Bush’s National Guard Service
This is the only post I intend on writing about the current controversy over the President’s National Guard service. I think the whole thing has been conflated far past the point of reason and the facts have been distorted intentionally by various news outlets so as to convince the public that the President was somehow delinquent in his obligations. Thankfully, an article in The Hill has given us the salient points. They are, for me, the only points that matter.
1) The President served for two years, learning to fly the airplane to which he would be assigned the next several years. That’s two full years of service – not two years of weekends.
2) In his next five years he was required to earn 50 “points” every year to fulfill his National Guard obligations. Here are his point totals (from May to May, as the Guard counted a year): 253, 340, 137, 56, and 56. Bush earned enough points in five years to serve the minimum equivalent of almost 17 years of Guard Service.
3) He asked for, and was granted, an honorable and early discharge after slightly over 5 years and 4 months of service. This means that the Guard let him go 8 months early to attend Harvard business school. At the time of his request, the Guard was phasing out the plane he was qualified to fly and was also glutted with qualified pilots. They didn’t need him, and since he had fulfilled the point requirements, they let him go.
There. That’s the sum total of this kerfuffle. The Democrats say that Bush was AWOL, yet he exceeded the Guard’s minimum requirements in every single year he served. The Democrats say that Bush avoided service in Vietnam, yet he flew a fighter plane doing Homeland Security (well, at that time they were called something different) missions.
But here’s the most telling thing for me – at least as far as the Democrats’ accusations go. They say that no one remembers Bush being in Alabama (where he was allowed to go to work on a political campaign) and that those potential eyewitness sightings are more important than the official records that say he did serve his time. On the other hand, they completely discount the testimony of over 260 Swift Boat Veterans who provide eyewitness reports about John Kerry’s Vietnam activities and cling tightly to the official Navy Records and the few pages of records Kerry has released. So which will it be – eyewitness reports or official records?
You don’t get to play one side one time and the other side the other. That’s a little thing we around The Shack call hypocrisy.
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Category: President George Bush
