You want the real answer?
Because Scott McClellan has absolutely no knowledge of anything whatsoever, and is incapable of providing any information on any subject.
That’s why they send him out there. That’s his job.
Yep, McClellan is the Secretary of Intentional Ignorance. Quite fitting, really.
Or perhaps he was afraid something might just turn up.
I think we’ve seen this card before. At this link you can blow it up:
http://www.nationalreview.com/document/nationalguard200402101729.asp
Yeah. I know it’s the National Review. We can just blow it up and see it clearly here.
If you look at the bottome you can see that there are 15 points that are awarded for membership in the Guard.
I believe these are the “gratuitous” points under discussion.
What this means is that everybody gets 15 points awarded to them just for being in the guard.
If you look here, at this other Huckleberry:
http://www.nationalreview.com/york/bush4.jpg
(you can blow it up) It looks like the same thing is being said.
It looks to me like Bush had more than enough Guard duty in all of his previous years that the gratuitous points were never an issue.
It appears that in this particular year in question Bush was 12% above the minimum needed.
So, I don’t think we can classify this service as “minimal.”
Now this also brings up the question of transfers and absences and whatnot. I know little about being in the Guard but it looks to me like you can do your duty pretty much all at once or spread it out depending on what you feel like.
So, if Bush had satisfactory duty for most of the year and was ahead say in May in terms of points needed, would he be allowed to leave responsibly and go to another state even without a valid transfer in hand? If he only needed a couple of more points or he was all done for the year, it would seem reasonable.
I dunno though so I stand prepared to be corrected.
I urge the reader to the latest installment of Calpundit, an almost essential blog site. In it he condenses mounds and mounds of malarkey into a few concise and relentlessly, even annoyingly, impartial questions. He links to the documents themselves as well as the relevent testimony. He arrives at much the same sort of concensus that we have (more or less) come to, but his reasons are better. He has an amazing capacity to isolate the significant facts from the insignificant.
I demand you got this cite at once! Or the little dog gets it, I’m warning you…
Sure. It’s possible. All kinds of things are possible. Pretty much most things you can imagine. Simple possibility by itself is not an argument though.
This thread is about actually demonstrating arguments and making a case for something. Idle speculation belongs in some other thread.
You need to give me a reason why believing that McClellan is covering up a conviction is the best and most rationale interpretation. To do that you need to demonstrate the something that is being covered up.
McClellan losing his cool and getting flustered is not evidence of wrongdoing of Bush 30 years ago. Not by a long shot.
It’s like the “gratuitous points.” It was put out there as this derogatory hypothetical, that Bush got hese extra points in, to put in Elucidator’s words “as a question of privilege,” the system being manipulated on his behalf.
No effort was meant to substantiate that this was so. Just the possibility put forward.
Like that, it’s pointless. We’re just arguing opinions and speculations. I would like to avoid that here. If you want to put it out there, substantiate it in some way, give me a reason to believe it’s true.
If you want to put out the assertion it should be up to you to provide the support. I shouldn’t have to go out and show that it’s not true. You should have to show that it is true.
I think I’ve hounded down the gratuitous points. But, I can’t certainly hound down every possibility for wrongdoing that you can imagine. The possibilities are infinite.
You got to support it, give me a reason to consider it beyond it just being possible.
That’s the main thrust of this thread, the op, and the ground rules. Make a supported argument. Simple speculation just isn’t.
Elucidator:
Allright. I went to that cite.
Custom dictates that by linking to a blog I must now make the obligatory comparison between you and December, the greatest blogspotter of all time.
That being done, that’s not a bad blog. What is he, the Matt Drudge of the left?
Wow. This one’s really good:
http://www.calpundit.com/archives/003280.html
I’m not sure that I agree with his conclusion that Burkett is telling the truth, but his reasoning seems wondrously thorough and very fair.
The things that make me doubt Burkett’s story is THE AXE Burkett’s grinding, and the fact that he claims he saw the document’s in question in a trash can.
Now, if I was going to be cleansing embarassing documents from a file to do a coverup for the Governor I wouldn’t just throw them face up in a trashcan. They would be whole and complete and subject to anybody’s perusal or confiscation. I would rip them up or shred them or take them away and burn them, or at least put them face down in the garbage and put some banana peels on top of them or something.
I mean, if the guy who’s cleansing the file is intelligent enough to recognize something embarassing, you’d thing he’d be intelligent enough to actually hide or destroy the evidence.
[QUOTE=Scylla]
Elucidator:
…Custom dictates that by linking to a blog I must now make the obligatory comparison between you and December, the greatest blogspotter of all time…
[QUOTE]
It is part and parcel of a lifetime pursuit, the corruption and subversion of all standards; civil, religious, and metric. I hasten to point out that I’ve been citing Talking Points Memo for quite some time. I may be wrong, but the distinction may be that that these blogs are collections of cites themselves and not merely an opinion masquerading as an authority.
The important point about Calpundit is not his opinion of the matter at hand, but his outline of the pertinent points and chronology, as well as the documents and cites that support them.
Your comparison of myself to December reminds me of the words of Oscar Wilde in conversation with J.M. Whistler, to wit: “Jo mamma!”
(a) I don’t understand what that means. Bush was still under obligation to serve in the Guard. I don’t know what it means for him to clear the base, go to Alabama, and have his application for transfer denied. Shouldn’t be get back to Houston where he was stationed?
(b) It looks like he may have re-applied after he was grounded. Do we know when he applied for the second transfer? (The approval was on Sept 5)
Another voice on the “gratuitous points” question:
http://www.memphisflyer.com/content.asp?ID=2837&onthefly=1
Article is primarily focused on the memory of fliers at the 187th, but has an interesting comment towards the end…
One can address the OP’s “case” in two fashions. From the extensive dissection on this thread, a “case” in the legal sense is obviously dead. Bill Burkitt is a he said-he said type thing. The missing documents could cover something up huge, but everyone now acknowledges that TANG and NG in general was in disarray then, so we can’t count on good documentation. Unless something credible miraculously appears, then we are at a standstill. We have 30 year old memories and poor documentation and that’s it. Then again, the investigations of the Starr Chamber, seemed to pursue leads much less credible than these, but I’m not one to stay bitter…
The other allegations in the court of public opinion, are IMHO dead as well. I would like to further this as a knee-jerk card-carrying liberal. I would be only too glad to hear that Bush was spending those (at least) 6 unaccounted months trading F-102 avionics data to the NVA for bags of Colombian pure white. But we are never going to get there, and the issue of slacking during Vietnam is now passe because it is not new in a politician. Clinton, a known and admitted shirker, won a Presidential election against a man partially incapacitated by a war wound. GWB won a primary against a bona-fide Vietnam war hero. It is not a make-or-break point anymore like it may have been before 1992.
It is like marijuana usage. The right wing made a big deal out of Clinton’s “didn’t inhale” thing (partially because of its inanity, but partially because it was perceived as a Big Thing in 1991). Gingrich learned the lesson and admitted it right off the bat and won. Now every politician admits that they smoked the ganja and we don’t hear a thing about it. It only gets bad when they deny it and then are proved otherwise. This is not a new phenomenon. Catholics didn’t win national elections until the Kennedys. The war veteran thing also happened in the 1800s with the Civil War and the noncombatant Grover Cleveland.
So if the Dems want to win, they need to find something really good with real legs to take them to November. They can stick this in a back pocket to ferment a bit, and it may push a few percentage points here or there. But, perhaps to the delight of voters, they are going to have to fight this on the real issues or find better dirt.
Just to clear up another point for you, **Scylla ** - you’re concerned that Bush’s service at Project PULL has no apparent corroboration, no witnesses, etc. But he does claim credit for it, and it is in the official WH bio. If he claims he was there, but nobody else can or will confirm it, that works against him, not for him.
edwino, you’re right as far as you go, but there’s more to it. A drug-use history, and especially a criminal history, are Big Deals in American politics these days, especially among Bush’s core constituencies. Hypocrisy and coverups are a lesser part, but across the board. We here might not think any less of him as a person for revealing the facts, but there are enough who would to make it politically inadvisable for him to do anything else.
Elvis
Drug conviction, yes. Drug use other than marijuana, perhaps. Repeated DUI arrest and conviction, probably. The key lies in whether he has denied it in the past or not and whether there is enough evidence to prove that it happened. The key is Bush hasn’t specifically denied these things (like the cocaine isse during the campaign) and so far, despite all of the digging, there is nothing specific to pin on him. There is nothing (yet) approaching the scale of the National Guard stuff, and that, as this thread has shown, is far too flimsy to make a Really Big Deal out of it.
Certainly there are some suspicious things on his record/biography, like the 6 month stint at PULL in a lifetime with virtually no other inner-city community work. But IMHO this president (and all politicians of this era) are well prepared not to get caught in a lie. When it became known that Bush had a DUI arrest, he admitted to it right away and thus defused the situation. Obviously if there was a drug arrest or anything else along these lines, the records of it are far less than those that exist for that one-time misdemeanor DUI in Maine. If there are records, and they do pop out, Bush has a nice safety release – since to the best of my knowledge he has never denied these things (like the serial murder charges), he can just admit to the whole thing and watch the scandal largely blow over. How many Bush-backers do you know who will change their vote based on whether the man has done a couple lines of blow in the 1970s and 1980s? You may perceive them as Big Deals, but the Big Deals only occur when people get caught in lies – witness the whole Kerry intern thing of last week. People got very excited when he went on Imus and flatly denied it, because that set him up for getting caught lying. Bush will never get caught in a lie because he never says anything in a straightforward manner.
Scylla:
Sorry, real life commitments are making it difficult to keep up with this discussion. Just a couple of responses:
Well, in my opinion, if we’re going to be completely rational, then I don’t think we can “believe” that Bush was arrested, etc. We can merely suspect that something along those lines might have happened.
It is entirely possible that the true reasons behind Bush’s community service were known only to a select circle. Many of those who were privy to that information may have passed away by this point. Others may chose not to come forward for various reasons – they might be worried about the potential repercussions of ratting on one of the world’s most powerful people, for example, or they may feel they are honor-bound to keep quite about it. I don’t know anything about “expungement,” per se, but the information may be confidential and it may be against the law to disclose it. Etc. Even given all of those considerations it seems a bit of long shot to me, and I would need to see more evidence of it before I believed it.
By the way, your point about “clearing the base” is a good one. In the Regular Army one doesn’t simply pack up one’s stuff and move to a new assignment without first having received transfer orders of one sort or another. Does anyone out there know if the same is true with the Guard?
If Bush put in for a transfer, and that transfer was denied, then it would be wrong for Bush to claim “transient status.” On the other hand, let us say that the sequence of events was as follows:
May: Bush applies for transfer to the 9921st, and is welcomed by its commander.
mid-July: Bush is due for his annual physical, but hasn’t yet received word on his transfer.
July 31st: Bush’s transfer is denied. Now he is still officially assigned to his old squad in Houston. He’s also late for his physical, but simultaneously working on Blount’s campaign.
August: Bush is loses flight status.
September 5: Bush applies to 187th.
September 15th: Application approved.
After that, something happens and finally he winds back up in Houston, for some reason.
You know, I don’t know, I don’t seem to be able to make heads or tails of the chronology. I thought the circumstances surround the applications for transfers might excuse Bush for missing his physical, but after typing them out, it appears to me that they don’t.
This whole case is weirder than tits on bishop, as they say. The complete inability of the press to nail down the specifics of when Bush did what is particularly strange. Regarding the timeline for Bush’s transfer requests, I’ve read the following, that Sept. 5 was the date for his request; that it was approved on Sept. 15, and I don’t know when he was ordered to report for duty. If his request for a transfer occurred earlier – say, shortly after his first request was denied – then his failure to take a physical in July or August might be more understandable.
Finally, most of my info regarding this stuff comes from CalPundit’s coverage as well; I highly recommend him.
That is absolutely the case. If you go TDY you have orders directing you to go where they tell you to go. If you go PCS it’s even more complicated because with the Guard you actually have to negotiate a release from your home unit before you can sign on with another unit. It’s not like my unit could transfer me to Texas. I’d have to request the transfer, Texas would have to accept me, and then my unit would release me from duty, whereas with the Active Duty they could just send me wherever with a simple set of orders.
If I may raise a notion that might explain the discordant information being bandied about. I fear the president does not remember his time in the guard in Alabama because he is suffering from Alcohol relate brain damage.
My highlighting.
“Dry Drunk” Syndrome and George W. Bush. Katherine van Wormer is a professor of Social Work at the University of Northern Iowa, not that I’m appealing to authority.
He had a drinking problem, and has beat it. That’s great for him. Too bad his brain took a beating too.
Elucidator:
Well, my cite seems to say that you get the 15 gratuitous points automatically. Yours doesn’t exactly contradict this. I dunno that it’s all that important.
Elvis:
I suppose. Still, I guess on balance it made sense for him to have everybody associated with the project killed so they won’t be able to talk about his cocaine conviction.
Svin:
I don’t understand what’s wrong with a quasi-altruistic interpretation. Bush helped on someone else’s campaign. He was probably interested in politics and thought is was a good idea to get some altruism on the resume.
That makes sense, if you don’t trust Bush to posess genuine altruistic tendencies, and saves you the trouble of having to assert nutty conspiracy theories.
Airman:
Is that the way it was back then. I mean if Bush simply disapeared without permission in violation of Guard rules, you’d think the Press would be all over this indisputable proof of a violation.
The offhand way they say “cleared the base” looks to me like he was allowed to go. And, if he had deserted, how could he be applying for a transfer?
Scylla
“Well, my cite seems to say that you get the 15 gratuitous points automatically. Yours doesn’t exactly contradict this. I dunno that it’s all that important.”
Yes, you do get them automatically if you get the required 50 points to begin with. As noted, the source in question was administrative personnel, whom we may plausibly expect to be knowledgeable.
It is important? Depends. If one were trying to make a case that GeeDubya should instantly be brought up on charges of desertion, no. If one merely points out the thunderingly obvious, that GeeDubya was privileged to a committment of service so lax as to be inconsequential, then yes. In this instance, awarded points that were not commonly so awarded.
Small enough point, perhaps, but not so small that you were going to overlook the question of “gratuitous” points. As always, I follow your lead on what issues are significant. Well, maybe not always. Frequently. Sometimes. At least once.
One would expect this, wouldn’t one?
Yet if we look here at a primary document:
http://www.nationalreview.com/york/bush4.jpg
Albert C, Lloyd, Jr. a Retired Lt. Colonel who was in charge of the “validation of service dates for all Air National Guard professional officers” directly contradicts your cite.
He writes that Bush is entitled to the gratuitous points. Period.
Now I really can’t fault you for an excellent cite from a reputable source that should have the knowledge, but I think that my Lieutenant Col. who was in charge of this for all Air National Guard Members trumps your measly little lietenant who briefly administered a single unit.
My Lieutenant Col. put it in writing and signed off on it. Your retired Lieutenant appears to be just yacking to a reporter.
But you’re right. He should know what he’s talking about. It doesn’t appear that he does.
Now the discrepency between these two authoritative sources would seem worth investigation, but if you look again at the original documents concerning Bush’s pay you can clearly see that they were scored in accordance with the methodology which my LTC says is correct and not with the methodology your lieutenant says was in force.
I accept your correction that this is an important issue.