President top gun: affirmatively MIA (palast)

[dudeness]

Wednesday, July 9, 2003

Note: It's getting mighty expensive replacing every television I throw through the window when Mr. O'Reilly appears. And ripping up the New York Times leaves me without the news I need to pick up after Pluto, my retriever. There's only one thing to do: write the darn news myself. I am, I've heard, a journalist - but it's only a rumor in the USA where my reports for BBC Television and the Guardian papers are stopped by the electronic Berlin Wall. So this missive today inaugurates Greg Palast's Radio Free America, a web log of samizdat rants, raves and most important, hard-core must-know facts from my investigative stories appearing abroad. Three times a week at www.gregpalast.com you'll find the news not in your news.

And here's a taste, from the files of BBC Television's just-broadcast one-hour special, "Bush Family Fortunes."

President Top Gun: Affirmatively Missing in Action

Forty-eight hours before ordering our troops into Iraq, our President told us, "There's no certainty in war but the certainty of sacrifice." For most of us, yes, but not, however, if your name is 'Bush.' According to discomforting information my BBC investigative team reported last week. In 1968, former Congressman George Herbert Walker Bush of Texas, fresh from voting to send other men's sons to Vietnam, enlisted his own son in a very special affirmative action program, the 'champagne' unit of the Texas Air National Guard. There, Top Gun fighter pilot George W was assigned the dangerous job of protecting Houston from Vietcong air attack.

BBC thought it worth a look into our Commander-in-Chief's Vietnam war record after the White House staged our President's dramatic landing by fighter jet on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abe Lincoln to announce our victory over Iraq. Hey, Churchill never did that. (And kudos to Tom Brokaw and the other US network performers for maintaining their patriotically solemn expressions -- even when our President, unlike experienced flyers, kept his parachute clips fastened under his crotch, making him look a little less like Tom Cruise and more like that first chimp in space.)

In 1968, to qualify for the single available pilot spot in the Air Guard, young George took a test. He scored, out of a possible 100, only 25. (Word is that the chimp scored 26.) How then, did our future President - opponent of affirmative action, who believes no one should get their post except through merit -- leap over thousands of other applicants and cinch the get-out-of-'Nam post?

Here's what you won't see on US TV: Years back I got my hands on a copy of a document languishing in Justice Department files in Austin, Texas. In it, a tipster fingers two political friends of Bush Senior who, the source claimed, made the call to get young Bush out of the war and into the cockpit at the Air Guard. But the Feds could not act without corroboration. Now we have it. To the BBC crew, one of those named confessed to making the call - at Bush Senior's request - to help George W dodge the draft. (I've posted the letter at ?letter

(snip)

[ianbruce]

1. For those that had some trouble reading the above image...

[dudeness]

2. cheers mate..

:)

[SoCalDem]

3. check your mail

if you edit the original before the hour is up, the thread will be normal width..:)

[dudeness]

4. thanks SoCalDem

:)

[indepat]

5. Wow! Check out the expressions on the faces of snow, con, nut,

and lube.