Ryan Lizza of the New Republic covers George W. Bush:
Posted by DeLong at September 9, 2004 07:09 AM | TrackBackThe New Republic Online: Two-Sided Story: ...Ben Barnes.... The distinction between an actual family member asking Barnes for help and a family friend asking has always been incredibly important to the Bushies.... Barnes said that nobody in the Bush family contacted him about getting Bush a spot, but that a Houston businessman had.... For some reason, as Gillespie's e-mail makes clear, the Bushies have always worried that Barnes was going to change his story....
CBS obtained four documents from the personal papers of Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, Bush's Texas National Guard squadron commander. These memos tell a fascinating story about the struggle of a by-the-book commander caught between a self-important young pilot trying to cut corners and wiggle out of the rest of his Guard commitment, and superiors who seem all to willing to let the privileged son of a Texas VIP bend the rules. In the first memo, Bush is ordered to report for his annual physical within ten days. He doesn't show up.... To me, the most overlooked and most important new detail.... Killian writes, "I advised him of our investment in him and his commitment." It's often forgotten that... [t]he government spent a vast sum of money training Bush to become a Texas Air National Guard pilot, a highly coveted position in 1968 that saved Bush from Vietnam, and in return Bush promised he would fly for the Guard for as long as possible.... That's what Killian meant when he advised Bush of "our investment and his commitment."...
In the next memo Bush is "suspended from flight status due to failure to perform to USAF/TexANG standards and failure to meet annual physical examination (flight) as ordered." This is the first time any official document has reported that Bush was suspended for any reason other than simply missing his physical. It's also clear in this memo that Bush has completely abandoned the idea of ever flying again. "Officer has made no attempt to meet his training certification or flight physical," the memo says....
In the final Killian memo, the one with the subject line "CYA" (cover your ass), the commander makes cryptic references to a struggle with his superiors over how much slack to cut Bush, who hadn't been observed in Texas for a year. "Staudt has obviously pressured Hodges more about Bush. I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job," Killian writes. According to the Associated Press, Staudt and Hodges are Waleter B. Staudt, the commander of the Texas National Guard at the time, and Lieutenant Cololnel Bobby Hodges, one of Bush's superiors. Staudt, Killian wrote, was "pushing to sugar coat" the evaluation. Killian complains that Bush wasn't around and there's no word from Alabama about what he's been doing. He makes a small concession to the pressure he's feeling from his bosses but refuses a full cover up for Bush. "I'll backdate," he writes, "but won't rate."
He brings up a point anyone the reserves
would know. They just don't let you go
after spending all the money on training.
And they don't lose track of you either.
Thomas Powers has a careful summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report in the latest NYRB and then asks why Senators who had a shitload of evidence in front of them that the Administration deliberately misused intelligence reports and pressured, to a greater or lesser extent, intelligence agencies to tailor information to ideology... why Senators didn't pin the blame on the White House. Fear of "conflict of a kind that resembles civil war" seems to be the answer.
Huh? What? But I have a head cold which leaves my brain muddled and unreliable. I'll have to go back and make sure that's what he wrote.
We have a president (and an administration) which is being examined and revealed, finally, at a breathless rate. We keep asking ourselves: Why is America so unimpressed by this wrongdoing? What are people thinking, saying? Or is Powers right (naw!) that the establishment and the citizenry fear that pinning the entire-mess-plus-his-personal-lies on Bush will cause civil unrest? Huh?
Here is Powers' concluding paragraph:
"This is where things grow difficult for committees, commissioners, and ordinary citizens alike. It is not sympathy for President Bush as a person that makes them hesitate, but the power of the office of the presidency itself. A president is not only the leader of the country, but the leader of his party as well, and a serious attack on a president concerning a substantial matter is an invitation to conflict of a kind that resembles civil war. So the reason for the velvet gloves with which he is treated is not hard to understand. But the failure to act before September 11 and the unnecessary war with Iraq cannot fairly be blamed on intelligence organizations or anyone else. The White House is the problem, not for the first time. Iraq is President Bush's war. He insisted on it, and nothing can save us from the same again until we find the will to hold the President responsible".
Accountability is now labelled "a serious attack" by some people without will. Somehow this reminds me of not giving children report cards because report cards might demolish self-esteem leading to a breakdown of society. Bah humbug!
Posted by: Bean at September 9, 2004 07:57 AM"I'll backdate," he writes, "but won't rate."
Doesn't "backdating" suggest some kind of fraud was committed on behalf of the Boy King?
Posted by: ed at September 9, 2004 08:17 AM"This is where things grow difficult for committees, commissioners, and ordinary citizens alike. It is not sympathy for President Bush as a person that makes them hesitate, but the power of the office of the presidency itself. A president is not only the leader of the country, but the leader of his party as well, and a serious attack on a president concerning a substantial matter is an invitation to conflict of a kind that resembles civil war. So the reason for the velvet gloves with which he is treated is not hard to understand."
This stuff is written after the impeachment attemp of President Clinton?!! I am ready to vote out all members of the committee if possible, regardless which party they are.
Posted by: pat at September 9, 2004 09:00 AMDamn right, Pat! (Of course, Democratic presidents aren't REAL presidents; only Republicans have REAL presidents.)
Ah've said it before and ah'll say it again, who gets into/gets thrown out of the White House in November matters, but who gets into/gets thrown out of Congress matters just as much. Otherwise we may learn what it's like to suffer a tyranny of incumbency for a predicted thirty to forty years.
Posted by: Bean at September 9, 2004 09:22 AMIt's so over for Kerry. This is his Dean "scream". Everyone too little,
too late, unbelieving, screaming in
their beer mugs. It's over, baby!!
Maybe Ellsberg can write an epitaph.
I'll tell you a little story from
the War in Cambodia, when I was
doing community work as a C-0. The
National Guard had just blitzed a
peaceful campus rally against the
illegal invasion, and we'd watched
them with fixed bayonets, clubbing
pregnant women and elderly couples,
anyone they could drag off to the
college stadium, now holding tank.
There was this golden moment of
shocked silence as the pepper gas
cleared. The microphone was there.
I grabbed it, and shouted "Free
our friends!" or some such s&*t,
and pointed towards the stadium.
A massive roar went up in the crowd.
We filled the street fifteen wide!!
Our chanting grew to a fever pitch.
There was the stadium ahead. I walked
at the lead, shouting, pointing the
way. The crowd was swelling, cheering.
Then a funny thing happened....
The National Guard filed out and lined
the frontage street before the stadium,
personnel carriers, shields and bayonets.
The crowd wavered, but their chanting
grew to a roar. I turned forward into
the fray, fist upraised in righteous
wrath ... Then the entire mob behind me
turned left down a sidestreet, chanting
off into the distance. I was all alone.
This State Trooper broke his baton over
my head and hauled me off to the pokie.
I screamed for days. Kerry, Kerry, Kerry!
Politics is a strange animal.
So, anyone for the 2006 elections?
Posted by: Cros Strees at September 9, 2004 10:07 AM---Doesn't "backdating" suggest some kind of fraud was committed on behalf of the Boy King?---
I do not know whether the backdating, as such, was a serious violation of procedure; Killian obviously thought it was a problem of lesser import than out-and-out falsifying of an evaluation, which he did not do.
Since GWB was not serving anywhere, no evaluation took place at the proper time. Some unknown individual who was not stoned at the moment realized that the absence of an annual evaluation would be a problem, and that a way-late evaluation would be a red-flag, so the ask to Killian was 'give our boy a sweetheart evaluation, and - oh yes - backdate it to spring when it ought to have been written up'.
Killian apparently reasoned (well, he never was properly transferred out, so he is *our* deserter) O.k. I do an evaluation that ought to have been done in spring, but (the bastard hasn't been seen hide nor hair of, so) I'm not going to say there is any service to evaluate.
The careful observer will note that GWB's officer evaluation from spring 1993 is not actually signed by Harris and Killian, but that their signatures are represented by a rubber stamp 'SIGNED'. It would require someone familiar with the procedures of those times to say whether that might have been SOP, or whether it is a signal-to-the-aware that the evaluation is bogus.
Too bad we don't have better docs on this: it looks like a textbook case of honest man under thuggy pressure.
What I would love to see:
George W. Bush, in the next week or so, admit that the weight of evidence proves he was a goddamn slacker back then. But he can say he honestly was not aware that anyone was pulling strings behind the scenes, covering his ass.
That only leaves the question of why he got on the fasttrack to be an aviator like Poppy, only to "decide" to be grounded after less than two years. And why he later recalled that he flew with his unit for "several" years.
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