Here we go again. It's kind of incredible, isn't it? In 2000, the
Boston Globe runs a story about how there's a pretty big gap in Bush's Air National Guard Record, indicating that he may have been AWOL for as much as eighteen months in 1972 and 1973. It creates a minor stir at the time (I would say very minor) and then fades back into nothingness. Four years later, here we go again.
I don't exactly know what happened to change things, to make this once again an important story. Part of it is probably the "It's a new world after 9/11" business. Bush is, in his own words, a "war president". He has wrapped himself in the military, and of course, in the flag, but he's been a hypocrite about it. Sure, he's happy to appear on an air craft carrier a stone's throw from San Diego (carefully positioned to conceal any image of the visible shoreline from news cameras) in a fighter plane wearing a flight suit, but he's also cutting veteran's benefits and combat pay. This crass politicization of the military, which amounts to using men and women who risked their lives as nothing more than props in a grotesque political ad, makes his own military background newly relevant.
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