How Bush Got (and Lost) His Wings

[Guest guest]

http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair08122004.html

 

August 12, 2004

How Bush Got (and Lost) His Wings

Tracking the National Guard Career of the Fatuous

Flyboy from New Haven

 

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

 

He mumbles a prayer and it ends with a smile

The order is given

They move down the line

But he'll stay behind and he'll meditate

But it won't stop the bleeding or ease the hate

Sky pilot, Sky pilot

How high can you fly?

You'll never, never, never reach the sky.

 

Eric Burden and the Animals

 

If a bullfrog had wings, it wouldn't bump its ass.

 

Merle Haggard

 

The early winter of 1968 was a season of acute anxiety

for the young George W. Bush. As his academic career

at Yale sputtered to an inglorious denouement, the war

in Vietnam was hurtling forward at full-bore with the

onset of the Tet Offensive. In those perilous months,

there were 350,000 US troops in Vietnam, dying at a

rate of more than 350 a week. From Bush's perch in New

Haven, elite hamlet of his birth, the draft loomed,

casting a chill shadow over his future.

 

Bush faced limited options. Unlike his warden-to-be

Dick Cheney, this randy bon vivant wasn't prepared to

anchor himself down in early wedlock, which would have

entitled him to a marriage deferment. There were too

many oats yet to be sown. How many seeds in how many

fields? Tough to say precisely, but in the ripe phrase

of one of Bush's drinking buddies from the 1970s: " he

bedded nearly every bimbo in West Texas, married or

not. "

 

Alas, the remedial scholar's grades at Yale, already

puffed-up beyond all merit courtesy of his legacy

admission, proved to be so paltry that the escape

hatch of graduate school was out of the question, too.

 

Only one sure sanctuary remained: the National Guard.

 

In January of 1968, Bush sent enquiries to the

National Guard. It seems Bush had had an epiphany: he

wante to be a pilot, just like his dad. Well, not

exactly like Pappy, who was shot down flying a fighter

in World War II. Yes, Lil' Bush wanted to fly fighter

jets, but not in dicey combat situations. That,

naturally, would defeat the entire purpose of joining

the Guard.

 

In 1989, Bush explained the coarse calculus behind his

decision to a reporter from the Lubbock

Avalanche-Journal, " I'm saying to myself, 'What do I

want to do?' I think, I don't want to be an infantry

guy as a pilot in Vietnam. What I do decide to want to

do [sic] is learn to fly. "

 

The National Guard commanders responded warmly to

Bush's initial probings, but noted, somewhat ominously

for the fratboy flier, that before his application

could be accepted he had to submit to a battery of

physical and mental tests. Damn, Bush must have

shivered, more exams and no helpful tutors from the

egghead division of Skull and Bones to guide him

through the intellectual shoals!

 

At the time Bush applied to the National Guard, there

were 100,000 other young men in line before him,

stalled on a crowded waiting list hoping their number

would be called before they were sucked up by the

draft and dropped onto the killing fields of the

Mekong Delta. In Texas alone, there were 500

applicants frantically vying for only four open slots

for fighter pilot-training in the Air National Guard.

 

At first blush, Bush didn't seem to have much of a

shot at landing one of those choice positions. First,

he flunked his medical test. Then he flunked his

dental exam. And finally, as Ian Williams reveals in

Deserter, his merciless indictment of Bush's

disappearing act in the National Guard, he scores a

rock-bottom 25 percent on his pilot aptitude

examination. That's one out of four correct answers, a

ratio that is not even a credible mark in

cluster-bombing class. To put this achievement in

perspective, the average score of applicants taking

the pilot aptitude test was 77 percent, a whopping

fifty-two percent higher than the proud product of the

Yale ancestral admissions program. More than 95

percent of the testers scored higher than Bush, the

Ivy Leaguer.

 

Aptitude for piloting a fighter jet notwithstanding,

on May 27, 1969, just nervy twelve days before the

expiration of his student deferment, Bush the Younger

was accepted into the Texas Air National Guard. On his

application form under the heading " Background

Qualifications, " Bush declares in a refreshing spurt

of honesty " None. "

 

Today the pipsqueak commander-in-chief has exploited

the Guard and Army Reserve as a form of covert

conscription to beef up troop numbers in Iraq and

Afghanistan. But in those days National Guard

squadrons were generally not being sent off to the

frontlines in Vietnam. But just to be sure, Bush

checked the box on his enlistment form saying he was

unwilling to do time overseas. That box was a comfy

failsafe that is no longer available to young people

seduced into signing up as weekend warriors in Bush's

National Guard.

 

Flush with excitement at his triumphal entry into the

Air National Guard, Bush averred to one-and-all that

he had caught the flight bug. He duly submitted to the

Guard brass a " Statement of Intent, " pledging that he

had " applied for pilot training with the goal of

making flying a lifetime pursuit and I believe that I

can best accomplish this to my own satisfaction as a

member of the Air National Guard as long as possible. "

 

This seems like boilerplate stuff. But it is a crucial

document in at least one respect. Getting the

dunderheaded Bush air-ready was going to take a lot of

training and the Guard wanted to get a guarantee that

it would get a minimal return on its investment-if not

a special line-item in the appropriations bill, at

least commitment from Bush that he would stick around

as a pilot for the duration of his commitment, if not

beyond. Ian Williams estimates that the Guard spent

more than a million dollars training Bush how to fly.

Bush was warned that any prolonged absence from the

Guard would result in him being ordered to " active

duty " for a period of two years.

 

What the commanders of the Guard may not have known at

the time was that in Bush's mind it was either the

Guard or Canada. In 1994, the gunshy Bush, who

tortured animals as teen-ager, fessed up to the

Houston Chronicle that being sent to Vietnam was

simply not an option for him: " I was not prepared to

shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a

deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I

choose to better myself by learning how to fly

airplanesI don't want to play like I was somebody out

there marching when I wasn't. It was either Canada or

the service. Somebody said the Guard was looking for

pilots. All I know is, there weren't that many people

trying to be pilots. "

 

As we now know, there were more than 500 people

looking to be pilots in Texas alone, nearly all of

them more qualified for the slots than Bush.

 

So how did this miraculous induction come about? Bush

has long denied he got any favored treatment, which

would seem unmanly. But there's now little doubt that

the draft evader benefited from at least three pairs

of helping hands: Sid Adger, a Texas oilman and Bush

family crony, Ben Barnes, then Speaker of the House in

Texas, and Gen. James Rose, former commander of the

Texas Air National Guard.

 

The truth began to trickle out in 1999, when Barnes,

then a top lobbyist and political fixer in Austin,

became a witness in a lawsuit by Laurence Littwin.

Littwin was suing the State of Texas for firing him as

lottery directory, which he claimed was politically

motivated. The Littwin lawsuit is a complex and

confusing affair that provides a glimpse at the

baseline of corruption pullulating through the Texas

political system.

 

In sum, Littwin claimed that he was forced to hire a

company called GTech to run the Texas lottery in order

to suppress the real story of how Bush won entry into

the Guard-namely that Ben Barnes had pulled strings

with Gen. Rose. In the 1990s, Barnes worked a lobbyist

for GTech. Indeed, GTech had paid Barnes $23 million

for his expert services.

 

In his deposition, Barnes denied blackmailing Littwin

into giving GTech the lucrative contract. But he

confessed, with the haughty sense of accomplishment

that only an apex politico can impart, that he had

indeed opened the backdoor for Bush into the Air

National Guard. Barnes said that he responded to a

distress beacon from Bush intimate Sid Adger, a now

dead Texas oil tycoon, and prevailed on Gen. Rose to

adopt the young Bush as a member of the Guard's flying

elite, which then included the war aversive sons of

Gov. John Connelly and Sen. Lloyd Bentsen. It helped

that Barnes's chief of staff, Nick Kralj, also served

as a top aide-de-camp to the general. Mission

accomplished.

 

But the handouts didn't stop there. Bush didn't want

to remain a lowly private or corporal in those drab

uniforms. He saw himself as officer material. Yet, he

had no desire to subject himself to the mental and

physical rigors of Officer Candidate School. In his

mind, he was a birthright officer. And so it came to

be. After a mere six weeks of training, Bush was

promoted to the rank 2nd Lieutenant. He didn't even

have his pilot's license.

 

In the wake of this astounding achievement, Bush felt

it was time for a breather. He abandoned his training

with the Guard for two months, hightailing it to the

beaches and bars of Florida, where he claimed to have

occasionally lent the services of his agile political

mind to the senatorial campaign of rightwing,

neo-segregationist congressman Ed Gurney, a favorite

of Richard Nixon. Gurney won, but his victory was

short lived. Gurney was later indicted by a federal

grand jury on charges of political corruption, bribery

and perjury. He walked away a free man courtesy of a

hung jury.

 

* * *

 

After the election, Bush headed for Moody Air Base in

Georgia to complete his pilot training with the 3559th

Student Squadron. Around Thanksgiving, Bush was once

again whisked away from the monotony of life as a

fighter-pilot-in-training, this time courtesy of

Richard Nixon. The president sent a plane to Moody Air

Base to pick up the young Bush so that the newly

brevetted lieutenant could escort Nixon's fabulously

neurotic (and what progeny of Nixon's wouldn't at

least be neurotic?) daughter Tricia out on a date.

Sparks didn't fly. The young officer made clumsy

advances, which Tricia deftly deflected. She later

described Bush as " testy. "

 

And so the days and weeks of Bush's service to the

country, as commander-in-chief likes to put it, during

the war in Vietnam rolled on. His instructors at the

Moody Air Base assigned Bush the task of learning how

to fly the F-102, an obsolete fighter soon destined

for the scrap heap.

 

Finally, on June 23, 1971 Bush graduated from combat

flight training school. Now he was ready to defend the

airspace of Texas from hostile incursions from Mexico,

Belize or the Virgin Islands.

 

Except that George the Younger apparently had formed

other plans. Without informing the Guard commanders

who had saved him going to Vietnam, Bush quietly

applied for admission to study law at the University

of Texas. For one of the few times in his life, Bush

didn't get immediate gratification.

 

The flying fratboy's application to the University of

Texas law school was ungraciously declined, despite

the pleas of his father, then pitted in a fierce

senatorial election battle with Lloyd Bentsen that he

would end up losing. Whatever its faults, apparently

the University of Texas isn't prone to handing out

legacy admissions to New Haven-born whelps of the

political elite. Even in Texas, you have to draw the

line somewhere.

 

Sulking at this unfamiliar rebuke, Bush slunk off to

Ellington Air Base near Houston to join the 111th

Fighter Squadron. By most accounts, his drinking,

already problematic, began to intensify. By other

accounts, it was during this time in Ellington that

Bush began to refamiliarize himself with his narcotic

of choice at Yale...cocaine. In his college days, Bush

not only snorted, he dealt. Among the haute monde at

Yale, he was known as one of the top purveyors of

primo Colombian powder in New Haven, dispensing the

crystal snow from ounce bags.

 

Now we come to the crucial lost years of 1971 and

1973. Shortly after Bush arrived at Ellington, his

political ambitions begin to percolate to the surface.

He tells the Houston Post that he is considering a run

for the Texas state senate. His testing of the waters

doesn't excite much interest and nothing comes of it.

 

So he continues flying, mainly on weekends, over the

course of the next year. And he continues getting

inebriated. On a trip back to Washington, DC at

Christmastime, Bush treats his younger brother to a

night cruising the bars of Georgetown. In the early

hours of the morning, a shit-faced Bush crashes his

car into a row of garbage cans in front of the family

house. Roused from his slumbers by the racket outside,

his father confronts him in the driveway about driving

around drunk. Bush the Younger threatens to pummel his

father with his fists, but Marvin, also drunk,

intervenes and Bush is sent packing back to Texas.

 

In April of 1972, two important events coincide. The

Air Force mandates drug testing for all pilots during

medical exams and Bush takes what will turn out to be

his last flight as a pilot for the Air National Guard.

 

Less than a month later, Bush flees his Texas Guard

base for Alabama, where he signs up to work on the

congressional campaign of Winton " Red " Blount, a

friend of Bush's father and Nixon's postmaster

general. He didn't inform his superiors at Ellington

that he had left Texas until two weeks later, when he

requested a transfer to the 9921st Air Reserve

Squadron, a postal unit with no fighter jets.

Initially, the transfer is granted.

 

No one recalls seeing Bush report for duty and there

is no documentary record supporting his service there,

which, in any event, was to consist primarily of

reading flight manuals--an uninviting assignment for

the quasi-literate airman. On July 6, Bush is

scheduled to take his required flight physical, which

will for the first time include a drug test. He fails

to show up. Failure to take a flight physical is

grounds for immediate suspension of his pilot's

license.

 

These days Bush claims that he simply blew off the

physical because the Guard was phasing out the F-102

and he didn't expect to be piloting any more flights.

This excuse is circumspect for two reasons. First,

although the F-102 was on its way out, the jet had not

yet been mothballed and Bush still had the opportunity

to learn to fly the new generation of fighter jets.

Indeed, there was a fleet of them just down the

highway at Dannelly Air Base in Alabama. Moreover, the

flight physical was a mandatory requirement of

service. This was not a matter of getting a permission

slip to play intramural polo at Yale. For most

Guardsmen, failure to abide by such orders resulted

severe consequences, like being compelled to spend

two-years in active duty, perhaps in Vietnam.

 

On July 31, Bush's transfer to the Montgomery postal

unit was overturned by the DC office, which deemed him

" ineligible for reassignment to the Air Reserve

Squadron. He is ordered to return to Ellington. But

Bush doesn't pay any attention. Instead, he retreated

to Miami with his father for the 1972 Republican

National Convention, the last hurrah of Nixon.

 

Two weeks later Bush returns to Alabama, where he

files a new transfer request, this time to the 187th

TAC Recon Group in Mobile. The transfer is approved on

September 5, 1972. The following day the Air Force

officially revokes his flight privileges for " failure

to accomplish annual medical examination. "

 

Bush wasn't alone in losing his wings. The other pilot

suspended alongside Bush was none other than his close

friend, James M. Bath. Yes, that James Bath, who would

in just a few short years become the financial

factotum for the Bin Laden family in Texas. In the

1980s, it was Bath, backed by the Bin Laden fortune,

who bailed Bush out of the financial ruin he had made

of Arbusto Drilling and Harken Energy. Old friends

down there are not forgotten.

 

The de-winged pilot was ordered to report for duty to

Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, commander of the 187th

Recon Group. The Colonel says he never meet Bush and

there is no record that junior ever showed up at the

base. " Had he reported in, I would have had some

recall, and I do not, " said Col. Turnipseed. " I had

been in Texas, done my flight training there. If we

had had a first lieutenant from Texas, I would have

remembered. "

 

On September 29, Bush was sent a letter commanding him

to appear before the Flying Evaluation Board to

explain why he had refused to take the medical exam.

Bush never responded. At this point, Bush was not only

AWOL, but in breach of two direct orders.

 

Meanwhile, back in Montgomery, Bush had apparently

gone AWOL from the Blount campaign as well. He spent

his nights carousing in the bars of Montgomery. He

would arrive hung-over at the campaign office in the

afternoon, prop his cowboy-booted feet on the desk and

recount his night of debauchery. The women workers at

the campaign headquarters called Bush the " Texas

soufflé. " Full of himself and stuffed with hot air,

the blue-haired ladies for Blount snickered.

 

Bount lost the election, but remained tight with the

Bush clan. His company, Blount International,

continues to benefit from it close association with

the Bushes and their wars. In 1991, Blount

International got a multimillion-dollar contract to

reconstruct bombed out Kuwait City. Later, it won one

of the largest private contracts ever awarded by the

Saudi Royal family. Now, Blount's firm is working as a

subcontractor for Halliburton in Iraq.

 

In the fall of 1972, things began to look grim for the

fatuous flyboy from New Haven. The National Guard was

on his tail, demanding an explanation for why he had

jilted them after they had saved him from Vietnam and

had invested a million dollars in teaching him how to

fly fighters.

 

Thanks to the investigations of the intrepid Larry

Flynt, we now know that it was in this window of

months that Bush apparently got a Houston woman

pregnant and gallantly paid for her to have an

abortion. It was also in this period that Bush,

according to his biographer J.H. Hatfield, was

arrested for possession of cocaine. Instead of landing

in prison, the judge presiding over the case bent to

the pleadings of Bush's father, then US ambassador to

the UN, and ordered the young derelict to perform six

month's worth of community service at PULL, a center

for black youths in urban Houston.

 

Williams' book Deserter lends circumstantial credence

to Hatfield's account and raises even new questions.

According to Bush's autobiography (ghostwritten by his

political au pair, Karen Hughes), A Charge to Keep, he

met former Houston Oiler tight end John White in

December of 1972. White, Bush claims, asked him to

come work full-time at his Houston youth center,

called Project-PULL. Bush, who until this charmed

moment had never exhibited the slightest charitable

instinct, agreed. He started work at PULL in January

of 1973.

 

Now keep in mind that Bush supposedly already had a

job, working for the National Guard. Yet over the next

six months there's not one confirmed Bush sighting by

his Guard commanders. In the ornithology of the Air

National Guard, Bush is the rarest and stealthiest of

birds, passing through Guard air space like a ghostly

passenger pigeon. Indeed, when his superiors tried to

fill out an annual evaluation of Bush's service they

are unable to complete the form, writing on May 2,

1973: " Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit

during the period of the report. "

 

A month later, National Guard HQ in Washington sent

Texas Guard commanders an official query about Bush.

The DC brass instructed the Texas crew to prepare a

Form 77a on Bush " so this officer can be rated in the

position he held. " The Texas Guard, then run by Bush

family cronies who now saw themselves implicated in

the transgressions of the absconder fratboy, balks at

the order. Indeed, they delay filing a response until

November 12, 1973, by which time Bush has been

honorably discharged from the Guard. Even then the

response from the Texas HQ is coy, though ripe with

nefarious possibilities: " Not rated for the period 1

May 1972 through 30 April 73. Report for this period

unavailable for administrative reasons. "

 

So it seemed that the bureaucratic vise beginning to

squeeze young George. Then mysteriously Bush is

recorded as having performed 36 days of duty between

May and July of 1973. Bush doesn't recall preciously

what he did. There are no pay records to confirm his

service. No one in the Guard witnessed him on the

base. Indeed, Bush couldn't have done the Guard

service because by his own admission he was working

full-time for John White at PULL-if he'd gone AWOL

from that job he might have very well landed in jail.

It now seems likely that the entry of those 36 days of

service was post-dated by someone in the Texas office

not only to protect Bush, but also to shield his

retinue of enablers in the high command of the Texas

Air National Guard.

 

In September Bush completed his tour of duty at PULL,

applied to grad school, and despite being AWOL from

the National Guard from May of 1972 through October of

1973, is granted an honorable discharge.

 

That fall Bush evacuated to Cambridge, making a soft

landing at Harvard Business School, another reliable

safehouse for the brattish scions of the ruling class.

Fellow students at Harvard remember Bush prancing into

lecture halls wearing his uniform. Even then, he had a

taste for military cross-dressing, though no one in

the Massachusetts National Guard ever recalls the

tyro-in-a-jumpsuit showing up for duty at the

base--although he did drop by once to have his

choppers cleaned gratis by the Guard's dentist.

 

Whenever Bush plays dress-up, as he does at nearly

every photo-op on a military site from the USS Lincoln

to torture seminar rooms at Ft. Bragg, he comes off as

the missing member of the Village People, which mayy

explains his enduring appeal to the latent types

manning the controls of the Christian right these

days.

 

In the mid-1990s, as Bush began to plot his run for

the White House, the governor and his handlers (Dan

Bartlett, Karen Hughes and Karl Rove) realized that

Bush's missing years in the Guard might prove

problematic. After all, during the 1992 presidential

campaign, Bush's father assaulted Clinton for his deft

manipulation of Col. William Holmes, the commander of

Arkansas's ROTC, to sidestep the draft.

 

Bush's dilemma was trickier and more unseemly than

Clinton's. In order to escape service in Vietnam, he

had exploited his family's political connections to

secure a choice spot in the Texas Air National Guard,

despite failing his pilot aptitude test. Though a

blatant act of patronage, Bush was promoted to officer

status before he earned his pilot's license and

without going to officer training school. He refused

to take his mandatory flight physical and also refused

to show up for a mandatory evaluation. He went AWOL

for a year and a half and then requested and received

an early discharge. All this after promising to " serve

as long as possible " and to devote himself to a

lifetime of high flying...flying planes, that is.

 

In the offices of the Texas Air Guard there were

records documenting Bush's dubious career and exposing

the holes in his extravagent version of his military

service to the country. The most potentially damning

of those documents (Bush's pay records) are now

missing. Where did they go?

 

One intriguing explanation comes from Lt. Col. Bill

Burkett, a top aide to Maj. Gen. Daniel James, III,

then commander of the Texas Air National Guard. In

1997, Burkett claims he was just outside the open door

of Maj. Gen. James's office when the general received

a conference call from Joe Allbaugh, Bush's chief of

staff, and Dan Bartlett, Bush's communications

director. The conversation played out over James's

speakerphone, where Burkett claims he overheard Bush's

men order James to cleanse Bush's military files.

Burkett said he recalled Allbaugh's saying: " We

certainly don't want anything that is embarrassing in

there. "

 

A few days later, Burkett says that he saw Brig. Gen.

John Scribner dispose of Bush's pay and performance

records in a 15-gallon metal waste can inside the

Texas Air National Guard Musuem. " The files had been

gone through over the years, " Scribner quipped to

Burkett, pointing to the garbage can. " Not as much in

here as I thought. " Apparently, this was a mop-up

operation to make sure that nothing had been missed in

previous search-and-destroy raids on Bush's files.

 

Burkett went public with his recollections in the

spring of 2004 during the mini-tempest in the

corporate press over Bush's military record sparked by

Michael Moore's assertion that the president was a

" deserter. " The president's praetorian guard went into

action, smearing Burkett as a disgruntled malcontent

with an ax to grind against Maj. Gen. James, who Bush

had elevated to the head of the Air National Guard for

the entire country. Although the Burkett story quickly

faded, phone records and other documents back up the

circumstances of his claims. And Burkett himself

hasn't backed down despite the assaults on his

character from Bush's political mercenaries. " If

President Bush is going to be the first president in

over one hundred years that puts himself in a uniform

and uses taxpayer's money for a photo opportunity to

land on a flight deck and say hooray, " Burkett told

reporters. " He's put it on the table and we deserve to

know. " But the press bus had long since pulled away,

never to return to the scene of the crime.

 

Given this vaporous record of service during Vietnam,

it takes a perverse kind of hubris for Bush to assail

the military careers of a POW (John McCain), a bona

fide killing machine (John Kerry) and a triple amputee

(Max Cleland). It's the trademark of a pampered bully.

 

* * *

 

The moment George Bush refused to go spill blood in

Vietnam may have been the moral Everest of his life.

But he has long since buried that singular act of

conscience beneath a stench-heap of projection and

hypocrisy. The president remains a stunted brat and a

coward at the core, dodging rules he forces others to

abide by with unforgiving strictness. Festooned in a

flight jacket he never deserved, Bush has ordered

National Guard troops into a bloody desert war he and

his chickenhawk cronies launched under fabricated

pretexts. Then in order to hand out tax breaks to the

super-rich and billion-dollar contracts to favored

arms makers, Bush scrimped on the funding of his

precious war itself: too few troops, under-armed,

over-worked, operating with no occupation plan and no

exit strategy.

 

In their quest to transfer every possible federal

dollar to their fatcat base, the Bush regime even went

so far as to try to slash combat pay and separation

allowances and increase co-payments for the treatment

of those maimed in battle. Although he opted out of

the Guard early, Bush has now implemented (perhaps

illegally) " stop-losses " orders, a kind gang-pressing

by Oval Office fiat that keeps National Guard and

Reserve troops in Iraq far beyond their contracted

tour of duty. In essence, they are war slaves.

 

When the Iraqi resistance surfaced with a vengeance

after Bush made his premature declaration of victory,

the faux-warrior taunted them by sneering, " Bring it

on. " They did. And more than 700 American soldiers

have perished since the delivery of that infamous

sideline chant, tossed off as if the president were

still a flighty cheerleader at Andover. To top it off,

while Bush still refuses to attend funeral ceremonies

for slain soldiers, he wasted no time in trying to

slash death benefits for military families. And on and

on it goes.

 

Explain his actions? Not then, not now, not ever.

 

Just as he stiffed the Flight Evaluation Board in

1972, Bush now refuses to offer an explanation for his

illegal and unjust war that has killed and maimed tens

of thousands. " I'm the commander--see, I don't need to

explain, " Bush brayed in his best Mafia capo syntax to

Bob Woodward. " I do not need to explain why I say

things. That's the interesting thing about being the

president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why

they say something, but I don't feel I owe anybody an

explanation. " That's the distilled essence of George

W. Bush from his very own mouth: a bellicose and

imperious buffoon who has never once been held to

account for the mayhem he leaves in his wake.

 

So yet again Bush has succeeded in doing the

impossible: he has sullied the once heroic term " draft

evader. "