A Feeding Frenzy

Posted by Peter

Scott McClellan seems to have one on his hands right now about President Bush and his National Guard service.

You can't say the administration hasn't earned this.

1:20 PM |

 
A More Basic Question

Posted by Peter

Today, Scott McClellan said the White House plans to release records showing President Bush was paid for fulfilling his National Guard duties. Okay. The White House is also re-releasing the summaries of the retirement points Bush earned in the Guard. Um, okay again. Plenty of analysts, including me in the posts below, have already subjected those documents to exhaustive analysis.

McClellan's point is that "these records clearly document the President fulfilling his duties." Well, it's good to know that Bush wasn't a deserter -- a remarkably low standard for a future commander-in-chief, wouldn't you say? -- but the debate on this issue is shifting. Rather than being satisfied with technical proof that Bush wasn't AWOL, people are beginning to wonder why the administration doesn't seem to be able to offer any affirmative answers to questions about Bush's service time. This morning, McClellan still couldn't even say whether or when Bush served in Texas or Alabama.

It would be nice if Bush would waive his privacy rights and release any official record with his name on it. But I have a less legalistic, more basic request: Could the President just tell us if he remembers where he was and what he was doing to earn government checks after he stopped flying?

Reminder: Any job that carries a "Top Secret" clearance requires you to account for every month of your life.

12:40 PM |

 
The "W Document" Is Real! Now What?

Posted by Peter

Holy smokes. During the time it took me to put together a full account of George Magazine's autumn 2000 investigation into the military record of George W. Bush, which is posted below, a full version of a key piece of evidence has surfaced.

Kevin Drum of Calpundit has now posted a clean copy of the 1972-73 statement of points Bush earned in the National Guard. In a torn version that George and others had found earlier, this page had been known as the "W Document," and had led to all kinds of speculation.

After stitching together other evidence in Bush's files, we at George concluded that the "W Document" was real, and that two pages listing points of service that Bush earned correspond in an interlocking fashion to two documents ordering him to attend active duty training. (That's what the second half of the long post below is all about.) I think reasonable people would now have to agree: the "W Document" is genuine.

So first of all, congratulations and thanks to Kevin Drum.

But the full 1972-73 statement of points raises some new issues. Here are three that came to my mind right away, and that are now bubbling across the web:

1. The first date on the page ends with October 29, not November 29, as "W Document"-watchers had been expecting. One reason we had projected a date in November was because it fit – it would have been before the January 10 date that was deducible from the torn records, and it would have been around Thanksgiving, when we could assume Bush returned to Texas if he hadn't before. But there was a bigger reason: because the Bush campaign told us so in 2000.

Check it out: On Nov. 3, 2000, the New York Times' Jo Thomas wrote that Dan Bartlett "pointed to a document in Mr. Bush's military records that showed credit for four days of duty ending Nov. 29 and for eight days ending Dec. 14, 1972, and, after he moved back to Houston, on dates in January, April and May."

Again, you can figure out the January date if you look closely enough, and Bush was ordered to report in April and May, so those were no-brainers. But it turns out Bartlett was wrong about November 29 – and about December 14, too. The clean version of the "W Document" shows Bush gaining points for days ending on November 14.

This tells me that Bartlett either had some reason for intentionally confounding the dates, or, more probably, he was making his best guess about what the records showed, just like the rest of us. Given what the full page actually shows, it seems likely that Bartlett was working off the same torn "W Document" that we were and didn't have much information from Bush to supplement it – and he was the guy in charge of explaining to the press what Bush's files meant.

I think what we're seeing is that Bush hasn't made a full account of his 1972-73 time in Alabama and Texas to his own staff, either because he doesn't think he needs to or because he can't. Either way, this means it is more important than ever to put key questions directly to the President.

2. It's not clear why the statements of points Bush earned during his last two years of Guard membership are computer printouts on pages separate from his master personnel summary. Drum, abetted by former Guard pilot Robert Rogers, smells something fishy:

"[I]t is an ARF document … ARF is the reserves, and among other things it's where members of the guard are sent for disciplinary reasons. As we all know, Bush failed to show up for his annual physical in July 1972, he was suspended in August, and the suspension was recorded on September 29. He was apparently transferred to ARF at that time and began accumulating ARF points in October … To make a long story short, Bush apparently blew off drills beginning in May 1972, failed to show up for his physical, and was then grounded and transferred to ARF as a disciplinary measure. He didn't return to his original Texas Guard unit and cram in 36 days of active duty in 1973 … but rather accumulated only ARF points during that period. In fact, it's unclear even what the points on the ARF record are for, but what is clear is that Bush's official records from Texas show no actual duty after May 1972."

Well, maybe. But there are two big problems with this theory. One is that the chronological record of Bush's service shows him being transferred to Air Reserve headquarters in Denver on October 1, 1973 – a paper transfer corresponding with his enrollment at Harvard Business School – not September 1972. The other is that Bush received two orders, on April 23 and May 1, 1973, ordering him to report to annual active duty training at Ellington Air Force Base in Texas. Even if such orders were sent to someone who had been permanently grounded, fulfilling them seems like it would constitute "actual" duty.

And I am not so sure it's as big deal as Drum thinks that Bush's 1972-73 and 1973-74 pages are titled "ARF Statement of Points Earned." After all, the master personnel document that Drum cites for Bush's record prior to May 1972 is itself called as "Air Reserve Forces Retirement Credit Summary." The Air Reserve Forces tracked membership points for Guard members. It might be that Bush's retirement credit summary, his 1972-73 statement and his 1973-74 statement ought to be read consecutively, as they appear in the FOIA release of his records – that taken together, they form a full record of the points he earned. Maybe the document type shifted when Bush put in days in a state other than Texas, or when he stopped flying, or when the Air Reserve switched forms. These would all be simple explanations, and the simplest explanations are usually the likeliest.

Of course, we can speculate all we want – and people across the Internet are already convinced that Bush's assignment to Denver was disciplinary in nature. We won't know the truth until the President explains where and how he reported for duty, and opens his service files and pay records to back up his assertions.

Of the 10 queries in my original post on this topic, Question #5 was: Was there a Flight Inquiry Board after George W. Bush's suspension, and if so, what did it find? Was Bush disciplined for missing flights or his physical, and if so, how?

And Question #9 was: How did Bush "work out" that early discharge, exactly? Were the terms of that discharge related to his attachment to Air Reserves headquarters in Denver until late 1974?

These seem more pertinent than ever.

3. Drum says the untorn version of the "W Document" was "delivered to Bob Fertik in response to a FOIA request in late 2000." Pardon me for asking, but exactly when when did Fertik obtain the full page?

I'm wondering about this because on October 15, 2000, Fertik published a piece on Democrats.com with the screaming headline "George Magazine is Wrong!" In it, he referred to our treatment of the 1972-73 statement of points this way:

"This 'torn and undated' document … is the cornerstone of their story. It therefore warrants close scrutiny. On the face of it, there is nothing to connect this document with George W. Bush, because his name appears nowhere, and the place where his name should be is torn … In the final analysis, this 'document' is bizarre - and not credible evidence that George W. Bush reported for duty during this period … [W]e dispute the authenticity of this 'document.'"

On January 24 of this year, Fertik updated his piece to include a working link to our original George story – but left all of these (and other) references to the "W Document" intact. That's very curious, given that he was Drum's source for the untorn version of the page.

I would hope that we can get off the question of the authenticity of the 1972-73 statement of points, get off the AWOL question and move toward asking what Bush was actually doing while he was in the Guard. Of course, I also hoped that in the fall of 2000, to no avail. But there's a huge amount of investigative energy out there, and public demand for information. Let's keep pursuing – and pushing the major media to ask – the right questions, not ones that are easily dismissible by Bush spokesmen.

12:04 PM |

 
10 Questions Beyond AWOL

Posted by Peter

In September and October 2000, when I was the senior writer for politics at George Magazine, we investigated George W. Bush's military record. We generated some significant results, including the first explanation of what some people are now calling the "W Document," and to get our findings out as quickly as possible, we posted them online. Unfortunately, George went out of business in January 2001, and its parent company, Hachette Filipacchi Media, has kept its archives closed. Georgemag.com went dark shortly afterward, and, even with tools such as the Wayback Machine , I haven't been able to conjure the ghosts of the documents we scanned onto the site to support our piece.

But in addition to our story, which is still floating around the web, I do have the series of online responses we published to the avalanche of questions we got, and I have my original notes. And I thought this would be a good moment to re-introduce our research. I think putting it back online can settle some arguments, bring some evidence to the table that has been ignored since 2000 and point us toward some relevant questions that remain very open. (And, for what it's worth, re-establish that the late George put together a chronology of Bush's record using all the available evidence before the New York Times and Washington Post got around to their stories in November 2000.)

Our original story, which Karthik Thyagarajan and I co-authored and which was published on October 13, 2000, reported that "Bush may have received favorable treatment to get into the Guard, served irregularly after the spring of 1972 and got an expedited discharge, but he did accumulate the days of service required of him for his ultimate honorable discharge." I stand by that conclusion. And I believed that once we presented the evidence that Bush had met the technical requirements for an honorable discharge, the focus of media and political inquiry would shift to what he did during the time he served in the National Guard. The piece was called "The Real Military Record of George W. Bush: Not Heroic, but Not AWOL, Either"; I thought the next round of stories would be about what "not heroic" actually meant.

Instead, the anti-Bush left kept arguing about whether or not Bush actually had gone AWOL, and the Bush campaign ran out the clock. Al Gore made nothing of Bush's military record, major newspapers didn't pick up the thread until just days before the election and TV news ignored the story.

Bush's political advisers erred in thinking they buried this issue forever. But in order for this go-around to be more productive than the last time – either politically for Democrats or just in terms of getting the truth out – the right questions have to be put to the administration. To see what they are, let's take a run through the account that we assembled at George.

(I apologize in advance for the book-length size of the rest of this post, and thank other online bloggers and researchers for keeping alive a virtual library of Bush documents, which I have relied on below.)

The beginning of this tale is familiar by now, but bears repeating. George W. Bush applied to join the Texas Air National Guard when he was a senior at Yale, around the time of the Tet Offensive in 1968, when an estimated 100,000 Americans were on waiting lists to join Guard units across the country. He got in two weeks before he graduated.

Ben Barnes, former speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, stated in September 1999 that in late 1967 or early 1968, he asked a senior official in the Texas Air National Guard to help Bush get into the Guard as a pilot. Barnes said he did so at the behest of Sidney Adger, a Houston businessman and friend of former President George H. W. Bush, then a Texas congressman. Former President Bush has denied pulling strings at the Guard on behalf of his son, but given Barnes' admission, that is not a complete explanation of events. Adger and Barnes are deceased.

So here's question #1 for President Bush: Did he or his father ever give an okay for a family member or friend to help him get into the Guard? Did either of them ever know about such help?

The younger Bush fulfilled two years of active duty and completed pilot training in June 1970. During that time and in the two years that followed, Bush flew the F-102, an interceptor jet equipped with missiles that could shoot down enemy planes. His commanding officers and peers regarded Bush as a competent pilot and enthusiastic Guard member. In March 1970, the Texas Air National Guard issued a press release trumpeting his performance: "Lt. Bush recently became the first Houston pilot to be trained by the 147th [Fighter Group] and to solo in the F-102 … Lt. Bush said his father was just as excited and enthusiastic about his solo flight as he was."

But in the spring of 1972, National Guard records show a sudden dropoff in Bush's military activity. Around that time, Bush decided to go to work for Winton "Red" Blount, a Republican running for the U.S. Senate, in Alabama. Documents from Ellington Air Force Base in Houston state that Bush "cleared this base on 15 May." Shortly afterward, he applied for assignment to the 9921st Air Reserve Squadron in Montgomery, Ala., a unit that required minimal duty and offered no pay. Although that unit’s commander was willing to welcome him, on May 31 higher-ups at the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver rejected Bush's request to serve at the 9921st, because it did not offer duty equivalent to his service in Texas. "[A]n obligated Reservist can be assigned to a specific Ready Reserve position only," noted the disapproval memo, a copy of which was sent to Bush. "Therefore, he is ineligible for assignment to an Air Reserve Squadron."

Bush moved to Alabama anyway. There has been considerable confusion about his whereabouts during the second half of 1972 and the first half of 1973, but at George, we obtained records showing that the Blount Senate campaign paid Bush about $900 a month from mid-May through mid-November to do advance work and organize events. (I will post these as soon as I can get my hands on our old files.)

Now, this doesn't mean Bush was AWOL, or a deserter, or that he failed to report when ordered. Even in wartime, the National Guard tries to accommodate members that have civilian jobs. But it does mean that Bush separated himself from his Texas unit without having a replacement location to serve. And neither Bush’s annual evaluation nor the Air National Guard’s overall chronological listing of his service contain any evidence that he performed Guard duties during that summer.

So here's question #2 for President Bush: When he packed up and left Texas for Alabama even though he still owed the Guard service in 1972, what was he thinking? Did he care that his transfer request had been rejected? Did he assume he could get another?

On or around his 27th birthday, July 6, 1972, Bush did not take his required annual medical exam at his Texas unit. As a consequence, he was suspended from flying military jets. In 2000, Bush aide Dan Bartlett told George: "You take that exam because you are flying, and he was not flying. The paperwork uses the phrase ‘suspended from flying,’ but he had no intention of flying at that time … The Air Force had begun phasing out the F-102 at that time, and he was not extending his duty, he was planning to go to graduate school. It did not make sense for [Bush] or the Guard to extend his training. He was in a non-flying capacity, warranting no reason for him to take a medical exam."

But there's no such thing as an insignificant suspension – the U.S. government spends considerable time and money training pilots, who are supposed to fly whatever their "intention." Moreover, Bush didn't start business school until the fall of 1973. Yet after April 1972, he never flew for the National Guard.

Question #3: When and how did President Bush decide to permanently stop flying for the Guard?

Question #4: How was he able to communicate this decision to his superiors in a way that they never asked him to re-train, or to keep flying F-102s until he fulfilled all his service obligations?

Some media reports speculated that Bush took and failed his physical, or that he was grounded as a result of substance abuse, and Bush’s vagueness on the subject of his past drug use has only abetted such rumors. Bush’s commanding officer in Texas, however, denied the charges to George. Bobby Hodges, now a retired Major General, said: "His flying status was suspended because he didn’t take the exam, not because he couldn’t pass."

Since our story appeared, other reports have indicated that the suspension of a pilot is usually followed by a Flight Inquiry Board to review the reason and set any punishment. So that's Question #5: Was there a Flight Inquiry Board after George W. Bush's suspension, and if so, what did it find? Was Bush disciplined for missing flights or his physical, and if so, how?

On September 5, 1972, Bush wrote to then-Col. Jerry Killian at his original unit in Texas, requesting permission to serve with the 187th Tactical Reconnaisance Group, another Alabama-based unit. "This duty would be for the months of September, October, and November," Bush wrote.

This time his request was approved: 10 days later, the Alabama Guard ordered Bush to report to then-Lt. Col. William Turnipseed at Dannelly Air Force Base. The memo noted that unit training assembly would be held on October 7-8 and November 4-5. (Scroll down to the last document at this link. Note that this is not the same as ordering Bush to report on those dates; such an order would contain a direct phrase, such as "Following named officer are ordered to attend annual active duty training at the Air National Guard training site Ellington AFB, Texas for the period indicated" – which other Bush documents do have.) It also stated: "Lieutenant Bush will not be able to satisfy his flight requirements with our group," since the 187th did not fly F-102s.

Bush was a cipher in Alabama. In 2000, the GOP tried to find people who served there with him to try to confirm that he spent time with the Alabama Air National Guard – and nobody stepped forward. And neither Turnipseed, Bush’s commanding officer, nor Kenneth Lott, then chief personnel officer of the 187th, could remember Bush serving with their unit when George interviewed them. "I don’t think he showed up," Turnipseed said.

Bush maintains he did serve in Alabama. On Sunday, he told Tim Russert: "You don't just, you know, say I did something without there being verification. Military doesn't work that way. I got an honorable discharge, and I did show up in Alabama." In 2000, Bartlett told George: "Gov. Bush specifically remembers pulling duty in Montgomery and respectfully disagrees with the Colonel," says Bartlett. "There’s no question it wasn’t memorable, because he wasn’t flying. He was not associated with that unit, and he wasn't in a position to develop relationships with a lot of the folks in that unit."

In July 2000, the Decatur Daily reported that two former Blount campaign workers recalled Bush serving in the Alabama Air National Guard in the fall of 1972. "I remember he actually came back to Alabama for about a week to 10 days several weeks after the campaign was over to complete his Guard duty in the state," stated Emily Martin, a former Alabama resident who said she dated Bush during the time he spent in that state. "Although I never actually drove him to Guard duty, he told me that he went and there is no reason for me to believe that he did not go."

Question #6: Can Bush provide any details at all about the time he spent in Alabama – where he lived, who he hung out with, what he did? How about just one person whom he served with in the Alabama Guard?

After the 1972 election, which Blount lost, Bush moved back to Houston and subsequently began working at P.U.L.L., a community service center for disadvantaged youths. This period is controversial, too, because even though Bush’s original unit had been placed on alert duty in October 1972, his superiors in Texas lost track of his whereabouts. On May 2, 1973, when Lt. Col. William Harris, Jr., Bush’s squadron leader in the 147th, tried to fill out his officer evaluation report, heincorrectly assumed that Bush had been reporting for duty in Alabama all along. Harris wrote that Bush "has been performing equivalent training in a non-flying status with the 187 Tac Recon Gp, Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama." He also stated: "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit" for the preceding year.

The key thing about this report is that since Harris was wrong about the former, we have no way of knowing whether or not he was right about the latter. Bush’s evaluation by itself neither demonstrates nor disproves anything about his service between the time he stopped flying and May 1973. All we know is that Bush fell off his superiors’ radar screens after the spring of 1972 to such an extent that they didn’t know where he was. Of Bush’s return to Texas, base commander Hodges told George: "All I remember is someone saying he came back and made up his days."

At this point, we have to take a long detour to examine the specific question of whether or not Bush accumulated enough service time to merit an honorable discharge. Specifically, we have to look at four pieces of evidence, one of which is the notorious "W Document."

The "W Document" is a torn, undated page with only two typed letters visible beyond its title, "ARF Statement of Points Earned," which indicates that it is an Air Reserve Forces record of the points that every Guardsman must accumulate to maintain his standing. Taken by itself, it sure doesn't seem to say much.

But it doesn't stand by itself. First, it was part of Bush's military records (not an insert, as some reports have claimed). At George, we got the first copy we saw from a set of Bush's records released under the Freedom of Information Act. It was the 99th page in the set, and it filled a gap between statements of points Bush earned in previous years and the points he earned in 1973-74. So it seems on its face to be statement of points Bush earned in 1972-73. Start on that basis, and you will see that its "W" is right where you would expect it to be if the name "Bush George W" were printed at the top, as it is for the '73-'74 page.

Further, the fourth date on the "W Document" is the 10th day of a month that ends in "N." Given the three-letter codes used on ARF statements, that month could be "JAN" or "JUN." However, Bush's service year started when he was sworn into the Guard, which means it ran from May to May. So the first date listed is the 29th of a month that is May or later, the second is the 14th of at least one month following, and the third is the 6th of at least one month after that – which means the "N" month cannot be June, and therefore must be January.

With that chronology in mind, we can turn to the other pages related to the "W" page. First, on April 23, 1973, Bush was ordered to report to annual active duty training the following month; the dates listed are May 1-3 and May 8-10. Since the fourth date on the "W" document is from January, the sixth and seventh could be from May, and would then correspond to the dates listed in Bush's orders.

Second, on May 1, 1973, Bush was ordered to report for more active duty training, on May 22-24, May 29-31 and June 5-7. The first of these matches the ninth (and final) date on the "W Document," and the other two fit with the first two dates listed on Bush's 1973-74 statement of points earned.

In short, there are two orders to attend training that contain dates that correspond in an overlapping fashion to two documents listing points of service that Bush earned. At George, we concluded that was enough to take those lists seriously. That's why, after piecing together this puzzle, we reported in October 2000 that Bush racked up enough points – barely – in his final two service years to maintain his standing as a Guardsman.

We weren't exactly lauded for our detective work. Many of the people paying close attention to this subject three and a half years ago were convinced that Bush had been AWOL, and refused to accept the legitimacy of any analysis that concluded otherwise, though we had found gaping holes in Bush's record beyond the technical question of how many Guard points he managed to accumulate.

Also, we goofed – not on any factual matter, as far as I know, but on how we introduced the "W Document" to the public. In gathering information about Bush's record, the Guard and service points, one of the people I interviewed (among many others) was retired Lt. Col. Albert Lloyd, Jr., who retired in 1997 as director of military personnel and data systems for the Texas Air National Guard. Earlier in 2000, when the Bush campaign itself had asked the Texas Adjutant General’s office for assistance in deciphering its candidate's military records, the request was referred to Lloyd. He had access to Bush's records, and it was he who first figured out that the "W Document" was Bush's statement of points for 1972-73. In offering his explanation of the document to me, he faxxed me a copy. That page was much more legible than the one we had in our copy of Bush's records, which looked more like this. So I gave it to our website to post. I didn't even give a thought to the fact that Lloyd had written some notes on the page, because nothing he had done changed the substance of its text. I just wanted people to be able to make out the letters and numbers on the document, especially the "N" in "JAN." So I am responsible for putting online the version of the "W Document" with Lloyd's handwritten notes, and my motive was simple: legibility.

The pro-AWOL crowd immediately bombarded George with e-mails accusing us of using "tattered," "doctored" and "embellished" documents – and, after I explained what happened in a supplementary online post, of being "deliberately misdirected" by Lloyd. It was not a pleasant way to spend the week leading up to an exciting presidential election.

We offered further evidence and response to our readers in online posts on October 20, October 24 and November 3, 2000, but probably very few of the people interested in this subject today read those exchanges, and they are no longer available. To set the record straight on a few of the points they contained:

> Lloyd neither worked for nor received payment from the Bush campaign.

> When Lloyd examined Bush’s records – in 2000, not 1998, as some reports claimed – he found the "W Document." He did not add that page to the set of documents. And it's not just on Lloyd's say-so that we know this. George Lardner, a reporter for the Washington Post who co-authored a major series on Bush back in July 1999, confirmed to me that the 1972-73 statement of points was included in the set of Bush’s military records he obtained for his research.

> The crucial point, of course, is that Lloyd's writing does not change any of the numbers on the "W Document," nor their sum: 41 points for Bush that year from active and inactive duty. (Bush also accumulated 15 "gratuitous" points, as all members of the Guard do automatically.)

> Lloyd also told George that since he had permission to examine the documents without privacy redactions, he saw Bush’s Social Security number on the 1972-73 Statement of Points Earned. "I will take a lie detector test. I will swear on a Bible," he said.

Even if the "W Document" and its companions indicate that Bush made up the time he missed during the summer and autumn of 1972, they don't say where or how. Which means Question #7 is: On which exact dates and in what way did Bush make up days in Alabama, and which in Texas?

While Bush still wasn't flying, his records indicate he crammed in 10 Guard sessions from the end of May to the end of July 1973, piling up enough points, when added to his gratuitous points for the year, to get him to the requisite total of 50 for the year ending in May 1974.

Question #8: After so many months of attendance so desultory that his superiors don't remember him showing up, why did Bush develop such a sudden interest in the Guard in the spring of 1973?

On October 1, 1973, Bush received an early honorable discharge so that he could attend Harvard Business School. He was credited with five years, four months and five days of service toward his six-year service obligation. It's not clear why, but Bush's records show him serving with Air Reserves headquarters in Denver, a paper unit, from October 1 1973 through November 21 1974.

On Sunday, Russert asked the President: "You did, were allowed to leave eight months before your term expired. Is there a reason?" (Which, by the way, was an extraordinarily weak question. Of all the things to press Bush on, and with so many facts needing clarification, why ask a question everyone knew the answer to?)

Bush replied: "Right. Well, I was going to Harvard Business School, and worked it out with the military."

Question #9: Exactly how did Bush "work out" that early discharge? Were the terms of Bush's discharge related to his attachment to Air Reserves headquarters in Denver until late 1974?

George reckoned back in 2000 that valid questions remained about Bush's service while acknowledging that his days served met minimum requirements. Others who looked at the totality of the Bush record agreed. For instance, retired Lt. Robert Rogers, author of a Democrats.com story on Bush’s military record, told me: "I have no reason to consider either of the two years of points [1972-73 and 1973-74] illegitimate. What concerns me is that Bush signed up for two years of training and four years of gung-ho, elite, champagne unit, runway standby alert flying and then only flew for two years."

And on October 31, 2000, Boston Globe reporter Walter Robinson, who had broken the first major ground on this subject five months earlier, wrote: "Major Thomas A. Deall, a spokesman for the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver, said last week that officials there now believe that after looking at Bush's records, he met minimum drill requirements before his discharge." Robinson then wrote: "The result is that Bush's discharge was ‘honorable.’ But, for understandable reasons, it is not a period of Bush's life he has called attention to."

Keep assailing Bush for being AWOL when the numbers don't support the charge, and the President will simply intone a safe answer over and over again, as he did on Meet the Press: "I had an honorable discharge … I did report, otherwise I wouldn't have been honorably discharged."

Instead, it's important to find out what kind of service this man who now proudly declares himself a "war president" gave his country, to learn where he was and what he was doing when hundreds of thousands of others who answered – or were forced to answer – the call of military service were sent into combat.

One last quote from Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT: But you authorize release of everything to settle this?

PRES. BUSH: Yeah. Absolutely. I did so in 2000, by the way.

Actually, he didn't. So Question #10 is: Can we see it all now, please?


10:16 AM |

 
Killing Stars and Stripes

Posted by Sini

Phil Carter at Intel Dump reports on the Pentagon's attempt to shut down Early Bird and Stars and Stripes.

Here his analysis:

So, let's review the facts. We have a somewhat intentional effort by the Office of Secretary of Defense to reduce the amount of news going to soldiers in the field, partially on what lawyers might call "content-based" criteria. The Early Bird constitutes the primary source of real-time news for military officers and higher-level commands around the the world. Next, we have fiscal pressure on Stars & Stripes, the primary news source for soldiers, officers, and their families stationed overseas. The net effect of both of these efforts is to reduce the amount of news being conveyed to our men and women in the military, at a time when we are asking them to go into harm's way. Maybe I'm overstating the case here, but I think that's a real problem when you have an all-volunteer force of citizens who you're asking to put their lives on the line.

9:43 PM |

 
The most significant news broadcast in recent memory

Posted by Sini

If you missed 60 Minutes tonight, here's your chance to catch up with Morley Safer's tour de force on evangelical Christianity, its intolerance and political supremacy.

7:17 PM |

 
Survey USA: WA stays Democratic

Posted by Sini

Their findings for Washington state, released February 6th, with a 3.2% MOE:

Bush 49
Dean 47

Bush 48
Clark 48

Bush 46
Edwards 51

Bush 43
Kerry 55

1:06 PM |

 
Nader "considering whether or not to run"

Posted by Sini

Our friend David Mihalyfy, our firsthand source on the New Hampshire Dean campaign, received the following email from Ralph Nader:

Dear Nader 2000 list subscriber,

I am considering whether or not to run for President in 2004, and because of your past support, you are invited to keep up to date and provide input about any potential run this year.

I intend to decide soon. Please take a minute right now to sign up at my exploratory committee's website at the following link.

I hope you remain interested and personally involved in our country's elections at all levels. Thank you for your support in 2000.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

*Paid for by the Nader 2004 Presidential Exploratory Committee, Inc.*


11:52 AM |

 
Wes Clark zinger

Posted by Sini

From tonight's Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Virginia: "I've forgotten more about foreign policy than George Bush will ever learn."

9:43 PM |

 
The showdown state

Posted by Sini

Dean and Edwards have decided to make a last stand in Wisconsin, but the latest Badger poll findings posted by Kos can't be encouraging:

Kerry 41
Clark 15
Edwards 10
Dean 9
Kucinich 2
Sharpton 2
Undecided  21

In the meantime, 54% say "they would like to see 'someone else in the White House' after the Nov. 2 election," even though 51% have a favorable impression of him as a person.

Take away "character," "integrity" and "truthtelling" away from this president, and he could go into a free fall. It's not a hard case to make, but it has to be made very soon. Post-election polling analysis has proven that Al Gore never recovered from a particular week during the campaign, when Republicans managed to cement public perception of him as a liar. Democrats must do the same, and before the Republican attack ads begin.

8:45 PM |

 
Flabby questioning

Posted by Sini

Our old classmate Rosalind Jordan of NBC News (who amost certainly doesn't remember us) reports that the White House has issued no clarifications or corrections following the Meet the Press interview. So all predictions of journalistic deference should be amply confirmed to those who have the stomach to watch tomorrow morning.

8:26 PM |

 
Kerry explains his Senate career

Posted by Sini

From tomorrow's New York Times

In the debate of Democratic candidates in South Carolina last week, Howard Dean asserted, "I mean him no insult, but in 19 years in the Senate, Senator Kerry sponsored 11 bills that had anything to do with health care, and not one of them passed."

Mr. Kerry responded to Dr. Dean that there were many ways to influence legislation, from amendments on the floor of the Senate to framing debates and filibusters. And, he argued, "sometimes your accomplishments are not in what you get done, but in what you stop other people from doing."

Still, he is not known as a legislator's legislator. Defenders say Mr. Kerry's background as a prosecutor and Vietnam veteran pushed him in a direction different from that of most other senators — toward early investigations of the contras in Nicaragua, the corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and the elections in the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos.

"They represent a part of the lesson I learned early about governments that tell lies and governments that don't keep their promises to people, which all comes out of the experience I had of being lied to and seeing the consequences," he said, alluding to his time in Vietnam. "The efforts to hold government accountable to the people we really represent is to me the centerpiece of why I'm there."

8:21 PM |

 
Picket fences

Posted by Sini

So that's why I've seen those Fannie Mae ads every couple of minutes on CNN for the last month.

7:16 PM |

 
AFSCME de-endorses Dean

Posted by Sini

The news was delivered in person to Governor Dean this morning, says Wolf Blitzer.

7:01 PM |

 
Bill Maher last night

Posted by Sini

A friend of a friend reports this from last night's monologue, on whatever new program it is that he's hosting:

"President Bush got a million gay votes. As someone who got an awful lot of guff for voting for Nader ... 'hey, you lost the election!' ... how about those million gay people?! Didn't THEY lose the election?!"


5:32 PM |

 
The first 100 days of the Janklow Administration

Posted by Sini

Bill Janklow (there is some dispute as to the spelling of his last name) should count himself lucky. His record of criminal conduct is well known, and he's always been a stickler on sentencing.

Maybe, just this one time, justice "Wild Bill" style would have been righteous.

4:07 PM |

 
France: "Anglo-Saxons" spoke for themselves

Posted by Sini

Think it isn't personal? Think again.

Senator John McCain told reporters at a global security conference: "It wasn't just an American intelligence failure, it was German, it was French, it was British, it was Israeli -- it was all intelligence failures, and we need to find out why that happened."

Asked about McCain's comments, French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said France had not reached the same conclusions as "the Anglo-Saxons" on the basis of available intelligence such as satellite photographs.

She said that was why Paris had argued against last year's U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and in favor of letting U.N. inspectors keep searching for the alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

"It's true that intelligence...has its limits. Knowing how to recognize its limits and find other means is the way to avoid committing mistakes," she told a news conference.

Nearly a year after the invasion of Iraq, countries like France and Germany, which fiercely opposed it, still dispute the justification for war cited by President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

[...]

The charge that other countries suffered from flawed intelligence is likely to grate with other U.S. allies besides France. German intelligence chiefs have repeatedly said they were skeptical of the U.S. case for war, particularly of Washington's attempt to link Saddam to al Qaeda.

"Germany feels that events have proved the position it took at the time to be right," Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer told the conference earlier. "We were not and are still not convinced of the reasons for war."


4:01 PM |

 
Democrats' major fundraising disadvantage

Posted by Sini

The Congressional Black Caucus was miles ahead of everyone else when it came to calculating the impact of McCain-Feingold on the Democratic Party (at least in the medium term).

1:30 PM |

 
You know things are going badly for Bush...

Posted by Sini

...when even Nancy's boy George Will slams him.

1:26 PM |

 
Greens, Kucinich, Nader, and Avocados

Posted by Sini

A must read in today's Seattle Times on changes in the Green Party.

12:47 PM |