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President Top Gun: Affirmatively Missing in Action
(Greg Palast, July 9, 2003)
According to discomforting information my BBC investigative team reported last week. In 1968, former Congressman George Herbert Walker Bush of Texas, fresh from voting to send other men�s sons to Vietnam, enlisted his own son in a very special affirmative action program, the �champagne� unit of the Texas Air National Guard. . . . after the White House staged our President�s dramatic landing by fighter jet on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abe Lincoln ... unlike experienced flyers, kept his parachute clips fastened under his crotch, making him look a little less like Tom Cruise and more like that first chimp in space.) . . . In 1968, to qualify for the single available pilot spot in the Air Guard, young George took a test. He scored, out of a possible 100, only 25. (Word is that the chimp scored 26.) How then, did our future President � opponent of affirmative action, who believes no one should get their post except through merit -- leap over thousands of other applicants and cinch the get-out-of-�Nam post? . . . Here�s what you won�t see on US TV: Years back I got my hands on a copy of a document languishing in Justice Department files in Austin, Texas. In it, a tipster fingers two political friends of Bush Senior who, the source claimed, made the call to get young Bush out of the war and into the cockpit at the Air Guard. But the Feds could not act without corroboration. Now we have it. To the BBC crew, one of those named confessed to making the call � at Bush Senior�s request � to help George W dodge the draft. (I�ve posted the letter . . . Look, I don�t care if President Bush cowered and ran from Vietnam. I sure as hell didn�t volunteer � but then, my daddy didn�t send someone else in my place. And I don�t march around with parachute clips around my gonads talking about war and sacrifice. . . . That�s far from the end of the story. There are only two men alive today (outside the Bush family) who knew exactly how George Bush ducked the draft. Both men became high-powered Texas lobbyists. To an influence peddler, having damning information on a sitting governor is worth it�s weight in gold � or, more precisely, there�s a value in keeping the info secret. One of the lobbyists, former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes, appears to have made lucrative use of his knowledge of our President�s slithering out of the draft as a lever to obtain a multi-billion dollar contract for a client. The happy client paid Barnes, the keeper of Governor Bush�s secret, a fee of over $23 million. Barnes, not surprisingly, denies that Bush took care of his client in return for Barnes� silence. However, confronted with the evidence, the former Lt. Governor now admits to helping the young George stay out of Vietnam. . . . This week, on July 6, George W. Bush turned 57. William White was born the same day in 1946. I mention this because, if you�re old enough, you�d remember that young men were drafted for Vietnam based on a grim lottery � if your birthday was picked out of a hat, you went. I got White�s name off a black wall in Washington. He went to Vietnam when George W went to the Air Guard in Houston. White never came back. Happy birthday, Mr. President.

posted by LoZo 7:47 PM