Did Bush lie to become a member of the American Legion?

I chanced upon a fascinating bulletin board for Veterans for Common Sense. Basically, they spell out a damn compelling case that Bush:

1. Was NOT a member of the active-duty Air Force. They even provide the specific US law that makes this clear on its face.

2. Bush is incorrectly claiming that he's a veteran, and thus lied in his application to become a member of the American Legion.

3. Bush let his American Legion membership (the one he allegedly got by lying about being a veteran) lapse in 2002! He must have really cared about it.

Here are the details from the bulletin board - I've checked a lot of the links cited below and they're right:

As a combat veteran and member of The American Legion, I blew a gasket last night when my September edition of “The American Legion” magazine arrived. Inside, on page 32, The Legion reports that Bush is a member of American Legion Post 77 in Texas. Well, Bush isn’t a veteran, so Bush can’t be a member of The American Legion.

Here’s the bottom line: Either Bush has a discharge from active duty or he doesn’t. Unless Bush can cough up a valid and complete DD214 as evidence of active duty, then Bush is a fraud, and he can’t be a member of The Legion, either.

On the outside chance Bush was discharged from active duty, then the official paperwork, a DD214 (Department of Defense Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty) will contain separation codes, re-enlistment codes, and periods of active duty that should open another Pandora’s Box of inquiry to check pay records, attendance records, etc.

1. Here are the legal definitions of “veteran,” “active duty,” and “active duty for training.”

There is a huge difference between “active duty” and “active duty for training.” A person can only become a veteran if they were on “active duty.” Very simply, “active duty for training” doesn’t qualify a person for veteran status.

Title 38, United States Code, Part I, Chapter 1, Section 101, Paragraph 2: The term ''veteran'' means a person who served in the active military, naval, or air service, and who was discharged or released therefrom under conditions other than dishonorable

Title 38, United States Code, Part I, Chapter 1, Section 101, Paragraph 21: The term ''active duty'' means - (A) full-time duty in the Armed Forces, other than active duty for training

Title 38, United States Code, Part I, Chapter 1, Section 101, Paragraph 22: The term ''active duty for training'' means - (A) full-time duty in the Armed Forces performed by Reserves for training purposes

2. According to Bush’s military records, Bush has a discharge from the Air Force Reserve, and was issued a NGB 22 (National Guard Bureau Form 22, Bush’s Report of Separation and Record of Service in the Air National Guard of Texas). A NGB 22 isn’t a DD214. Under Line 30 on Bush’s NGB 22, only training is listed. There are no periods of active duty are listed on Bush’s NGB 22.
http://www.glcq.com/docs/arf_discharge.htm
http://users.cis.net/coldfeet/ANG22.gif

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4. According to CNN, then-governor Bush appeared in person before The Legion convention in 2000 as a member of Post 77 in Texas:

[Television Video Footage Transcript] BUSH: George Bush, Post 77, reporting for duty.

[CNN Correspondent] CROWLEY: Criticized for criticizing military readiness, George W. Bush went to an American Legion convention and launched an offensive….

Bush is expected to speak again before the Legion convention that starts this weekend in Nashville, Tennessee.

5. According to the Houston Chronicle, as recently as August 2003, Bush claimed to be a member of Post 77 in Houston, Texas:

“Bush, a former Texas Air National Guardsman and a member of the American Legion's Post 77 in Houston, emphasized the positive benchmarks of the war [in Iraq] ….”

The question here is this: Did the Houston Chronicle reporter check to see if Bush was a member in good standing at the local Legion Post?

6. According to membership application at The American Legion web site, a prospective member must meet these three requirements:

“I certify by forwarding this application that

[1] I served at least one day of active military duty

[2] during the dates marked below and

[3] was honorably discharged or am still serving honorably.”

The Legion application requires “active duty,” and there is no reference to “active duty for training.” Sure, Bush has an honorable discharge from the TANG between 1961 and 1975, but Bush has no discharge from active military duty produced by the White House.

7. Each local Legion post must keep a copy of every member’s DD214 on file as evidence of membership eligibility, otherwise anyone could walk off the street and join.

Here’s another issue: According to the news clip below, Bush let his Legion membership expire in 2002!

“Tom Harris, assistant director for membership at the group's national headquarters, said Bush joined Post 77 in Houston in 1995, the same year he took office as governor. Bush was part of the Texas Air National Guard in the Vietnam era. Bush's membership has expired because he did not pay the Houston post's $25 in annual dues before the end of last year, but Harris said Bush could renew.”

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Air Force says AGAIN that Bush was NOT an active-duty member like he claims

Matt Drudge - the guy with the pretty hats - has posted on his Web site a pdf of a document he claims "proves" that Bush did not lie when claiming in campaign literature that he used to be an active duty member of the US Air Force.

Putting aside the fact that the military itself has said that Bush's service did NOT count as active duty Air Force - but hey, far be it for Bush and company to let the military have the last word on Bush's service - even the "proof" Drudge posted on his Web site seems to state that Bush was a "member" of the Air National Guard, which we already knew, and a "reservist" in the Air Force, which we already knew. It says nothing about Bush being "active duty Air Force." Here are a few excerpts:



What the document does do is use the word "active duty" to refer to Bush's 120 days in flight school. Bush is now trying to claim that his time in school was the same as being "active duty in the Air Force." But again, the Air Force themselves says "no way":

From the July 17, 1999, Associated Press:

The Air Force says that Air National Guard members are considered 'guardsmen on active duty' while receiving pilot training. They are not, however, counted as members of the overall active-duty Air Force.

Anyone in the Air National Guard is always considered a guardsmen and not a member of the active-duty Air Force, according to an Air Force spokeswoman in the Pentagon. A National Guard member may be called to active duty for pilot training or another temporary assignment and receive active-duty pay at the time, but they remain Guard members.

Oh and it gets better. David Corn of The Nation called the Air Force to ask them about this. And guess what? They said Bush is lying:

[T]oday I checked with two spokespersons for the US Air Force, and each confirmed that an active-duty member of the Air National Guard is not considered a member of the US Air Force. "If a member of the Air National Guard is in pilot training," says Captain Cristin Lesperance of the US Air Force media relations office, "they would remain on the Guard books. They would be counted as Guard, not as an active-duty Air Force member."

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Feel good post of the week

I'm a sucker for this stuff. Has nothing to do with politics. It's simply really nice.

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey celebrated the premiere of her 19th season Monday by surprising each of her 276 audience members with a new car.

"We're calling this our wildest dream season, because this year on the Oprah show, no dream is too wild, no surprise too impossible to pull off," Winfrey said.

Making sure the audience was kept in suspense, Winfrey opened the show by calling 11 audience members onto the stage. She gave each of them a car - a Pontiac G6.

She then had gift boxes distributed to the rest of the audience and said one of the boxes contained keys to a twelfth car. But when the audience members opened the boxes, each had a set of keys.

"Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car!" Winfrey yelled as she jumped up and down on the stage.

Wouldn't it be nice if someone sent me a red box... ;-) Read More......

Bush to praise his own National Guard experience in speech Tuesday

Ok, wait a minute Batman. If Bush's National Guard experience is irrelevant to the current presidential debate, then why is Bush addressing members of the Las Vegas National Guard tomorrow, a speech in which he plans to say he's proud of his own service in the Texas National Guard?

Ok, all you media borg. Here's your chance to sock it to him. The president is opening the floodgates on this issue by USING HIS OWN NATIONAL GUARD EXPERIENCE TO ARGUE WHY HE SHOULD BE ELECTED. Putting aside the unmitigated gall this man has to take every lie and use it to his benefit, he now is clearly saying that his National Guard service is a relevant issue for this campaign. Then let's talk about it. Read More......

Another Republican wingnut running for Senate

In addition Mel Martinez the homophobe in Florida and Alan Keyes the nutjob in Illinois, we now have Tom Coburn, the arch-homophobe who allegedly sterilized a 20-year-old woman without her consent, running for the Republican Senate seat in Oklahoma.

Who says the GOP isn't the party of the big tent? That tent is so big, any nutjob is welcome. Read More......

Another outing on the horizon?

Rawstory.com has the, well, raw story. Read More......

Create your own anti-Bush ad

I want suggestions for your BEST anti-Bush political ad. It can't be an ad that someone's already run. It also can't be an ad that someone else came up with. I want to hear YOUR suggestions, your ideas, for the best ad that will:

1. Energize the pro-Kerry grassroots.
2. Piss the hell out of Bush and his advisers.
3. Make voters less likely to support Bush and more likely to support Kerry.

The ad has to have some gusto - it needs to be gutsy enough to catch the interest of the media and the voters (think Swift Boat). But it also has to be true - one of those pesky little things that we on the left care about. And have no qualms about being nasty. Nothing is off-limits, at least in the planning stages. :-)

Finally, if you post an ad in my comment section, then you consent to give me 100% ownership of the idea and permission to use the idea as I see fit. Why do I say this? Because if I can get a good enough idea, I'm going shopping for some money :-) Read More......

You break it, you own it

Great idea, from Daily Kos, channeling Al Franken:

I was just listening to the Al Franken show, and he touched on a point, but didn't make an interesting connection. Colin Powell told president Bush, "if you break it, you own it." And now president Bush is going around talking about having an "ownership society." That's a huge opening for Kerry:

"Mr. president, Colin Powell told you about this war that 'if you break it, you own it.' And now you're going around talking about an 'ownership society.' Well, Mr. President, let me tell you what you own. A million jobs lost. You own that. A thousand soldiers lost. You own that. 1.4 million new people living below the poverty line. You own that. 1.2 million less people covered by health insurance. You own that. A seventeen percent medicare increase. You own that. Health care costs skyrocketing. You own that. The tax burden increasing amongst the middle class. You own that. Mr. President, if you want to talk about an ownership society, let's talk about what you own."

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No turkee for Colin Powell

"I think it's unlikely that we will find any stockpiles" - Colin Powell, 9/13/04

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Bush's roomie in early 70s - what exactly is HE implying?

Check out the last line of this snippet from USA Today. I wonder what exactly he's referring to. Drug use?

So far, neither the White House nor former officers in the Texas National Guard have challenged the central assertions in the documents: that Bush's performance as a pilot was under scrutiny by commanders beginning in 1972 and that Killian, his supervisor, was unhappy with him.

In a 2002 interview with USA TODAY, Dean Roome, a former fighter pilot who lived with Bush in the early 1970s, said that during the first part of Bush's pilot service, he was a model officer. But he described Bush's Air Guard career as erratic — the first three years solid, the last two troubled.

"You wonder if you know who George Bush is," Roome said. "I think he digressed after a while. In the first half, he was gung-ho. Where George failed was to fulfill his obligation as a pilot. It was an irrational time in his life."

Pressed for details during the 2002 interview, Roome declined to elaborate. In February this year, replying to an e-mail from USA TODAY, Roome wrote that he admires Bush and does not want to be seen as attacking him. "Only George W. Bush knows why he was unable to continue flying in the Guard," Roome wrote.

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CIA Nominee Nails Bush (unintentionally)

A pretty good NYT piece on Porter Goss, the nominee for head of CIA. It does a pretty good job of explaining why someone who was fundamentally involved in the intelligence failure and has a consistent record of avoiding criticism of the CIA isn't the right man for the job.

In this era of massive intelligence failures, Goss has headed the House Intelligence Committee and failed to conduct one investigation into why these failures happened -- his last report was in 1998 and about Iranian shipments to Bosnia. The article fails to detail why the appointment of a political operative like Goss endangers national security -- Kerry would certainly have to dump him (Goss has used his post to attack Kerry, turning the important issue of national intelligence into partisan politics) and that would mean if Kerry wins the CIA would be without a head for a good year or so right in the middle of our war on terror.

But here's the money quote. Goss was talking about weak intelligence from the CIA et al, but don't you love this?

"I think the president has done very well with insufficient intelligence,'' Mr. Goss said late last year in an interview.

I couldn't agree more.
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White House is scared shitless

Check out this new quote from White House spokesman Dan Bartlett (the one with the pretty hairdo, not that there's anything wrong with it):

White House spokesman Dan Bartlett declined to offer an opinion Sunday and said, "We have not conducted an independent analysis of the documents." He said he showed Bush copies of the memos and the president "had no specific recollection of any of the documents I showed him." - USA Today

Of course, Bartlett didn't answer the question. We weren't asking if Bush had SEEN any of the memos - why would he, as I recall the memos were all internal National Guard memos, they weren't addressed to Bush. We were asking if the CONTENT of any of the memos was true or false. Notice how Bartlett STILL hasn't denied the content of the memos. And at this point, he's even using cute word games to get a "denial" out of the president, but a denial that he can later wiggle out of by saying the president simply denied having ever SEEN those memos - he did not deny that what the memos said was true.

And here you thought Bartlett got hired just because of his pretty hairdo. Read More......

Axis of the Forgotten

"Iran said Monday it was losing patience with U.N. inspections of its nuclear program and announced that its agreement with the Europeans to halt uranium enrichment would soon come to an end." - Reuters

Good thing Bush showed them who's boss. Oh, that's right, he didn't. Read More......

Progress in Iraq?

It's not exactly the Tet Offensive, but it's not exactly going in the right direction either.

The latest wave of attacks, which included hours of mortar fire on the Green Zone — where the U.S. Embassy, interim Iraqi government and many U.S. contractors are headquartered — was centered in Baghdad but included several cities in the Sunni Triangle of central Iraq.

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US Air files Chapter 11 after burning through corporate welfare check from taxpayers

It's hard to pick what caused this but considering how the airline industry received massive corporate welfare handouts from the government after 9/11, I find this repulsive. US Air has had such incredibly incompetent management for years and were barely out of Chapter 11 and then this. It's a good thing Bush artificially propped up the airline industry as US Air, United, Delta and others tank. Sounds a bit, well, socialist to me. Is Bush a commie?

I'm still struggling to see how executive management of corporations like this continue to pay themselves so handsomely and then expect employees to bend over because management screwed up. It's lovely to see that US Air management believes that it is doing so well that somehow it deserves to average well over $2,000,000 a year in salary and bonuses. Considering the cliff that they jumped off of with the stock value, it's a curious way to pull a team together. Those handsome comp plans were all courtesy of us, the taxpayers.
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Forest fire? Nuke test? Planned implosion?

And if you go here you can look at the implosion of Three Rivers stadium which shows low level and scattered dust clouds afterwards and not a 2.5 mile high mushroom cloud as has been reported. Even the administration of liars isn't buying into the demolition/implosion of a hydroelectric plan. It's hard to say who is covering up what but I do see that Colin Powell has been covering up lies since his days investigating the My Lai massacre right up until his fiasco at the UN prior to the Iraqi invasion. It's scary to think what's happening in North Korea but we need a change in leadership to sort it out.
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