James C. Moore Speculates on the CBS Memos.

[punpirate]

http://www.buzzflash.com/buzzscripts/buzz.dll/sub2


Moore makes some interesting observations, and on Bush, and Rove. Including this one, which hasn't gotten much press around the country:

Burkett, who is subject to seizures as a result of his virus and has begun to need a cane to walk, is not the only officer within the Texas Guard who is angered at President Bush. At least a dozen commanders, some of them still within the guard, are mad over the lack of adequate funding and essential training. They blame former Texas Governor Bush and his successor, Rick Perry. Burkett had been hired to fix those failings. But he never got the chance. He was brought into the Texas Guard by recommendations from former Republican Governor Bill Clements and Jim Francis, one of the president’s closest friends and most prolific fund-raisers. Burkett’s job was to develop a plan to make the guard’s training and equipment more relevant to modern missions against enemies like terrorists. His years of work and recommendations, however, were never implemented and the governor is said to have turned down millions of dollars in federal money to pay for improvements when it was offered by the Clinton administration.

No one understood the decision to not upgrade the guard until Bush ran for president. In his first policy speech, given at the Citadel, candidate Bush told the assembled cadets, “If the commander-in-chief were today call upon all of our armed forces to defend America, at least one full division would be unable to answer that call.” The only “full division” that was incapacitated at the time of that speech was the Texas National Guard. The governor of Texas is the only governor in the country who has command of a full division. It struck Texas Guard commanders then, even some who supported Bush, that they had been used as a political ploy and their lousy training and equipment was part of a plan. Burkett’s complaints, and those of others, had already resulted in a Texas legislative investigation. Nothing changed, though, and a few years later stories of “ghost soldiers,” men kept on rosters after they had quit in order maintain federal funding, began to leak into the media. Burkett also related the purging incident to USA Today but the paper’s editors failed to publish it until my book was released in early 2004.

The disgust over all of this may have reached its flashpoint this summer when the Texas 56th Brigade Combat Team was called to active duty and sent to Iraq. The grumblings were the same. Not enough armored equipment. Outdated weaponry. No tactical training relevant to the conflict. An insufficient amount of body armor. One former officer threatened to hold a news conference and confront Mr. Bush and the governor of Texas. A president, who had avoided combat in Vietnam by getting into the guard and then had walked away four years into a six year hitch, was sending them into a deadly war without training or appropriate weaponry. Their anger was understandable.

The emotion was further exacerbated by political context. The same president that had avoided combat was allowing his re-election campaign to attack a candidate who had volunteered to go to the war, a man who had shed blood and had been awarded medals. Even Texas Guard soldiers that follow orders, regardless of the politics of their commanders, had now reached the end of their tolerance. And at least one of these individuals was probably angry enough to manufacture documents.


Much more on Rove's tactics, etc.

[PROGRESSIVE1]

1. kick

[StClone]

2. Could this have been

A sincere effort to oust Bush with faked memos by military people loathing Bush. It backfired.