Bush's Service Record

Salon.com is on the case.  Bush's that is.

Mystery Man by James Unger, author of House of Bush, House of Saud (2004), looks at someone else who also was in Bush's unit and who missed his medical exam at the same time Bush did.  The man's name, James Bath, was redacted on some of the Bush Air Guard documents released but not on others.  Unger notes:

As it happens, when I interviewed Bath for my recently published book, "House of Bush, House of Saud," I discovered that the White House may not want to reveal his name because Bath, a Houston businessman who became friends with George W. Bush in the '70s, is the middleman in a story Bush doesn't particularly want told -- the saga of how the richest family in the world, the House of Saud, and its surrogates courted the Bush family. Bath was present at the birth of a relationship that would bring more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts from the House of Saud to the House of Bush over more than 20 years. The blotting out of Bath's name indicates President Bush's extreme sensitivity about his family's extensive connections with the Saudis.

James Moore, author of Bush's War for Reelection (2004), writes on Bush's flight from the Guard (I'm not sure why the book title uses reelection, though; don't you have to get elected first to be reelected?).  Moore has this to say about Bush's missing the medical exam in 1972 and losing his flight status:

Taking away a pilot's wings was not a minor decision. During the course of investigating this matter over the past decade, I was told by numerous Guard sources that pilots simply did not skip their physicals for any reason. Bush may have thought this was a good strategy for getting out of his obligation to the Guard. However, there had to be an investigation into his grounding. Normally, a formal board of inquiry would have been convened to examine the pilot's failure to keep his physical status current. At a minimum, a commanding officer would have been expected to write a narrative report on why one of his pilots had been taken off the flight duty roster. Either that report, or the findings of the board of inquiry, would then be sent to the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver and to the Texas Guard headquarters in Austin. A pilot simply did not walk away from all of that training with two years remaining on his tour of duty without a formal explanation as to what happened and why. This narrative report is the document the public has never seen and the Bush White House is unlikely to ever release. Disciplinary action taken against Bush ought to be a part of his personnel record. No such files have ever been disclosed.

On the Bush Guard story, David Neiwert of the Orcinus and American Street blogs has convinced me that the story about missing the doctor's exam and losing his flight authorization is the key part of the Bush Guard mystery to watch.  The rest - Old Man Bush getting him jumped to the top of the list to get in, the AWOL months, the early release - are all interesting but secondary elements.

Moore's account of tracking the documents makes a good little historian/journalist/detective story, too.  Notice that the story of the revocation of the flight authorization is the focus of Moore's article, as well.

And completing the trio of book author's is Joe Conason, author of Big Lies (2003), who writes about Bush confidant Karen Huges high-octane gall.  Hughes flogged the riculous Kerry-and-medals-and-ribbons story this past weekend on TV:

For George W. Bush's surrogates to question John Kerry's war record, as they have continued to do in recent days, requires a special Republican brand of super-high-octane gall. Why would the president want to draw additional attention to the most unflattering contrast between him and the Democratic challenger? Why would his flacks reopen the painful issues of that era by questioning Kerry's undoubted heroism? If anyone ever earned the right to talk about what he had seen in Vietnam and why nomore Americans should kill or die there, it was the young, highly decorated Navy lieutenant who had volunteered for duty.

Pointing out that Hughes ghost-wrote Bush's 1999 autobiography A Charge to Keep, Conason notes how she herself helped Bush phony up his Guard history in that book. Conason ends his article with this observation:

On that chapter's concluding page, Bush proclaims: "I am proud of my service. Yet I know it was nothing comparable to what our soldiers and pilots were doing in battle in Vietnam." Having written those words, Hughes should remember them whenever she feels the urge to demean Kerry, who still carries a piece of shrapnel in his left buttock. And should she open her mouth about this subject again, someone should ask her what the president did with his medals.

Joe Conason has particular scorn for Republicans whose own military records are less than impressive who trash the patriotism or try to ridicule the military service of Democrats who did serve.  One of the chapters in Big Lies is called Male Cheerleaders and Chicken Hawks (excerpted last year on Salon.com).  He says there, "Of all the pernicious claptrap emitted by right-wing propagandists, none is more offensive than smearing liberals and Democrats as unpatriotic."  He gives an example of a leading Democrat who responded appropriately to sleazy Republican attacks in 2001-2 on the patriotism of Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, a veteran of the Strategic Air Command:

It was Sen. John Kerry, not Daschle, who addressed the Republican leaders in the manner they deserved. At a Democratic dinner in New Hampshire, the senator from Massachusetts stood up and said, "Let me be clear tonight to Senator Lott and to Tom DeLay. One of the lessons that I learned in Vietnam -- a war they did not have to endure -- and one of the basic vows of commitment that I made to myself, was that if I ever reached a position of responsibility, I would never stop asking questions that make a democracy strong ... Those who try to stifle the vibrancy of our democracy and shield policies from scrutiny behind a false cloak of patriotism miss the real value of what our troops defend and how we best defend our troops." ...

As a Vietnam combat veteran who earned three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star in two Navy tours -- and who later founded Vietnam Veterans Against the War -- Kerry had ample stature to challenge the character assassins.

And he still does now that the attacks are aimed at him.  Conason regards the Daschle incident as an example of "how routinely Republicans and conservatives resort to the kind of hyperbole that was once heard only from extrmists and bigots."

If the Bush campaign keeps bringing up Kerry's Vietnam-era record, they may shame even the lazy national press into going back into the Bush Air Guard story, which they have largely dropped after a week or two of feeding frenzy earlier in this campaign.  They pretty much rolled over and played dead on this story in the 2000 campaign.