The following was written by Michael Daly of the NY Daily News. It's just more proof that Bush is a moron incapable of any success without his Daddy or Mommy pulling strings for him. One more thing to despise about this puppet.
On this Memorial Day weekend when our commander-in-chief suddenly finds himself less in command, we might think back to the day that 22-year-old Lt. George W. Bush of the Texas Air National Guard filled out a form that asked whether he wished to volunteer for duty overseas.
Overseas in 1968 meant Vietnam, and Bush had signed up for the Guard just 12 days before he was eligible to be drafted whether he wanted to or not. He returned the form with a check in the box next to the words "Do not volunteer."
Bush had no moral objections to the war, for he soon after took a four-month leave from the Guard to join the campaign of Edward Gurney, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Florida whose primary criticism of our Vietnam policy was that we were not fighting hard enough.
"Win or get out!" went one Gurney slogan.
Bush secured the job through his father, then a congressman who vigorously supported sending other men's sons to Vietnam, volunteer or no.
"Telephone calls were exchanged, and young George came to Orlando," recalls the campaign's media strategist, Pete Barr.
American boys were dying at the rate of 350 a week as the younger Bush traveled about Florida, sheepdogging the media and carrying the seat cushion his candidate required due to a bullet wound to the spine suffered in the Battle of the Bulge.
"Bush always says he was the pillow-toter," Barr recalls.
Gurney's wound made campaigning extra arduous, and he periodically retired to his Winter Haven home. Bush whiled the time away with Barr.
"We would play a lot of tennis and drink a lot of beer," Barr says. "He just had this very nice personality. Everybody liked him. Very polite ... a lot of fun ... a neat guy."
Bush would then grab the war hero's pillow and rejoin the campaign against the legendary former Gov. Leroy Collins. Gurney called his Democratic opponent Liberal Leroy, a reminder that Collins had been the first elected official in the South to speak out against racism.
Collins had excoriated storekeepers on the radio for barring black patrons and fought to desegregate schools when polls showed four of every five white Floridians opposed him.
In 1965, President Johnson had dispatched Collins to Selma, Ala., to serve as a peacekeeper between civil rights marchers and the police. A news photographer had snapped Collins negotiating with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the march.
Three years later - just six months after King's assassination and only days before the Senate election - this picture of Collins "marching" with the slain civil rights leader appeared on thousands of pro-Gurney leaflets and posters. Barr insists,
"We didn't have anything to do with those pictures." "We never used that photograph, but it crept in in places," he says.
Gurney won by 300,000 votes, thanks largely to a late surge among white undecideds. Bush returned to the Guard and took another leave in 1972 to work for a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama.
Time-Tested Tactics
Bush faced John McCain in the primary, and the pilot who had checked the box "do not volunteer" did not hesitate to smear a pilot who had survived the Hanoi Hilton. Bush then faced Al Gore.
On Dec. 10, a hand count that promised to determine the next President commenced in none other than the Leroy Collins Public Library in Tallahassee, Fla. Collins' retort to a rabid segregationist was inscribed on the wall.
"I don't have to get reelected, but I have to live with myself."
At 2:42 p.m., a cell phone rang with word that the U.S. Supreme Court had voted, 5 to 4, to halt the count. Bush became President despite losing the popular vote nationwide and continued to be viewed by many as a "neat guy." A growing number have come to feel otherwise, notably including Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont, who bolted the Republican Party last week.
The pillow-toter marks his first Memorial Day as commander-in-chief no longer in command of that august body to which Leroy Collins once sought election.
I have discovered other facts about the military career of W...
In 1968 after Bush left Yale the Texas National Guard was filled up. There was a lengthy waiting list. No one has directly accused the Bush family of using their influence (his Daddy was a Congressman at the time) to get him in. Retired Major General Thomas Bishop, the adjutant general of the state stated: "We were full". Dale Pyeatt, the associate director of the Guard says, "There were waiting lists. There wasn't any question about that". Bush's unit had 27 pilots which was two short of its maximum number but there were two pilots in training already. W said that he had "heard there were pilot slots open" and he simply "signed up to fly a single-seat F-102 Interceptor". Turns out that one Sydney A. Adger, a wealthy Houston oilman and friend of the Bush family, requested help in getting W into the Guard. So his Daddy stays "clean". A Brigadier General Buck Staudt, family friend of Bush Sr, always said that there was no influence in getting W into the Guard nor his rapid promotion to second lieutenant. Staudt was so thrilled to have W in the Guard that he staged a special ceremony so he can be photographed giving W the oath, even though a captain had really done it, and, when W got his officer's commission he staged another photo op with Pop flying in from DC. Staudt also states that W had all the qualifications for officer material.
To qualify for 2nd lieutenant you needed:
high school diploma - W has one.
18 months of military service (including 6 months of active)- no go for W on that one.
completion of officer training - nope for W again.
According to a Guard pamphlet, there were three ways of becoming an officer: 23-week training program, a nine-week training "reserve" course or eight weekend drill periods and two summer camps. W did none of these. So, how did he get his bars??
Other fun facts: W scored 25 percent on the pilot aptitude test which, according to a retired Guard personnel officer, was as low as you can go and get accepted. On his form under the area "qualifications of value to the Air Force" W put "none".
The plane he trained in was in the process of being phased out in Vietnam almost guaranteeing his never being sent to active duty.