| Wrong Questions |
23 February 2004
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Democrats Miss the Boat on Bush's Military Service
Ineptitude can be an endearing, even charming quality, in small children. It is an unforgivable sin in a political party, and it is a trait that the American Democrats have in spades. Facing a self-proclaimed "war-time" president, they have chosen to attack his military service by hunting for documents that prove he ducked his duty. Instead, they should try using his own words against him or dealing with today's issues.
In the 2000 campaign, rumors circulated that Governor Bush's military record included a stint of not reporting for duty, cutting in line to join the Air National Guard, and otherwise avoiding his place at the sharp end of the spear. Now, those rumors have revived, and the Democrats are trying to catch Mr. Bush in a lie by pursuing 30-year-old documents while the White House desperately releases papers that prove nothing.
The real sin, if Mr. Bush has committed one by protecting Alabama and Texas from the Viet Cong in an obsolete airplane, is in leaving the guard early. The now famous "Meet the Press" interview included the following exchange:
RUSSERT: You were allowed to leave eight months before your term [in the Guard] expired. Was there a reason?
BUSH: Right. Well, I was going to Harvard Business School and worked it out with the military.
Tim Russert is normally a pretty decent interviewer, and one can only presume that there was a lot he wanted to cover and the time for the interview was running short. Otherwise, he would have followed that up with "How did you do that? There are over 50,000 names on a wall not far from where we're sitting, and I bet those guys would have loved to 'work it out with the military'."
Rather than look for documents in musty old archives which may have been lost or destroyed, someone in the Loyal Opposition needs to ask what that "work it out" phrase means. Was it normal for members of the Guard to leave early? If so, why hasn't the White House trotted that out? If it wasn't, what was arranged? But alas, no. Instead, the nation is treated to a debate over pay stubs.
But above all, there are 130,000 American troops in Iraq under what can only be called false pretenses, there are almost 3 million fewer jobs than there were when Mr. Bush became president, and the surplus has become a half trillion dollar deficit. AWOL, indeed.
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