Guess Which Presidential Candidate DID Misrepresent His Military Service?

Given the claims by the Swifties (now utterly proven to be completely untrue -- yes, even the Cambodia accusation, see Fred Kaplan's excellent column on that point) that Kerry has been exaggerating his military service, one would think that any exaggeration by Bush about his service would be subject to the same scrutiny. (I know, it's hard to exaggerate about something when your service was so minimal and spotty -- maybe that is exaggeration enough.)

But David Corn of the Nation has pointed out quite nicely that Bush misrepresented his military service back when he first ran for Congress in 1978, and again in 1999 when he was running for President, points largely ignored by the major media:

Putting aside the controversy over Bush's Air National Guard service (or
dereliction of duty), there was another instance when Bush clearly did not speak
truthfully about his military record. In 1978, Bush, while running for Congress
in West Texas, produced campaign literature that claimed he had served in the US
Air Force. According to a 1999 Associated Press report, Bush's congressional
campaign ran a pullout ad in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that declared he had
served "in the US Air Force and the Texas Air National Guard where he piloted
the F-102 aircraft."

Bush lost that congressional race, but twenty-one years later, the AP
questioned him about the ad. The news outlet had a good reason to do so. Bush
had never served in the Air Force. He had only been in the Air National Guard.
But when AP asked Bush if he had been justified in claiming service in the Air
Force, Bush, then the governor of Texas and a presidential candidate, said, "I
think so, yes. I was in the Air Force for over 600 days." Karen Hughes, his
spokeswoman, maintained that when Bush attended flight school for the Air
National Guard from 1968 to 1969 he was considered to be on active duty for the
Air Force and that several times afterward he had been placed on alert, which
also qualified as active duty for the Air Force. All told, she said, Bush had
logged 607 days of training and alerts. "As an officer [in the Air National
Guard]," she told the AP, "he was serving on active duty in the Air Force."

But this explanation was wrong. Says who? The Air Force. As the Associated
Press reported,
The Air Force says that Air National Guard members are
considered 'guardsmen on active duty' while receiving pilot training. They are
not, however, counted as members of the overall active-duty Air
Force. Anyone in the Air National Guard is always considered a
guardsmen and not a member of the active-duty Air Force, according to an Air
Force spokeswoman in the Pentagon. A National Guard member may be called to
active duty for pilot training or another temporary assignment and receive
active-duty pay at the time, but they remain Guard members.

The AP report said, "It may be a question of semantics." But today I
checked with two spokespersons for the US Air Force, and each confirmed that an
active-duty member of the Air National Guard is not considered a member of the
US Air Force. "If a member of the Air National Guard is in pilot training," says
Captain Cristin Lesperance of the US Air Force media relations office, "they
would remain on the Guard books. They would be counted as Guard, not as an
active-duty Air Force member."

When you combine this untruth with Bush's fraudulent claim in his 2000 autobiography, A Charge to Keep, that he completed pilot training in 1970 while assigned to an air base in Houston and "continued flying with my unit for the next several years," you have a pretty clear pattern of deception. After all, even Bush's defenders concede that Bush stopped flying during his final 18 months of service in 1972 and 1973, as Bush had been grounded after failing to take a flight physical exam, and had won permission to train with a unit in Alabama where he did no flying. (Putting aside the unresolved question as to whether or not Bush ever showed up for duty in Alabama for anything other than dental work.)

- posted by Joshua @ 1:23 PM