As a result of missing the physical, the Air Guard suspended Bush from flying in September 1972. Conason observes, "The next time Bush strapped himself into a fighter cockpit would be thirty years later, when he was flown to the deck of the USS Lincoln for a triumphal speech marking the American victory over Saddam Hussein's dictatorship."
"Unsatisfactory participation" in his Guard duties could have subjected Bush to being assigned to active duty for two years. But instead, as Conason says, "he spent thrity-six days in drills (though not flying) from May through June 1973, apparently to compensate for all the months he had been absent." July 30 was his last day in uniform, and in October 1973 he was released from the Guard "eight months before he would have finished his original six-year commitment to the Guard."
Conason notes the way that the mainstream media failed to investigate this story during the 2000 campaign (my emphasis):
Despite all the remarkable contradictions between his military record and his self-serving stories, and despite the plentiful evidence that he had shirked a year of his servcie and then lied about it, the "liberal media" never subjected Bush to the searing interrogations inflicted on [Dan] Quayle in 1988 and Clinton in 1992. Only the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, and a Democratic Web site bothered to explore the curious absences and lapses of duty that resulted in Bush's grounding after two years of fighter [pilot] training. Nobody insisted that he hold press conferences to explain himself. Pundits dismissed the issue when they mentioned it at all. The cultural assumption that Republicans are paragons of flag-saluting martial virtue is rarely challenged, regardless of reality.
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