I dunno. The article I linked to was pretty clear about the poor quality of Nat’l Gd records. But whether or not we think there’s any “there there”, it seems pretty clear to me that the story is going to die. It’s already slipping of the front pages.
I could be wrong, but that’s my prediction. Care to make one yourself?
Nah, because I don’t really care about the issue as an issue. Mox nix.
I am not hypocrite enough to pretend that I am not pleased that more people are exposed to young Lt Bush. Privilege is seldom kind to character. There are exceptions, of course, but young Mr. Bush does not appear to be one of them. Older Mr. Bush, who should know better by now, is too entranced by his image as a Leader of Men to simply admit the obvious.
But your response may not be as concisely relevent as you seem to believe. The record keeping is poor, you say, and that explains the absence of certain records. This buggers the question. It may account for the absence of records, but it cannot account for the remarkable specificity of the missing records: oddly enough, only those records that have the most bearing on the issue at hand appear to be missing. That you are inclined to view this as mere coincidence is rather curious. We have abundant evidence of Mr. Bush tonsils, certain unpleasant growths upon his Nixon, the removal of growths, etc. And yet, for the one particular year of most interest to us, there is a paucity.
No, companero, once is accident, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
400 pages of records over the course of 5 years (spring 68 - spring 73) implies an average of about 80 pages per year. There’s probably a burst of records at the start and end of ones term of service, but it’d be interesting to compare the steady state rate of record production on Bush with that of other guardsmen (pilots or not). Is there enough paperwork on Bush’s time in Alabama to be plausible?
Maybe I’m missing something here, but that seems to be a circular argument. This issue arose originally because of gaps in the records. Without those gaps there never would have been an issue. The fact that the gaps weren’t filled later is no coincidence-- merely a reflection of what the situation has been all along.
Yeah. Helping inner city kids. THE SHAME!
Not quite. The issue is “what did young Lt. Bush do, and when and where did he do it.” The records are sought as evidence. Older Candidate Bush, soon to be a “wartime President” and Leader of Men, refused to divulge those records,saying, in essence, “Trust me (fuck you)” The supine and compliant press corps of the time tugged thier collective forlock and assumed the position. The same press corps, you will remember, that was not happy without every jot and tittle of documention regarding Clinton’s evasion of service.
Apparently due to the efforts of Mike Moore (who knew being a flaming asshole could be a patriotic act?), the issue has resurfaced. The Admin repeats the previous performance, but to thier dismay the press dogs do not roll over and reveal thier vulnerable tummies, but snap and growl in an unseemly display of curiousity.
Over time, the issue comes to focus on young Lt. Bush’s activities in Alabama. Finally, the President promises to release all the records. He dumps 400 pages of documents in front of the press. Upon examination, in turns out that records of the time of particular interest are noticeably sparse, being exactly one. There is ample documentation, even an abundance, for times and dates not at issue. But not for the period of time in question.
Now, I am something of a math retard. But I do have some vague knowledge of the theorys of distribution of random occurances, as I ineptly illustrated in my metaphor of cutting the cards 20 times but only cutting an 8, 9, or 10 once.
I don’t believe in magic, and am inherently suspicious of coincidence. So far, you have offered inadequate record keeping as the explanation. As I noted, this would explain a random distribution of absent documents, but it would not come anywhere near explaining why documents from this specific period of time have gone missing.
I find this decidedly odd. You do not. Can you tell me why?
Bush entered the National Guard and trained to be a pilot. The accusation has been made that Bush family connections got him the billet. To date though, I have seen nothing to substantiate that this is true.
By all accounts, Bush was an excellent pilot and diligent and zealous in performing his duties for approximately the first 2/3 of his service term.
At about the time that American involvement in Vietnam came to a close, Bush lost his zealousness for the Guard.
He wanted to work on a candidacy in Alabama, and by some accounts got permission to go, and by others did not. He showed up in Alabama at any rate, and they seemed to expect him, or at least let him hang out.
The plane Bush was trained on was obsolete, the war was ending and Bush was looking forward to ending his Guard career. He missed a physical thus allowing his flight status to come to an end.
This missing of his physical appears to be the fulcrum of the matter.
Bush had approximately two years left in his service. He could have been checked out on another airplane.
Some have argued that this is a very serious lapse and possibly grounds for an investigation and legal action. By not taking his physical he was denying the National Guard the choice of whether to check him out on a new airplane, and ensuring they could do nothing but let him out early. Further, it was a clear and obvious dereliction of his responsibilities, commitment and duty to his country.
It has been theorized that Bush would have suffered severe disciplinary action for this violation were it not for his family connections. To date no evidence supports this speculation
The other side of the argument suggests that the physical was a mere detail, technicality, and not valid because Bush was moving into a nonflying position to finish out his career. Therefore there was know reason to take it.
It has been theorized that as the war came to a close there was a general laxness in the Guard concerning it’s members who were on the way out, and as the military was downsizing, it simply was no issue whatsoever.
What supports this last is that to date no disciplinary action appears to have been taken against Bush as regards the physical. Bush was granted an early release from the Guard and received an honorable discharge for his service.
There seems to be no supporting evidence to suggest any wrongdoing on the part of Bush concerning his National Guard duty, nor is there any indication that the Guard had a problem with the way he filled his commitment.
And, that’s the way it works. You need evidence before the accusation can responsibly be made. What the accusers seem to be doing is attempting to get Bush to prove that his duty was fulfilled. Bush it appears is willing to release records. However, the fact that these records do not prove that Bush fulfilled every aspect of his duty is not an argument that it didn’t occur.
One needs to prove that he didn’t before the accusation is made.
At this time I consider the accusations to be baseless. An example of partisan muckraking.
If one is in disagreement, one needs to gather evidence to suggest that Bush’s case was abnormal.
His personal records are not the only source. One might seek to find out if early discharges among pilots checked out on the same plane as Bush were handled similarly. One might check the early discharge records of 1973-74 and see if Bush’s case actually gives cause to raise eyebrows.
At this time, it doesn’t appear that there is a valid case against Bush’s service.
In fact, by definition his service was satisfactory as he was granted an honorable discharge. Really, the only way to overcome this last is to demonstrate a conspiracy, or Bush’s family pulling strings on his behalf.
As I’m sure you probably already know, the question (or, more correctly, the insinuation) is to suggest that young Lt. Bush was sentenced to community service for some crime that I, for one, consider insignificant. Perhaps drunken driving, perhaps a drug infraction, but comparatively minor.
Of course, the alternative explanation is that Lt. Bush discovered in himself a previously unknown deep committment to the well being and progress of inner city youth.
Sure. You’re making a logical error.
The area of interest is of interest specifically because there is little data concerning it.
If you are Michael Moore and want to create a scandal against Bush concerning his National Guard career, but actually find nothing to support any wrongdoing, you are going to look pretty stupid if you point to a period where the documentation proves Bush to be diligent.
Therefore you point at the area with the least documentation, in the hopes that you can construe an absence of positive evidence as proof of wrongdoing.
So, it is not that the matter of dispute is suspiciously undocumented. It is that the undocumented period has been chosen specifically for that reason.
You’re remarking on the fact that information is sparse for the disputed period and suggesting that this is clearly not a coincidence but something sinister is like pointing at a dead body and saying “A-ha! This corpse just happens to be lying exactly in the spot where a murder occured! I’m no genius with numbers, but surely this can’t be coincidence.”
Now you see, I’m being nice. I specifically used a murder metaphor to make you feel good, so you could remark about how I said Bush’s service is like the scene of a murder, and isn’t that ironic.
I notice that you have not made that insinuation. I think it highly unlikely myself. Had it occured, I can’t believe we wouldn’t have heard about it by now.
And, as Elvis points out he should be deeply ashamed of his betrayal of Republican principles, and should simply apologize for being young and irresponsible.
(Hell of an argument Elvis made.)
Well, I actually am somewhat of a math whiz, so let me explain this to you. 
Firstly, I never proposed that “the answer” is faulty record keeping. You, on the other hand, have, on several occasions, claimed that military records are scrupulously kept and so a gap in said records is strongly suggestive of wrong-doing. I offered evidence to the contrary-- expert witness testimony that Nat’l Gd records are notoriously poorly kept.
You bring out your card analogy. It’s actually a good analogy, but requires a bit of critical thinking to use it correctly. If faulty record keeping is a problem, it would be akin to missing, say, the 6 - 10 of clubs. You can shuffle the deck and look as many times as you like, but you won’t find the 6 - 10 of clubs because… they were never there in the first place.
No coincidence. It’s been Bush’s records (the deck of card) at issue all along. Mr. Moore did nothing but bring up the same, original charge which came about due to a gap in the records. No one has seen all the records until now, but you are acting as if there were two independent sets of documents that coincidently are missing the same pages.
Your argument about a logical fallacy might hold water if Mr. Moore and his ilk (don’t you dare!) had selected a period at random and made an accusation out of whole cloth. As we both know, the period in question has been under suspicion for some time.
Now we are offered as evidence a plethora of irrelevancy, documents pertaining to issues not in question. Documents relevent to the time at issue are noticeably scarce, being one (or at least one, if you so prefer). Documents about every other period of time abound. How very odd. How very convenient.
We are offered the explanation that record keeping failure is to blame here. This spasm of bureaucratic incompetence apparently began and ended with the time in question. A coincidence. After years of questions, at least four that we are aware of, now it can be known: they are not. Perhaps they never were, but now they are not.
How very odd. How very convenient. As I said, I am suspicious of coincidence, and most darkly suspicious of convenient coincidence. Most likely, we will never know, perhaps the base mascot ate the relevant files.
Perhaps to you and friend John this puts all questions to rest. I can only hope that you excercise more suspicion when offered such coincidences by used car salesmen, lawyers, and Nigerian diplomats with temporary financial difficulty.
I have stayed out of this debate cum shouting match up until now. The present fight, cunningly drawn by friend Scylla on the proposition that the President fully performed his duty as a member of the Air National Guard (and prove he didn’t), I have no interest in. I expect that the President did do what was expected of him as a Air Guard pilot. He may have done the absolute minimum to meet the conditions of his commission and he may have gotten a little help in that. It’s like the chin ups before chow – if you have trouble the sergeant will look the other way and the other guys in your squad might give you a lift so that you don’t slow the line down.
My problem is that as a young, fit man with his college behind him and as a member of a family of Connecticut Yankees with an admirable tradition of service to the nation and no wife and children to look after, the President chose to accept a position in the Guard if he did not actively seek it. While hundreds of thousands of other young men were enlisted or conscripted into the national service, put their lives on hold, left families behind, the young man who is now our President decided that his family’s tradition of national service could go take a flying leap, that he was sufficiently important that he ought to be exempt from the duty accepted by or imposed on the rest of his generation. That says something about sense of duty.
Don’t go telling me that the President honorably fulfilled his duty by going into the Guard. The National Guard, both Army and Air Force, was during the Vietnam period, and to be charitable about it, a route step outfit. It was the extremely unlucky Guardsman, or one with an unusually ambitious commander, who was going to see the inside of the Green Machine for any more than two consecutive weeks once a year, let alone in a combat theater. The decision was made early in the Johnson Administration that the war and the European frontier was going to rely on the Regulars and the Draft–the Guard and the Reserve was not going to be mobilized. As a consequence the Guard became something very like a suburban country club until after the Vietnamese demobilization.
This was forcible brought home to me in 1968 when I was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, a basic training and combat engineer training post in Southern Missouri. That summer the post was the host to the summer encampment of NG training units from the Illinois and (my recollection) Alabama Army National Guard. These guys were supposed to take over and run basic training posts if and when they were mobilized. It was the damnedest thing you can imagine. Convoys rolled in with trucks full of beer. One company had an enlisted contingent that seemed to be entirely composed of members of a professional football team. We had senior officers locked up in the drunk tank. We had a one pair of lieutenants who got into a fist fight in front of a battalion formation because one thought the other had impugned his honor. Platoons of prostitutes we had never seen before (it was a basic training post, none of out kid were let out and none had any money if they did get out) showed up on the roads leading off post. They were undisciplined, disorganized, poorly motivated and resentful of any regular who made any attempt to restore a little order. There was general relief when the NG loaded their remaining beer on their trucks and left.
That was the Army NG in 1968. A few years later the same people (undisciplined and disorganized) were responsible for the tragic fiasco at Kent State University. It is enough to say that the Vietnamese War ANG was an object of ridicule among the Regulars.
Was the Air Guard and different? I have no personal knowledge, but Air Force pilots I spoke to as Ramstein and Bittberg-Spangdalm and any number of other small air bases and fields where my batteries provided air defense seemed to be universally of the opinion that Air Guard pilots of the period were merely playing Air Force and were not serious military aviators and not to be regarded as combat worthy without a whole bunch of very intense training and weeding out of undesirables.
It has seemed to me that when a man avoided active service for which he was eligible he better have a very good reason for that when he comes to me asking to be rewarded with some public office, not the least of which is to become President of the United States. President Bush, it seems to me, has no good explanation. He could have been on active duty, He wasn’t why not? The same question applies to other people seeking office, including Vice-president Quail and President Clinton.
I have said any number of things derogatory of the Army NG. I want to be as clear as I can that the NG I knew during the war in Vietnam is not the same Guard that emerged after the war. Since then I have seen NG units, even combat arms units, that I would be happy to go into a war zone with --units well trained, well equipped, disciplined and motivated. It’s a different Guard and it is no longer the sluff-off outfit it was 40 or 30 years ago. I’m sure this has offended someone, but that’s my judgment and I’m sticking with it. Do not confuse the NG our President served in with the young men and women who are following the guidon in Iraq and Afghanistan and any number of other places and at the armory down the street.
“…No one has seen all the records until now, but you are acting as if there were two independent sets of documents that coincidently are missing the same pages…” (emphasis added)
No, no one has seen all the records, not even now. At no time did I mention another set of documents, this chimera is your own invention.
Yes, of course, my original analogy depends on a full deck of cards. I believe we were given to understand that a full deck existed, full records were extant, but there was no reason to review them because of Mr. Bush’s entire innocence in this matter. Further, we were given to understand that the records would show precisely that. It was only after he promised to release this “full deck” that we find the credibility gap.
Note well: the period after is fully covered, as the period before. To belabor friend Scyllas rather extravagant murder metaphor, you are seeking to imply that the presence of a corpse can be taken as suggesting that no murder was committed.
Specifically because it is not as well-documented as the rest. This is why it is under suspicion.
You really can’t have it both ways, you know? You can’t chastise Bush about not releasing his records, and then chastise him when he does release them because they don’t contain what you want.
And, for the third time, there is nothing convenient about the fact that the period under suspicion is sparsley documented. That’s why it’s under suspicion.
Again, this appears to be your whole argument. It’s a bad one. A really bad one. You can’t construe wrongdoing based on an absence of evidence to the contrary. Bush does not have to prove that he didn’t do something wrong. You have to prove he did.
If you can’t, it is wrong of you to make the argument that he has.
It’s a faith-based argument, nothing more.
Where were you August 16, 1967? What did you do? With whom did you speak? About what?
Prove it.
If you can’t, then why don’t you just admit you were commiting a crime?
Come on man, this is really a crappy argument you’re making.
No coincidence here. None.
I’ll explain it a different way. I think you’re a bad man who committed a crime sometime last week.
You can account for all of your time, every minute of every day… Except for Saturday.
Is it “coincidence” that I would focus my attentions on Saturday?
Odd? Convenient?
[supportive hijack]
“I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well-placed… managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units…Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.” (Colin Powell’s autobiography, My American Journey, p. 148)
[/sh]
You keep talking about a “coincidence”. Give us some more detail. There has been one set of doc’s all along. There was not a random pulling of records that produced the origianl controversy and another random pulling of documents later. There’s been a gap all along, and a thousand mining expeditions into those doc’s would show the same gap. I simply don’t understand your claim of “coincidence”.
Hey, you said it, not I.
Sure I can. Stoned on pscilocybin mushrooms and practicing Tantric yoga with a hippie hottie. Her. Love, what else?
Eat your heart out.
But I don’t chastise. I merely note that we are offered as exculpatory evidence is no evidence at all. It proves nothing, and I do not claim that it does, merely that what we were promised as proof has not materialized, regardless of the volume and precision of the irrelevant documents.
I don’t claim that it proves guilt. I merely assert, entirely plausibly, that it does not prove otherwise. Further than this, your respondent sayeth not.
It proves Bush was in Alabama. And just a page a go you, or at least your ilk were claiming he never showed up. Now that that’s been proven, y’all are claiming that something else hasn’t been proven.
You’re painting a floating bogey. As each accusation is addressed you merely shift to a new accusation and claim that remains unproven.
I’ll again say. That’s not the way it works. To act responsibly, you must have evidence for your accusation before you make it.
I agree. Therefore their is no case against Bush, and the accusation should not repsonsibly be made.
It’s good to hear you say this. Now I know I can count on you to defend Bush on this issue in the future.
If you actually find something, I’ll be interested in hearing it.
The issue goes to character and integrity, both then and now.
What place does a Vietnam hawk have in the guard?
Has the president signed a privacy waiver for his military records so that they can be requested through FOIA procedures? This is the route that McCain and Dole at least, took (possibly Gore and Kerry but I cannot say for certain). Requires 5 minutes of the presidents time and then the White House can move on to other things. Or were the documents all released via the White House? If FOIA requests for Bush’s service record are still getting the “We’re sorry, but that info is private” then I think questions definitely still exist.
Is the mad rush to bug out of Iraq by the summer because spreading democracy (or whatever) has lost his interest, as flying/fulfilling his obligations did in '72?