Is Bush a "Deserter"? (5)

The most bizarre thing about this "Bush the deserter" flap is that the high priests of punditry tried to use it as a criticism against ... General Clark. Reporters began asking the General to repudiate Moore's statement. Clark refused.

To the punditocracy, this was heresy. On the PBS Newshour of 01/23/04, the increasing pitiful David Brooks declared his version of the conventional wisdom on the "deserter" charge and scolded the General for not disavowing it:

He was presented with something Michael Moore, his supporter, had said in front of him that George W. Bush was a war deserter; why didn't he object to that, which is untrue. Why didn't he object now, and he didn't do it at the debate, he didn't do it then and he came off seeming to me like a hater.

At the links in the previous posts, one can find several opportunities to check if Michael Moore said Bush was a "war deserter."

Brooks' liberal counterpart Mark Shields, who is actually several cuts above most of his pundit colleagues in the quality of his work, in this case gave a variation on the conventional wisdom that at least avoided being silly:

I don't know if I subscribe to Dr. Brooks' assessment there on the motives involved. But I don't, quite frankly. But I do think that Wesley Clark showed flashes of some eloquence, but I think he stumbled on the Michael Moore question. Jim, I've been around politics too long, I guess, but I remember in 1966 when a rookie candidate from California named Ronald Reagan was running for governor and the major issue in the Republican primary for governor, where Reagan was actually an underdog, was whether the candidates would accept the support of the John Birch Society, the kind of loony tunes anti-Communist group then prominent in California politics.

And Ronald Reagan had a wonderful answer, he said, "I seek the support, welcome the support of all freedom loving law abiding Californians, but because somebody endorses me means in no way that I endorse them." And, you know, that's the answer. You couldn't rebut it, you couldn't argue with it. And Wesley Clark stumbled on the Michael Moore question last night, no doubt about it.