Carpe Datum

Save Room for "Deserter"

My Typical Reaction to Finding Out That
Someone I Know Is a Bush-Supporting Clown
(Image credit: Steve Jackson Games)

The headline says, "Records Fail to Shed Light on Bush Service", but the story is something very different. It's always fun to keep an eye on every administration for the Friday Afternoon Document Dump. Nobody pays much attention to the news on Friday evening or Saturday, so releasing bad news late on Friday afternoon ensures it is left out of that evening's national news broadcasts. Something else usually happens on Saturday, so the story ends up buried in either Saturday's or Sunday's paper, and the Sunday morning shows are usually booked far enough in advance that the guests can't comment on the Friday story anyway.

The latest dump comes from the Pentagon (which I thought was non-partisan, but I guess I was wrong), which announced that it actually found Bush's National Guard pay records (or his lack-of-pay records) which it had earlier claimed were destroyed in a tragic and rare microfilm accident. Various versions of the story are out there on the wire, and from what I gather, it was the initiative of some employee who found these records. My guess is someone there doesn't like Bush and decided to do some digging on the QT, pretending it was part of some project to organize and catalog everything that was "lost" for future reference.

However it happened, the records were released, and they show that contrary to Bush's claims, he actually did go AWOL in 1972 (because he never got paid for the period in question), blowing off his Guard commitment entirely. So, technically, Michael Moore's charge of Bush as a "deserter" is accurate. For most people, going AWOL meant getting shipped to Vietnam when they caught you, but for Bush, he somehow got an honorable discharge later.

Unfortunately, thanks to multiple "complete releases" of Bush's Guard records, none of which has actually been complete (there's still more out there supposedly in an archive in Austin that the Associated Press is suing for access to), the situation is very muddled. Even though this sort of rouge behavior in the past is far more serious than Mr. "I Didn't Inhale" Clinton, it doesn't have an easy hook or storyline for people to understand. That doesn't change the fact that Bush has lied repeatedly in public and in "his" book about his past. And for those so enamored of the "rule of law" for Clinton, saying it is doubly important for the Commander in Chief to obey all the rules, etc., because he's a role model for our kids: Well, there's no statute of limitations on prosecutions for desertion, so what gives?

As soon as I saw this story in a couple of blogs, I commented to the effect of, "Hey, isn't this about the time they trot out Tom Ridge or someone to tell us there's a new terrorism threat?" I mean, that happens with such predictability now whenever bad news comes out. Sure enough, late yesterday, they were reporting on CNN that the terror threat today is just as bad as the data showed in the Summer of 2001. As Atrios points out, though, the Bush line about 9/11 has been that we didn't have any evidence of a threat in Summer of 2001 (which is supposedly why they didn't do anything, why Bush went on vacation for a month after being briefed that "bin Laden intends to attack targets in the United States", that they were training to hijack and fly planes, etc).

Where's the so-called liberal media pointing all this stuff out? Why is this simple, basic, common-sense analysis only being found in the blogosphere? The way the media is spinning it, this release of Guard records is nothing new, but hell, even the 101st fighting warbloggers' brigade knows that the story stinks for Bush, because they're all ignoring it.

Posted by Observer at July 24, 2004 10:05 AM