Who needs the CBS docs, when Bu**sh** admitted it

[Snellius]

This is the most complete and disturbing recount of this infamous conversation I've read. From Kristof's column in the Times today:

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 his daddy had good friends who got him in despite the long waiting list," recalls Professor Tsurumi, who is now at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. Professor Tsurumi says he next asked Mr. Bush how he could have already finished his National Guard commitment. "He said he'd gotten an early honorable discharge," Professor Tsurumi recalls. "I said, 'How did you manage that?' "

"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.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/15/opinion/15kris.html?hp

[No Mandate Here.]

1. The phrase that bothers me the most

is the one about how a ~40 year old named Bartlett knows exactly what Mr. * did, was thinking, and just exactly what transpired 35 years ago.

This guy must be the most prescient, the smartest, the best guy there ever was.

He is Nostrodamus, Jean Dixon, Kreskin AND Einstein all rolled up into one person.

He is amazing.

I wonder why he works for such an ignorant, swaggering bozo.

Why doesn't the ignorant swaggering bozo work or him, if he is SO SMART?

[Ruffhowse]

2. I have no trouble believing Bush said these things then and still believes

them to this day. Facist Pig that he is.

[fugue]

3. My problem with this assertion

According to my memory, this is new news from an old source.

Professor Tsurumi has made the statements about Mr. Bush's outrageous statements in class and his lazy entitled attitude before. He does every time Mr. Bush is up for election, or so I'm told. But the last time I read his list of what Mr. Bush said and did (a couple months ago), I do not believe it contained the statement that Mr. Bush said his father got him out of Vietnam. That it is suddenly included sounds suspicious to me, much as I'd like it to be true.

If anyone can show Professor Tsurumi saying this before the memos surfaced, I'd trust it more. Can anyone do that?

[Snellius]

4. Here's some more:

As the controversy swirls around documents uncovered by CBS regarding President George W. Bush's National Guard service, a significant witness has been largely ignored: a corroborating source for the central claim in CBS's original story that Bush benefited from family connections throughout his military service.

The September 10 edition of CNN's NewsNight with Aaron Brown featured a story about the controversy over President George W. Bush's National Guard service that included a single clip of professor Yoshi Tsurumi. Tsurumi has claimed that when Bush was his student at Harvard Business School in 1973, he told Tsurumi that he had gained a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard with help from his well-connected father. Tsurumi, who was an associate visiting professor at Harvard Business School from 1972 to 1976, told CNN: "He admitted to me that to avoid the Vietnam draft, he had his dad -- he said 'dad's friends' -- skip him through the long waiting list to get into the Texas National Guard." Tsurumi is currently a professor of marketing at Baruch College in New York City.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200409140008

[ClintonTyree]

5. Mr. Bush?

Can't you possibly come up with more descriptive adjectives to describe "Mr. Bush". That sounds like a term of respect which the Krazy Kowboy does not deserve.

[kanrok]

6. Ohhhh....I smell a straw man!

combined with personal "memory" and a challenge to prove a negative! Straight out of the Rush Limbaugh playbook! Oh, yeah, welcome to DU!

[Snellius]

7. You contradict yourself:

"He does every time Mr. Bush is up for election, or so I'm told."
...
If anyone can show Professor Tsurumi saying this before the memos surfaced, I'd trust it more.

You've already said -- "or so you're told" -- this story has come up several times before, yet you seem to suggest that Professor Tsurumi only recently started making such allegations after the memo affair. What?