Apologies if this has already been posted, but I didn't see it. Josh Marshall has been all over the aWol story, but that seems to have taken a pretty bizarro
twist. Essentially, in order to rebut Democratic claims that Bush skipped guard duty, the Republicans got a whole bunch of records from the Air National Guard base in Alabama-- where Bush was stationed as he worked on a political campaign. The White House perused the President's records from that time... and only released his dental records. Why?
Why only release dental records? Especially when you claim to have medical records and service records that would be provide a more powerful rebuttal to your political enemies?
I fully recognize that I'm tinfoiling this sucker, but let's consider why a politician would hold back medical records. Especially a politician with known substance abuse problems. Especially a politician who was widely rumored to have engaged pretty heavily in cocaine use (sure, at this point it's just a circa-2000 rumor... so was aWol).
I'm not a dentist or a physician, so I don't know for sure. But I don't think that you could find much evidence of illegal drug use in a routine dental check-up. At least not if it wasn't really severe drug use. But it seems like a more thorough medical check-up could turn up evidence pretty quickly. So you've got this rich, well-connected politician's son working for a powerful politician in the state of Alabama. What happens if he's found taking illegal drugs? I really doubt the answer is "he gets shipped off to Vietnam ASAP".
And on top of that, we know Bush's records were "cleansed" in 1997. Now what could you possibly need to "cleanse"?
Of course this is all tinfoil hat conjecture. But it's almost disturbing how well all this fits together.