New American Dark Ages
You’ll probably need a higher speed connect to get the full effect of this Bush ad attacking Kerry; the ‘chapter 1’ suggests many more to come (got $200million to spend).
Notice this ad is on the official Bush site AND does not include the identity of the sponsor — which is REQUIRED BY LAW. Bush ignores the rules again. mjh
GeorgeWBush.com : February 12, 2004 : Unprincipled, Chapter 1 (video)
Op-Ed Columnist: Bush’s Duty, and Privilege By BOB HERBERT, NYTimes
James Moore, an author and former Texas television reporter who has spent many years following the fortunes of George W. Bush … explores the murky circumstances surrounding President Bush’s service in the National Guard in the late 60’s and early 70’s in a book that is soon to be published called “Bush’s War for Re-election.” This issue remains pertinent because it foreshadowed Mr. Bush’s behavior as a politician and officeholder: the lack of engagement, the irresponsibility, and the casual and blatantly unfair exploitation of rank and privilege.
Mr. Bush favored the war in Vietnam, but he had the necessary clout to ensure that he wouldn’t have to serve there. He entered the Texas Air National Guard at the height of the war in 1968 by leaping ahead of 500 other applicants who were on a waiting list.
Mr. Bush was eventually assigned to the 147th Fighter Group (later to become part of the 111th Fighter Interceptor Group), which Mr. Moore described in his book as a “champagne” outfit. “The ranks,” he said, “were filled with the progeny of the wealthy and politically influential.”
So here’s the thing: After strolling to the head of the line, and putting the Guard to the considerable expense of training him as a pilot, Lieutenant Bush didn’t even bother to take his duties seriously. He breezed off to Alabama to work on a political campaign. He never showed up as required to take his annual flight physical in 1972, and because of that was suspended from flying.
This cavalier treatment of his duties as a Guardsman occurred as thousands of others were being killed and wounded in Vietnam…. Having escaped the horror of the war himself, one might have expected Lieutenant Bush to at least take his duties in the National Guard seriously. …
Mr. Bush has been nothing if not consistent. He has always been about the privileged few. And that’s an attitude that flies in the face of the basic precepts of an egalitarian society. It’s an attitude that fosters, that celebrates, unfairness and injustice. …
Mr. Bush’s experience in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam years is especially relevant today because it throws a brighter spotlight on who he really is. He has walked a charmed road, with others paying the price of his journey, every step of the way.
[photo from Salon.com News | Bush’s missing year By Eric Boehlert]
Op-Ed Columnist: The Real Man By PAUL KRUGMAN, NYTimes
By my count, this year’s budget contains 27 glossy photos of Mr. Bush. We see the president in front of a giant American flag, in front of the Washington Monument, comforting an elderly woman in a wheelchair, helping a small child with his reading assignment, building a trail through the wilderness and, of course, eating turkey with the troops in Iraq. Somehow the art director neglected to include a photo of the president swimming across the Yangtze River. [mjh: alá Chairman Mao]
It was not ever thus. Bill Clinton’s budgets were illustrated with tables and charts, not with worshipful photos of the president being presidential.
The issue here goes beyond using the Government Printing Office to publish campaign brochures. In this budget, as in almost everything it does, the Bush administration tries to blur the line between reverence for the office of president and reverence for the person who currently holds that office. …
The sad truth is that people who have been taken in by a cult of personality — a group that in this case includes a good fraction of the American people, and a considerably higher fraction of the punditocracy — are very reluctant to give up their illusions. If nothing else, that would mean admitting that they had been played for fools.
Still, we may be on our way to an election in which Mr. Bush is judged on his record, not his legend. And that, of course, is what the White House fears.
An Enemy of the Environment (NYTimes Editorial)
The Bush administration has a troubling record of putting lobbyists in influential positions in the executive branch. Now it is taking the practice a step further by nominating a longtime lawyer and lobbyist for the mining and cattle industries, William Myers III, to an important judgeship. His extreme views on the environment, his hard-edged ideological approach to the law and his close ties to industries whose cases he would be deciding make Mr. Myers unqualified to be an appeals court judge. …
At Interior, he had an obligation to represent the public more broadly, but continued to carry water for special interests. His hometown newspaper, The Idaho Statesman, editorialized that although he had stated in applying for the job that he had ”no particular ax to grind,” he had ended up acting ”less like an attorney, and more like an apologist for his old friends in the cattle industry.”
Mr. Myers has been nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco, which plays a critical role in overseeing the Western states, where environmental disputes have been most heated. The Senate should insist that the president nominate someone with a proven record of defending broader public interests, rather than those of a powerful few.
Bush continues to stack the government with zealots. A new president will be able to sweep the executive branch clean, but judges are appointed for life — they are the lasting legacy of Bush. mjh
”Free-Speech Zone”
The Bush administration doesn’t want dissenters to be seen or heard.
By James Bovard, The American Conservative magazine
When President Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up ”free speech zones” or ”protest zones” where people opposed to Bush policies (and sometimes sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined. These zones routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of presidential sight and outside the view of media covering the event.
You probably thought the whole country is a free-speech zone. As Bush talks about how freedom in the Middle East will end ”terror”, he has done more than anyone since Nixon, even Joe McCarthy, to curtail freedom in our own country. mjh
Though you didn’t see it on the news and read almost nothing about it in print, there were protesters in Roswell confronting George Bush. We were there. [read more…]
If President Bush thought that his release of selected payroll and service records would quell the growing controversy over whether he ducked some of his required service in the Air National Guard three decades ago, he is clearly mistaken. The payroll records released yesterday document that he performed no guard duties at all for more than half a year in 1972 and raise questions about how he could be credited with at least 14 days of duty during subsequent periods when his superior officers in two units said they had not seen him.
[Bush] dropped off the Guard’s radar screen when he went to Alabama to work on a senatorial campaign. The payroll records show that he … went more than six months without being paid, virtually the entire time he was working on the Senate campaign in Alabama. That presumably means he never reported for duty during that period. [mjh: what did Bush contribute to that campaign; is it legal for the military to campaign?]
Mr. Bush was credited with 14 days of service at unspecified locations between Oct. 28, 1972, and the end of April 1973 [mjh: 2 days a month — what a hardship!]. The commanding officer of the Alabama unit to which Mr. Bush was supposed to report long ago said that he had never seen him appear for duty, and Mr. Bush’s superiors at the Texas unit to which he returned wrote in May 1973 that they could not write an annual evaluation of him because he had not been seen there during that year. Those statements are so jarringly at odds with the payroll data that they demand further elaboration. A Guard memo prepared for the White House by a former Guard official says Mr. Bush earned enough points to fulfill his duty but leaves it unclear whether he got special treatment.
The issue is not whether Mr. Bush, like many sons of the elite in his generation, sought refuge in the Guard to avoid combat in Vietnam. The public knew about that during the 2000 campaign. Whether Mr. Bush actually performed his Guard service to the full is a different matter. It bears on presidential character because the president has continually rejected claims that there was anything amiss about his Guard performance during the Alabama period. Mr. Bush himself also made the issue of military service fair game by posturing as a swashbuckling pilot when welcoming a carrier home from Iraq. Now, the president needs to make a fuller explanation of how he spent his last two years in the Guard.
Bush and others are responding to these questions in classic Radical Right rhetoric — they claim such questions are actually attacks on anyone who has served in the National Guard. That cowardly twist speaks volumes.
Al Franken has the right idea: ask the President who his best friends were in Alabama, what the commander was like and which bars did he go to with his Guard buddies. mjh
FactCheck.org New Evidence Supports Bush Military Service (Mostly)
During those six months Bush got permission from his National Guard superiors to attend non-flying drills in Montgomery. Also during that time he was officially grounded after he failed to take an annual physical examination required to maintain flying status. …
The newly released records show only sporadic service by Bush during the months immediately following his return to Houston after the 1972 election. They show pay and credits for six days in January 1973 and two in April.
It was the following month that his two superior officers at Ellington Air Force Base wrote that they could not complete Bush’s annual evaluation covering the 12 months ending April 30, 1973 because “Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of this report.” How could Bush be paid and credited for drills and still not be “observed” by his superiors? Both of them are now dead and can’t answer that. White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett says Bush was doing “odd jobs” for the Guard at the time in a non-flying capacity and his superiors might not have been aware of that. …
He was released from service with an honorable discharge eight months before the end of the six-year term of service for which he had originally signed up.
Why did Bush refuse an annual physical? Why didn’t he fly for so much of his time in the AIR National Guard? Veterans of combat should see right through this guy. mjh
FactCheck.org Bush A Military ‘Deserter?’ Calm Down, Michael
FactCheck.org Defending Spending? Bush’s Blooper
President Bush slipped up in his hour-long interview with NBC’s Tim Russert over the weekend, claiming that the growth of discretionary federal spending has slowed markedly since he took office. But in fact, annual growth has been in double digits for the past three years [11.8% average annual growth rate], far higher than in any year of the Clinton administration [2.4% for 8 years].