A 1968 document from the president's military file, posted on the Internet, merely reminds us of how far short he fell in fulfilling his service commitments.
By Eric Boehlert
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.
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Like the White House aides who in February released a portion of Bush's military payroll records under media pressure without fully understanding the incriminating evidence embedded in their military coding -- information that has come back to haunt Bush -- Drudge, by posting Bush's 1968 signed statement, merely reminds people how far short of fulfilling his military requirement the president fell.
For example, in his 1968 statement, Bush pledged to maintain "satisfactory participation" with his Guard unit, which meant fulfilling "satisfactory performance of assigned duties at 48 scheduled inactive duty training period days and 15 days filed training annually." Failure to do so meant being transferred to active duty, and the possibility of being sent to Vietnam. But in both 1972 and 1973, Bush failed to meet that participation standard.
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http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/14/bush_service/index.html
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