Kristof: Mr. Bush's Glass House

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/15/opinion/15kris.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

President Bush's paramount problem with his National Guard years is not that he took shortcuts in 1972. The problem is that he still refuses to come clean about it.

So as we get caught up in the furor over the CBS documents showing favoritism in President Bush's National Guard career, let's bear a couple of points in mind.

First, there's reason to be suspicious of some of those CBS documents. For starters, a Guard veteran who worked with the supposed author, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, tells me that abbreviations in the documents are wrong. He says group should be "GP" rather than "GRP," there should be no period after "Lt," and Mr. Bush's Social Security number should have been used rather than his old service number.

Second, we shouldn't be distracted by our doubts about the CBS documents. There's no doubt that Mr. Bush benefited from favoritism. The speaker of the Texas House has acknowledged making the call to get Mr. Bush into the National Guard.

Does any of this matter? What troubles me is less Mr. Bush's advantage three decades ago and more his denial today. Mr. Bush's own route to avoid the draft underscores the disparities in America, yet his policies seem based on a kind of social Darwinism in which the successful make their own opportunities. His tax cuts and entire outlook seem rooted in ideas not of noblesse oblige, but of noblesse entitlement.

[BeyondGeography]

1. It's a very strong anti-Bush column

Here's some more:

<One fall day in 1973, when Mr. Bush was a new student at Harvard Business School, he was wearing a Guard jacket when he ran into one of his professors. The professor, Yoshi Tsurumi, says he asked Mr. Bush how he wangled a spot in the Guard.

<…"He said, oh, his daddy had a good friend," Mr. Tsurumi said. "Then we started talking about the Vietnam War. He was all for fighting it."

<Professor Tsurumi says he remembers Mr. Bush so vividly because he was always making outrageous statements: denouncing the New Deal as socialist, calling the S.E.C. an impediment to business, referring to the civil rights movement as "socialist/communist" and declaring that "people are poor because they're lazy." (Dan Bartlett, an aide to Mr. Bush, denies that the president ever made these statements.)

[sonias]

2. Excellent editorial

I don't like Kristof much, but he's not the right wing shill Safire usually is. Occasionally he shows his disgust for bu$h like someone with a brain should.

The whole point to me is that last line in your selection above:
"His tax cuts and entire outlook seem rooted in ideas not of noblesse oblige, but of noblesse entitlement."


Sonia