Saturday, January 31, 2004

Is Bush a "Deserter"? (4)

Martin Heldt also has several pieces on the topic - with more links - indexed at his Web site, including Finally, the Truth About Bush's Military Service Record TomPaine.com (09/27/00) and an index to relevant source documents. TomPaine.com described Heldt as "an Iowa farmer who was so outraged by the special treatment doled out to Bush that he spent all summer [2000] pouring over the governor's military file."

Joe Conason in Big Lies (2003) devotes several pages to recounting Lt. Bush's service record in the Air Guard.

David Neiwert offers the useful reminder in terms of this whole story that "Bush's status technically was Absent Without Leave (AWOL), which is not precisely the same as desertion. Moore uses the term, as Bob Somerby notes, as a term of art, but it is not definitively correct."

Moore, in his irreverent way, illustrates in his Jan. 27th post cited in my previous entry:

When the press heard me use that word "deserter," though, the bells and whistles went off, for this was one of those stories they knew they had ignored -- and now it was rearing its ugly, truthful head on a very public stage. ... After all, when I called Bush a deserter, how did they know I wasn't referring to how he has deserted the 43 million Americans who have no health coverage? Why didn't they assume I was talking about how Bush is a deserter because he has deserted the working people of this country (who have lost 3 million jobs since he's taken office)? ...

Instead, they have created the brouhaha over Bush's military record, often without telling their audience what the exact charges are. It seems all they want to do is to get Clark or me -- or you -- to shut up. "We have never investigated this and so we want you to apologize for bringing it up!" Ha ha ha.

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