I still support Bush in spite of the fact that he lied. I recognize the lie. I have measured it, and taken it inot account. I also recognize reasonable evidence such as that which has been produced to show Bush had strings pulled to get into the guard. My opinion of Bush is not faith-based. It is malleable and subject to change based on new information.
Here, I start with the same principles I apply to Kerry, or Clinton or any other man or woman. That is, the presumption of innocence. I assume Bush is innocent of wrongdoing in any given activity or aspect of his life until it is demonstrated to me otherwise. When that has been done, I accept it and modify my opinion as I see fit.
You, and the rest of the Enemies of Bush start with the presumption of guilt and do not appear willing to change this opinion no matter what. In any given scenario you seem to automatically select the worst possible interpretation of events that the facts can possibly bare and then you stick to it.
It is nowhere so obvious as in this thread where you have literally nothing to support your contentions of wrongdoing.
This is why I say it’s faith-based and irrational. The latter because you do not appear to apply this standard equally.
If you did, you would be like some of my more devout conservative brethren and you would assert that Kerry shtooped the intern, that he is a kept man interested only in marrying money, that his post Vietnam activities were a betrayal of the country giving aid and succor to the enemy. Etc. etc. etc.
But you know what?
They are hacks that can be dismissed simply because they’re assumption that Kerry is a bad man is an article of faith. They apply a different standard to their analysis of Kerry than they do to anybody else.
This makes them irrational and silly partisan hacks.
In fact, the Enemies of Bush are the same as the Enemies of Kerry, or the Enemies of Clinton. They’re partisanship has made them blind.
Once you abandon the standard of the presumption of innocence you join them. You become them. You are them.
I am not irrational or faith-based because I attempt to apply my standard evenly.
I was being sarcastic about the tears. You have a common misconception on these boards. I don’t love Bush. I only think he’s Ok. I don’t like his social conservatism, and I don’t like his big government ideas. So far, he’s simply prefererable to what else is available. It’s like going Burger King and McDonald’s. I think Burger King is better but I don’t love the Whopper. It’s just that going down i-95 I prefer the Whopper to a steamed McBurger.
What I take issue with is the double standard, and the vehemence of the lies and accusations made against Bush. I understand that a Whopper is not filet Mignon, but you’ll get an argument from me if you try to assert that it’s actually made out of plastic. It’s not.
What do you mean, “even me?” I have no predilection or interest in denying what appears to be true. I assume innocence until the assumption no longer makes sense (or at least that’s what I try to do) I required one good cite for this from a reputable source, a preponderance of evidence. That’s all. There’s no “even me.” Just a rational standard.
He had the choice.
Another hole based argument. In point of fact, I was posting here while Clinton was President. I invite you to keep your speculations about what you guess I might have done to yourself until you compare them to what I actually did. I had criticisms of Clinton, but not about his service or lack of it, that I recall, and I’m on record saying that I thought the Whitewater thing was a screwjob.
Only my wife is allowed to yell at me for things she thinks I hypothetically might have done.
Oh stop the whining. Make a case or don’t, but I don’t want to hear you’re bitching about how mean I’m being by giving you a hard time about the total lack of support you have for your allegations. I don’t need to answer your questions. Answer them yourself. Go find the answers. Make a case. That’s what this thread is about. Or don’t. I don’t care.
But this whining that I’m not accepting your bullshit as gospel must stop.
Ok, we’re going to go over this again, apparently. Let us speak frankly.
McClellan is a mushroom. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. He’s a press secretary. His job is to go out there and get the message across that he’s sent with, and answer questions about the message. He is not there with Bush in 72-73 at the Guard or with project Pull. He doesn’t have a lot of special information on Bush’s Guard duty or project Pull or what have you.
What is happening is that the press is mad that they are not getting what they want when they want it, and they are interrogating him in hostile fashion in matters in which he is unsure of himself. What he was doing was the right thing to do, he just wasn’t doing the right thing.
What he should be doing is not giving out any information on things he doesn’t know what the official stance is. A denial is giving information, as is a confirmation.
The press is trying to get him off topic, lead him away from what he knows and hope the he’ll divulge something he’s not supposed to. Better yet, they’ll get him into territory that he’s unsure of and get him to state a guess as a fact. Then they follow up with another question and then he has to support a fact that he just guessed at and then he’s screwed.
That’s the game.
He was losing control of the press conference, off message, off-topic, in hostile territory, and he did not know for a fact the answer to the question or the official postion. So, he stonewalled and gave out no information.
That’s what he’s supposed to do.
The only valid criticism that I see is that a good press secretary should be cognizant of the topics that he’s going to have to deal with and know what the answers or positions are beforehand. It’s possible he got Pearl harbored. Usually there’s a working relationship between the press and the press secretary. The latter has to feed the former, and provided he does they tend not to go after his ass. Maybe he hadn’t been feeding them, and when he put out his feelers they didn’t tell him that this would be a topic they would be what answers to as revenge.
Maybe they just went after him for the fun of it.
Maybe he was stupid and didn’t put out any feelers, or prepare himself against a likely topic.
I don’t know. Neither do you.
I’m not really interested in your questions. There are always questions. I’m interested in your assertions provided you can support them. You can’t support them with more questions though. At some point you actually need some kind of foundation upon which to support your reasoning.
He also wisely stated that “a flute with no hole is not a flute”. And all philosophers are wise, but he was distinctive in that he was a Zen philosopher.
It’s no lowering of the bar. Innocence is for the most part impossible or extraordinarily difficult to prove.
For example, if a local gas station go knocked over last night at 3 am, it would be impossible for me to prove I didn’t do it.
The only thing I could demonstrate was that you couldn’t prove that I did it.
That’s why the standards are the way they are. If you wish to assert wrongdoing you need to demonstrate it. If you fail, that’s it.
This case is particularly interesting since the most cherished piece of evidence that you have is the very fact that you don’t have any.
So, no, it’s no pyrhhic victory. Being familiar with the case before the start of the thread I knew that these were allegations were both baseless and fabricated.
I do find your faith in this wrongdoing based as it is on nothing and your willingness to argue for all these pages that your total lack of support is contraindicitave, as an interesting study in dogmatic stubbornness.
I would also agree with you if my claim was: “Bush did something wrong when he was a Guardsman. I know it!” followed by a repetition of the deficiencies in his military record. That is not my claim. My claim is that those deficiencies raise legitimate questions, and are fishy. They therefore merit deeper investigation. That’s all.
[quote]
As we’ve already been over, this is not the “questions about Bush and the National Guard thread.” I learned a lesson there and I really don’t want to have to go through 12 pages proferring explanations and proving innocence. More importantly, I lack the expertise on this issue that I had with Harkens. I know an awful lot about Finance and Corporate structure and activities and corporate setup, so I was comfortable working with the subject matter.
I am neither a Guardsmen nor a pilot nor particularly familiar with either.
Therefore, I’ve specifically set up this thread not to answer questions about Bush and the Guard or defend or explain them, but to here the arguments and evaluate them from those who assert wrongdoing.
So, I expect that if that wrongdoing is asserted, it will be explained to me why it is a logical and rational assertion.
But I’m not here to explain or defend, or answer questions.
I’m not qualified to answer them.
So, if you just have questions, or your skeptical of the answers you get, there seems to me no shortage of Bush bashing threads where you can rant about it to your heart’s content.
I just would ask that here you make a case, if you have one.
Before I can make a defense, or decide if one is merited, I need somebody to actually make a case against Bush. Failing an actual case against Bush, there is nothing to defend. That’s why I keep asking for a case. With Harkens we at least had some specific accusations. “Bush committed illegal insider trading.” “Bush manipulated the financials.”
Here though, we have nothing but the fact that some of you have “questions.”
Not exactly true. Diog and some others have asserted that the preponderance of evidence shows guilt.
No you can ask questions. I support that. Just not here in this particular thread. I started this to combat the assertions of wrongdoing that were cropping up in a whole bunch of other threads.
I beleived they were unsupported. So I started this thread to see if they could be.
It doesn’t appear that they can be at this point so I consider all such assertions to be false and irrational until such time as they can be supported.
To answer that last first, the irrefutable facts are obviously *not * entirely sufficient for some, or we wouldn’t be up to Page 6.
Now, back to the drug thing, you’d certainly be right about it being overreaching if that’s all we had to go on. But please set the Wayback Machine to the 2000 campaign and the question, asked of all candidates, about whether or not they had ever used illegal drugs. *That * is what set off the Bush campaign’s series of carefully worded explanations about what points in time Bush would have been eligible for a security clearance. If the matter were a simple DUI, then the answer to the *drug * question could have been an equally-simple No, instead of the shuck-and-jive act. There was a Bush-bashing organization, I forget which now, that researched clearance policies, added up the dates carefully provided by Rove’s people, and proposed as a campaign slogan “Bush: Drug-free since 1973!”. Well, whaddaya know?
Perhaps that was all a misunderstanding, as you charitably offer. But the puzzle pieces do fit together too neatly to be so easily dismissed.
My primary objection with the OP stems from this claim:
I object to this statement because I do not believe that raising critical questions about the historical record – in this case, the discrepancies surrounding Bush’s military service – can reasonably be considered “the worst form of irresponsible derogatory muckraking.” Rather, I believe that raising such questions are essential to a well-functioning open society, and that in fact the Press Corps has something akin to a duty to ask them.
In addition, I see the OP as resorting to a snazzy rhetorical maneuver in the guise of reasoned debate, namely, “exclusion of the middle.” Apparently, from the OP’s point of view, the inability of critics to “define accusations” and “demonstrate guilt” means that they are muckrakers. There is no middle ground here, in which critical questions can be posed and investigated. If, after 5 pages, the critics still have not successfully demonstrated this guilt (to an undefined degree of certainty), they themselves are simply accused of muckraking and dismissed. From that point forward, no critical dialogue is possible, since we will apparently be forever labeled as “muckrakers.” And yet the discrepancies in Bush’s record still stand, unanswered.
In response to your last replies:
That’s certainly an admirable position to take. I would hope that were this a court of law, I would also apply such standards.
However, we do have the fact that, by your own admission, Bush has lied, at least once, on a serious matter of grave national consequence. That information goes to character. Even in a courtroom witnesses are judged as to their character and assigned credibility accordingly. Knowing this, most reasonable jurors would find Bush’s testimony to be probably not very credible; this is the natural consequence of being caught in a lie. At least for most of us. Standards not high enough for the noble Scylla, however, who wishes to consider every single instance of testimony in isolation, disconnected from the history of the testifier.
Not true. It’s just that I inhabit that middle area you’ve so skillfully excluded; I am willing to consider it possible that Bush might be guilty of something, even though I don’t have all the facts. I have not yet leveled a single accusation at Bush in this thread.
There is still the option of presuming neither guilt or innocence, of course. I would like to think that I’ve demonstrated repeatedly in this thread that this is the position I take.
Please point to any lies I’ve told about Bush, or any unfounded accusations I’ve made. I will gladly retract them.
You’re right. That was unfair of me; I allowed myself to fall into groupthink there for a second.
My apologies.
And no, I’m not going to marry you. So don’t even ask.
?
You really like to accuse you debating opponents of whining, don’t you?
On page 3 of this thread, in post # 115, I wrote:
You replied, in post # 118:
Can I take your accusations of whining, above, as your way of letting me know that you “have a complaint?”
Fair enough. Perhaps we might therefore turn to our local expert, Airman Doors, and see what he has to say about the matter. All the following quotes are taken from this thread.
Regarding the character of Lt. Bush’s service in the ANG, Airman states:
Regarding Bush’s transfer requests, Airman notes:
Regarding the missing documents in Bush’s military file:
Regarding the missed physical, Airman states:
You’ve whistled right past every one of these statements. At the very least you must admit that Airman’s professional judgements regarding Bush’s military service stand in stark contrast to your defense of him vis-a-vis the Harken accusations.
I concur that some of the posters in this thread have drawn premature and unfounded conclusions based on the evidence we have thus far. Some have asserted guilt. Others have asserted innocence. But most of us who’ve argued on my side of the aisle – elucidator, Airman, Hentor, and myself, among others – have merely suggested that the record is “fishy” and deserves further investigation.
Now you admit:
In other words, your mind was made up before you even started the thread.
Gotcha.
This statement appears to contradict your OP, quoted above, in which you state that such question-asking is “the worst form of irresponsible derogatory muckraking.”
Very true, my friend. I certainly did not mean to sell Basho short. However, I thought that it might be an arcane highjack to enter into a more robust discussion of the writings of Basho here. I mean, recall when you first tried to get your mind around the donut - danish connection!
I agree that we cannot say for sure whether Bush’s community service was mandated by a court of law or by his father (although we now know that it was not motivated by altruism). I am exceptionally grateful to Scylla for highlighting what he did, because it is most illuminating.
Let’s summarize: we know that he has a history of driving while drunk, both due to DUI arrest records and to Bush’s own family reports of other incidents (i.e. taking his 16 year old brother out drinking, driving and crashing into garbage cans). Bush himself has narrowed down the time frame of his cocaine use to sometime in the early 70’s or late 60’s, and the White House has issued some pretty poor non-denial denials. Now, Scylla makes useful note of the fact that just prior to his entering the community service program, his substance use problems were such that his father was ready to engage in domestic violence.
Is it really so far out of the question that Bush ran afoul of more than his father’s law at the time, and that his absence from the National Guard at the same time (and essentially thereafter) is associated with this? If his cocaine use was not a matter of official record somewhere, in that only he and those involved with the coke use might know about it, why would he be cagey in responding to questions? Why not just lie and say he never did drugs, apart from a fear that some record might be found?
Further, why did his father choose a time frame of six months of community service as the cure for his substance use hijinx? If it was because he had nothing to do, as Scylla called to our attention, (apart, of course, from put something less than the minimum amount of time at the Texas Air National Guard), why not remain at the community service agency until it was time to go to Harvard?
Is that really fish that I smell? Smells more … earthy to me.
"Just when you start debating how much or whether the president’s military service record should be an issue in this campaign, you realize that the main reason it’s an issue is that the president and his surrogates just won’t stop lying about it.
This morning Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot was interviewed by Juan Williams on NPR. When asked about the president’s Air National Guard service he said, the president’s and John Kerry’s service “compare very favorably… He (i.e. the president) signed up for dangerous duty. He volunteered to go to Vietnam. He wasn’t selected to go, but nonetheless served his country very well…”
He volunteered to go to Vietnam?
Marc, no he didn’t…"
"…When the president signed up for the National Guard there was a check box asking whether he wanted to volunteer for overseas service. And he checked off “do not volunteer…”
"…Of late, they’ve brought forward friends or fellow Guardsmen who say – with no documentary evidence whatsoever – that Bush at one point or another asked about serving in Vietnam.
But however that may be, it is awfully hard to turn the “do not volunteer” into “do volunteer…”
As well, consider the insight offered by food humorist Calvin Trillin, who jogs the ancient memory of Dan “Danny Boy” Quail.
"…Anyway, fair’s fair, and it has apparently been left to me to remind everybody of that. What I’m talking about is Mr. Quayle’s military service during the Vietnam War. Remember now? When Dan Quayle was chosen by George H. W. Bush to become the Republican vice presidential nominee in 1988, a firestorm broke out on the subject of whether the considerable influence of his family in Indiana had been used to get him a slot in the National Guard.
At the time it was thought that if the jackals of the press, who were in full pursuit, managed to find proof that influence had been used — that he had been jumped over a waiting list of less than influential Hoosiers, one of whom might have gone to Vietnam in place of this cosseted rich boy and been killed — Mr. Quayle would have had difficulty remaining on the ticket.
Mr. Quayle denied receiving preferential treatment, but he didn’t quibble about what making it into the guard meant at that time. “Obviously, if you join the National Guard, you have less of a chance of going to Vietnam,” he said on “Meet the Press” some time later. “I mean, it goes without saying.” That’s presumably what Colin Powell had in mind in “My American Journey” when he wrote, “I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well placed . . . managed to wrangle spots in Reserve and National Guard units.”
But in the current furor about George W. Bush’s military record it seems to be taken for granted that Mr. Bush got into the so-called Champagne unit of the Texas Air National Guard through influence. The stories begin by saying he was jumped over a 500-man waiting list. Then they quickly go on to investigate the details of his sojourn in Alabama. Using influence to get into the guard and therefore out of Vietnam is no longer disqualifying for “sons of the powerful”; it’s assumed. Or could it be that Dan Quayle is judged by stricter standards than other politicians?.." (emphasis added)
My apologies if this has already been noted, but Garry Trudeau is offering $10,000 to any members of the guard who can confirm Bush’s presence in Alabama.