Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Drudge screws Bush, and not in the gay way! Notice that the smoking gun has been removed, Wingnuts are fun!
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Attempting to bolster President Bush as he continues to stonewall questions about his Texas Air National Guard service, Internet gossip Matt Drudge posted a 1968 document from Bush's military personnel file Monday afternoon that purports to buttress a long-ago claim by Bush that he served not only in the Texas Air National Guard but in the Air Force as well. Although this "exclusive" Drudge posting is a trivial sidebar to the larger story of Bush's absence from two years of military service, the document itself -- presumably provided to Drudge by a Republican operative -- turns out to be an incriminating piece of evidence against Bush's case.
The Air Force claim arose in 1978, when Bush ran unsuccessfully for the House of Representatives from west Texas. During the campaign he produced literature in which he said he had served in the Air Force as well as the Texas Air National Guard. Pressed by the Associated Press about the claim two decades later in 1999, Bush's spokeswoman, handler and biographer, Karen Hughes, insisted the assertion was accurate. Her explanation: As part of his 1968 training to become a Guard pilot, Bush served 120 days of active duty; therefore he served in the Air Force.
The signed document Drudge posted is titled "Statement of Understanding" and dated May 27, 1968, the day Bush joined the Guard. Among the stipulations Bush agreed to was entering "active duty for training for 120 days," bolstering Bush's later assertion about the Air Force. But a Pentagon spokesperson told the A.P. in 1999 that despite their four-month training, Air National Guard members are not counted as members of the active-duty Air Force.
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