Dubya's ANG app: '( )I DO (x)DO NOT volunteer for overseas'(May1968)

AirAmFan

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Sat Aug-07-04 06:58 PM
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Dubya's ANG app: '( )I DO (x)DO NOT volunteer for overseas'(May1968)

Ian Williams, UN correspondent for the Nation, has a new book out called "Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past". He points out that Dubya has been dressed in military garb for more photo-ops than any recent world leader save Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein.

This passage in an online excerpt caught my eye with something I'd never heard before. It led me to google for the document reproduced below, and to share it with DUers who may not have seen it before or who had forgotten about it. It's especially relevant in light of the 'Swift Boat' ad controversy:

From http://www.theprescotian.co.uk/williamsplug2.htm :

"Of the many military bases, Fort Hood is the president's favorite, more so since it is conveniently close to his dude ranch in Crawford, Texas. It is also the biggest base in the United States, home to over 40,000 troops. ... There were not as many waiting to greet him at Easter 2003 as on his New Year visit: By then half the 40,000 troops normally housed at the base were in Iraq ... early in 2004, thirty-five of them were never coming back -- all but one of them killed after the President had made his "formalization that tells everybody we're not engaged in combat anymore," the previous May.

(T)here are deeply personal reasons why George Bush has wrapped himself in quasi-uniform, which he wears with the same grin of a six-year-old presented with a cowboy suit for Christmas. From one way of looking at it, all over the world, men and women are now dying and being maimed because George W. Bush had lived through "the war of his generation," without hearing a shot fired in anger. "Little Googen," as his indulgent parents called him, has been trying to emulate his genuinely heroic father -- without actually risking his life. Bush's Freudian self-delusion is apparent in Bob Woodward's friendly account, "Bush at War." In the days after September 11, Bush tells Rove, "just like my father's generation was called in World War II, now our generation is being called ... I'm here for a reason."

Bush the Elder, however, was a genuine war hero who left school at 18 and used his family connections to become the youngest pilot in the Navy. But when the government was drafting his contemporaries and sending them to Vietnam, his son joined the Air National Guard in Texas, and TICKED THE BOX SAYING "NO" TO OVERSEAS SERVICE: a choice denied most of his contemporaries then, who did not have the Ivy League connections to enter such units. (More importantly, such choices are denied now to the National Guardsmen who were not only called up for service in Iraq, but have found their terms extended while they were out in the desert.)"

Some googling found the actual document. Look at the third set of check boxes, under "Area Assignment Preferences". THIS BELONGS IN A SATURATION AD, in light of the ridiculous amount of media attention being given to absurd questions about John Kerry's well-documented heroism.