Bush Campaign Distortions Keep National Guard Story Alive
By Joshua Micah Marshall
When the president filled out his enlistment papers, those forms included a checkbox asking whether he wanted to serve overseas or not. The president checked off the box labeled ”I Do Not” volunteer to serve overseas.
Just when you start to wonder why and how much President Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service record should be an issue in the 2004 campaign, a light goes on over your head. Why? Because he and his surrogates and spokesmen simply won’t stop lying about it. …
The president’s and Kerry’s service records, ”compare very favorably,” said [the president’s campaign chairman and chief election spokesman, former Montana Gov. Marc] Racicot.
The president ”signed up for dangerous duty,” he said. ”He volunteered to go to Vietnam. He wasn’t selected to go but nonetheless served his country very well.”
You didn’t know the president volunteered to go to Vietnam? If this is news to you, it’s probably because it’s simply not true. …
When the president filled out his enlistment papers, those forms included a checkbox asking whether he wanted to serve overseas or not. The president checked off the box labeled ”I Do Not” volunteer to serve overseas.
In recent years, the president and his aides have had different explanations for how that checkmark got there. Some have speculated that some other, unknown person checked off that box without the president’s knowledge. Somewhat more plausibly, they’ve suggested that he was instructed to check off that box since obviously what he was really trying to do was sign up for service in Texas, not Vietnam.
However that check got there, the fact that the president filled out a form stating explicitly that he did not volunteer for service in Vietnam would seem to create at least a few credibility problems for Racicot when he claims the president did just the opposite.
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Originally published in The Hill, a weekly covering congressional and White House affairs.
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