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Originally posted by SoupCatcher:
Is Bush's guard service relevant to this election? To me, not really. What is, in my mind, relevant is that Bush has continued to make claims over the years, and continuing to this day, about that service that are brought into question by evidence from a number of different sources (eyewitness as well as documentation). This is an issue of character. It's one thing to make mistakes in the past, own up to those mistakes, and move on. It's another to deny that mistakes were ever made, make claims that appear to not be substantiated by any evidence, and stick to that story. So the actual service itself in my mind is not as important an issue as what has been claimed about that service in all the years following.

What do we know about Bush's National Guard service? Bush has repeatedly claimed that he received no preferential treatment in getting into the guard. There are witnesses who say that he did (I can't really say anything about the accuracy of accounts from Barnes or Bush's Harvard professor). The only thing we can say for sure based on documentation is there was a long waiting list and that Bush made the cut with test scores that appear to be average. Bush completed flight training and from the records things appear to be going well until around 1972. Then something happens. Bush does not renew his flight physical. Bush requests to go to Alabama to work on a political campaign. There are questions about whether or not Bush ever showed up for duty in Alabama. Bush's superiors don't fill out an evaluation form. Bush requests early release to go to graduate school at Harvard. Bush is placed on inactive status. Bush is taken off inactive status and given an honorable discharge. From the paper trail it appears that Bush was turned over to Denver when he went to Harvard. Denver placed him on inactive. Some documents from Texas got him taken off inactive and then the discharge.

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Originally posted by SoupCatcher:
That is an interesting fact that you bring up. So does this mean that Bush enlisting in the National Guard as a way to avoid going to Vietnam was unneccessary?

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Originally posted by SoupCatcher:
There might be quite a few job openings at 60 minutes .

I'm not surprised either that men whose family had influence got moved up the roster. In fact, if I was in that situation and someone helped me out in that way I would serve and never look back. And if Bush had come out and said something to the effect of, "Look. I didn't want to go to Vietnam. People pulled strings to get me in the National Guard. I served my country proudly."

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Brief excerpt from above link
That story began Wednesday, 19 minutes after the "60 Minutes II" broadcast began, when another FreeRepublic poster, TankerKC, noted that the documents were "not in the style that we used when I came into the USAF…. Can we get a copy of those memos?"

Less than four hours later, Buckhead pointed to "proportionally spaced fonts" in the memos, which CBS said had been written in the early 1970s by Bush's commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who died in 1984. Buckhead concluded that the documents had been drafted on a modern-day word processor rather than a typewriter.

"I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old," Buckhead wrote. "This should be pursued aggressively."

And it was — with startling speed.

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Excerpt from above link
WASHINGTON — It was the first public allegation that CBS News had used forged memos in its report questioning President Bush's Air National Guard service — a highly technical explanation posted on the Web within hours of airtime, citing proportional spacing and font styles.

But it did not come from an expert in typography or typewriter history, as some first thought. Instead, it was the work of Harry W. MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer with strong ties to conservative Republican causes who had helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Clinton after the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

...

Operating as Buckhead, which is also the name of an upscale Atlanta neighborhood, he wrote that the memos CBS' "60 Minutes" presented Sept. 8 as being written in the early 1970s by the late Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian were "in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman."

"The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word-processing software and personal computers," MacDougald wrote on the website. "They were not widespread until the mid- to late '90s. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid '80s used monospaced fonts.

"I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively."

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excerpted from above link
Creative Response Concepts (CRC), the VA-based agency promoting the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, used right-wing blogs and news sites to turn a CBS report casting doubt on President George W. Bush's National Guard service into a potential black eye for both the network and the Democrats.

A CRC client, the Cybercast News Service (CNS), was among the first to voice suspicion that documents suggesting Bush had received preferential treatment in the Guard were forgeries.

"After the CBS story aired, [CNS] called typographical experts, got them on the record that these papers were fishy, and posted a story by 3pm Thursday," said CRC SVP Keith Appell. "We were immediately in contact with [Matt] Drudge, who loved the story."

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excerpt from above article
NEW YORK — It was 11 a.m. on Sept. 8 — nine hours before "60 Minutes" was to air. But as news executives debated whether to broadcast a story on newly obtained paperwork offering fresh evidence about President Bush's National Guard service, a big question hung over CBS News' Westside headquarters: Were the photocopied documents real or fake?

Suddenly, the answer seemed to materialize, and from an unlikely source — the White House itself.

John Roberts, the network's White House correspondent, called to report he'd just completed an on-camera interview with Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. Bartlett, it appeared, had no quarrel with the authenticity of the documents.

That was the turning point.

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Originally posted by SoupCatcher:
I was actually thinking something along similar lines, Arawaen, in terms of military service. Of course, this might have been partly influenced by my recent re-reading of "Starship Troopers". I think Michael Moore provided a useful service in Fahrenheit 911 when he publicized how members of Congress are not immediately impacted by war (due to very few of them having children in the military).

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Somehow, seeing Robert Heinlein and Michael Moore referenced in the same paragraph gives me peculiar feeling.

But let's have some fun with numbers. Out of the 535 members of congress, there are only about 400 who might possibly have children of military age(after factoring out those single, under 40, or over 70. If I had a research staff, I'd find out exactly how many had children of military age). So we have one out of these roughly 400 possible congress persons and their spouses with a child in Iraq (per Moore). Sounds pretty bad. But wait, there's more.

Current US strength in Iraq is around 114,000. Last year there were around 51 million Married Filing Joint tax returns. Let's drop 10% for those too young or old to have military age children, leaving us with about 46 million. 46 million divided by 114,000 = 403 (more or less). So only one in 403 possible non-congressional couples has a child in Iraq. Makes our representatives look a bit less bad, doesn't it? Wish I had the time to find exact figures, but this rough approximation gives you the idea.

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You could be right, Geezer, that Bush wanted to fly because his father had been a pilot. I haven't read anything to support this, but I'll be curious about the results of your research.

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I did find this, in GWB's biography on the US Embassy, Japan site. I'll try to find some more.

"George W. graduated from Yale in May of 1968 with a major in history. Two weeks before graduation, he went to the offices of the Texas Air National Guard at Ellington Air Force Base outside Houston to sign up for pilot training. One motivation, he said, was to learn to fly, as his father had done during World War II. George W. was commissioned as a second lieutenant and spent two years on active duty, flying F-102 fighter interceptors. For almost four years after that, he was on a part-time status, flying occasional missions to help the Air National Guard keep two of its F-102s on round-the-clock alert."

http://japan.usembassy.gov/e/p/tp-2902.html





"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Originally posted by Arawaen:
I don't think the question is as much do our representatives have children or family in Iraq specifically, but rather do they have children or family in the armed services at all, now or in the past. It doesn't really matter if they are stationed in S. Korea, Germany or stateside. Only one member of congress has a child in the enlisted ranks anywhere in the military (if I recall correctly), not sure what the number of officers is.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
What you'll find is that the memos will be authenticated as much as any multiply-copied document can be, and the story will sink out of sight with no apologies and no retractions... along with "Nuclear Weapons Found in Iraq!" and "John Kerry shoots self to get a medal!" and other right-wing idiocies.

It's too bad the people who keep spewing this crap don't ever get embarassed about being so wrong so often.

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Originally posted by Geezer
I did find this, in GWB's biography on the US Embassy, Japan site. I'll try to find some more.

"George W. graduated from Yale in May of 1968 with a major in history. Two weeks before graduation, he went to the offices of the Texas Air National Guard at Ellington Air Force Base outside Houston to sign up for pilot training. One motivation, he said, was to learn to fly, as his father had done during World War II. George W. was commissioned as a second lieutenant and spent two years on active duty, flying F-102 fighter interceptors. For almost four years after that, he was on a part-time status, flying occasional missions to help the Air National Guard keep two of its F-102s on round-the-clock alert."

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Originally posted by Geezer
Given Burkett's previous anti-Bush statements, does this let the Administration off the hook for providing the documents, or do we just move deeper into X-files territory?

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Originally posted by SoupCatcher:
I guess I really shouldn't have used the wording that I did. What I said was that I hadn't heard that Bush joined the National Guard to be a pilot like his dad. So now I have (thanks to the excerpt). What I should have said was that I hadn't heard Bush say the primary reason he joined the National Guard was to be a pilot like his dad. This excerpt says that this was one motivation. I find it interesting that they don't list any other motivations.

This paragraph is fascinating. What's the impression that you get from reading it? This is a good kid who volunteered to serve his country, right out of college, the same way his dad did and that he did his part to protect this country. I guess it doesn't surprise me that they would put the best spin on events in the biography. There's nothing in this paragraph about Vietnam and the draft as possible motivations for joining the Guard. There's nothing in this paragraph acknowledging that he can't prove he flew an F-102 after May of 1972 (when did two years equal "almost four years" and when did not flying equal "flying occasional missions"). There's nothing that says he was suspended from flying in August of 1972. In short, it's about what I would expect from an autobiography.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Yeah, every now and again I go out on a limb and I faaaaaaaaaallllllllll!

Can I change my statement and not be called a flip-flopper??

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excerpted from article, "9/11 scenario faced" by Peter Bacque, 01 December 2003

One of those on-guard outfits was the Pennsylvania Air National Guard's 146th Fighter Squadron, an air defense unit based at Pittsburgh International Airport.

Just out of graduate school, Campenni was a 32-year-old captain in the 146th, flying the F-102 Delta Dagger, the world's first supersonic all-weather jet interceptor, and "sitting alert" on Nov. 11, 1972.

http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Common%2FMGArt
icle%2FPrintVersion&c=
MGArticle&cid=1031772380834&oasDN=timesdispatch.com&oasPN=%21newsℑ=timesdispatch80x60.gif

(note that the link has been split in two)

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excerpted from "Bush’s Air Guard stint started well, then faded into mystery" by William H. McMichael from Issue Date: September 27, 2004

From most accounts, Bush appears to have received preferential treatment to get into the Air National Guard and avoid the draft after he graduated from Yale University in 1968. He was initially regarded as a good pilot, but his performance faded over his final two years in the Guard and he was suspended from flight status. He did not fly for the remaining 18 months he served in the Guard, though he was obligated to do so.

And for significant chunks of time, Bush did not report for duty at all. His superiors took no action, and he was honorably discharged in 1973, six months before he should have been.

In a 2002 interview with USA Today, Dean Roome, a former fighter pilot who lived with Bush in the early 1970s, said Bush was a model officer during the first part of his career. But overall, he said, Bush’s Air Guard career was 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.”

http://www.airforcetimes.com/story.php?f=1-AIRPAPER-357916.php

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