It's Not Just About "AWOL"

There's no question that the idea that Bush may have been AWOL during part of his tenure in the Guard is intriguing. But it's not nearly the most offensive aspect of his military history, and it's mired in uncertainty. We need to avoid getting caught up in the legalistic AWOL/not-AWOL arguments, and focus on what Bush himself admits when asked how he got out of the Guard 8 months early: "I was going to Harvard Business School and worked it out with the military." Imagine with me a soldier named Joe Smith, from Southeast DC. Corporal Smith joined the DC Guard to pay for his undergrad degree at UDC -- he was the first member of his family to earn a four-year degree. Smith has been posted in Tikrit for the past six months, and despite the fact that his Guard commitment was due to end on Dec. 31, he isn't allowed to leave the service, due to Bush's stop-loss orders. But Smith applied to business schools before leaving for Iraq, and has just been accepted into Howard Business School. Will Corporal Smith, who has already served longer than the term for which he signed up -- and who has served in a war zone -- be able to "work it out with the military" so that he can go to the "other" HBS? Hell no. And that, folks, is a powerful testament to the arrogant sense of entitlement that permeates every cell of George Walker Bush. The fact that he can characterize his service as entirely honorable, and apparently believes that it was somehow normal to "work out" a deal with the military so that he could return to his Ivy League roots -- at the same time that he keeps Guard members in Iraq long past the time when they should have gone home -- is appalling and foreign to regular Americans.

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ARF!....

No, this is not the sound that Barney makes when the White House staff is late with dinner. Rather, it's the beginning of yet another intriguing mystery regarding George Bush's service in the Air National Guard. Read on for more. To begin, you need to recall the original mystery of the "torn document" that purports to show Bush's guard activity in 1972 and 1973 (details here and here if your memory is fuzzy). Question: is the document genuine? Or some kind of clever forgery? Answer: it's real. Here's the untorn version, as delivered to Bob Fertik in response to a FOIA request in late 2000: [...] The answer, as you can see from the top line, is that it is an ARF document, as is this record from 1973-74. So what is ARF? I asked Bob Rogers, a retired Air National Guard pilot who's been following this for some time, and what follows is his interpretation of what happened. ARF is the reserves, and among other things it's where members of the guard are sent for disciplinary reasons. As we all know, Bush failed to show up for his annual physical in July 1972, he was suspended in August, and the suspension was recorded on September 29. He was apparently transferred to ARF at that time and began accumulating ARF points in October.

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David Neiwert has a couple of excellent pieces on this issue...

Talkin' AWOL

Tim Russert goes AWOL
Sunday, February 08, 2004