Congress lost no time when threatened by refugees. It rushed to pass a law to hobble their admittance, hastily throwing aside Paul Ryan’s promise that the House would return to the orderly process of developing legislation in committees.
The President called them out: “Now suddenly they’re able to rush in, in a day or two [after the Paris attacks], to solve the threat of widows and orphans and others who are fleeing a war-torn land and that’s their most constructive contribution to the effort against ISIL?”
Obama was undoubtedly referring as well to the avoidance by Congress to authorize force in Syria. With much the same motivation for speedily acting against a refugee program that might have personal consequences, neither do its members want to be on record for any war plan that might fail and jeopardize their hope of re-election for life.
When the administration concluded that the regime of Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against its own people, crossing the “red line” that Obama had said would provoke U.S. intervention, the President’s wanted congressional approval before launching a military response. That, though, was interpreted as his attempt to avoid taking action, confident that Congress would shrink from its constitutional role “to declare War”. Russia’s proposal that Assad eliminate its chemical weapons was embraced by Obama, and Congress was happy to do nothing, a role in which they are supremely accomplished and which they have continued to perform for over two years since.
That has left in place only the AUMF, an Authorization for Use of Military Force that permits action only against those involved in “the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001”. That description does not fit today’s enemies. Obama is thus acting on his own, unconstitutionally, yet is blamed for not taking more decisive action. Three years on in the Syrian civil war, the excuse for inaction as expressed by McConnell (and this was after the Paris attacks) is that Obama “still has not laid out a strategy”. Some 8,000 bombing runs and the insertion of a limited number of special op troops is, so far, the strategy that has apparently gone unnoticed by McConnell. His demand that the Commander in Chief apply to the Senate for approval of his war plans is, of course, the continuing excuse for doing nothing.
Nov 29 2015 | Posted in
Policy |
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The New York Times this past week ran a three day investigative series on the now near universal preemption by corporations of consumer access to the U.S. justice system for resolution of disputes. Filling seven pages of the Times large format print edition, the paper found that Americans are almost entirely unaware that, when they do business with U.S. corporations, they are signing away a constitutional right — that is, until they have a problem.
If you’ve been a subscriber to LetsFixThisCountry for a time, you know about the problem. Back in May of 2013 we raised a red flag with a 1,400 word article titled, “Think You Can Take It To Court? Think Again” that began:
It controls your checking account; it governs your brokerage account; it’s in those “terms” on the internet to which you clicked “Accept”; it’s in the contract with your cable company, your cell phone service; it’s probably in your mortgage’s fine print or any other loan agreement; it’s even in the contracts you signed with local merchants such as a gym or a tanning salon; and you can be sure it governs every credit card in your wallet or handbag. What we are writing of, as if it were a fungus or invasive species, is the fine print to which you effectively agreed when you signed on for any of these services — terms that stipulated that any dispute may be resolved only by arbitration, a process whereby an arbitrator will be assigned to hear the claims of parties to a dispute and will have the sole power to decide who wins.
The Times expands on this with a number of personal stories of people left helpless against megacorps. In 2013, in what we called “another of Supreme Court’s dreadful decisions”, the justices made things immeasurably worse by allowing the fine print of corporate contracts that we never read to ban the individual consumer from starting or joining a class action suit, leaving individuals no chance whatever to contest huge American corporations on their own.
This May we ran a follow-up titled, “Maybe You’ll Have Your Day in Court Again”. There was a glimmer of hope when the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau issued a 728-page report (mandated by Dodd-Frank) that raised the alarm. Happily, that apparently has not simply simply gathered dust, says this item in the National Law Review, reporting that the CFPB intends to fight the class action prohibition.
The surreptitious takeover by corporations has deprived you of what you probably thought was a fundamental right — your access to the courts. Read about what has happened to you in these two articles of ours, and here are links to the Times valiant work (can we mention again that we led by two-and-a-half years?) which we’ll tag Sunday, Monday and Tuesday for when they appeared.
Nov 6 2015 | Posted in
Law |
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About this time four years ago in the run-up to the 2012 elections, Bloomberg/BusinessWeek ran an article titled, “The GOP Heads Straight for the Laffer Curve”, the notion that cutting
income taxes results in higher government revenues. Leaving money in the public pocket spurs investment, growth and higher taxable incomes that, despite reduced tax rates, throw off more income than the higher tax rates they replace and more than pay for themselves.
Lacking any conclusive proof that this is true, this brainstorm of economist Arthur Laffer has nonetheless become an unquestioned article of faith for Republicans, even though rejected by economists of all political persuasions. Laffer preaches economic gospel from his offices in Nashville and whom The New York Times dubbed “the Reagan era economist and godfather of supply-side economics”. The experiment that Republicans wish to apply to nothing less than the entire budget and revenue streams of the United States was literally born on a cloth napkin over dinner at the Hotel Washington in DC in 1974. Laffer was demonstrating his idea at dinner with a couple of government types named Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, well before the ascendancy of either of them to the vice presidency for one, and chief of staff and defense secretary for the other.
So why has this notion that Democrats consider voodoo proved so durable? Without it, without the ability to claim that tax cuts bring in more revenue, not less, how could conservatives make a case for cutting taxes while simultaneously railing against the $18 trillion-plus national debt that the cuts would aggravate still further?
But in this campaign, the Republican candidates seem to have all but given up on this counter-intuitive exercise in magical thinking. They are instead competing with each other with tax cuts so deep that they can no longer pretend they are not adding trillions of dollars to the national debt.
A companion cardinal principle is that higher taxes reduce the incentive to work. You can just about make this out in Laffer’s notes on the napkin (“We’ve been taxing taxing work, output and employment…”) 
The original napkin, dedicated to Rumsfeld
“High tax rates stifle innovation, work, investment and American competitiveness”, says Stephen Moore in the Weekly Standard”, Bill Kristol’s magazine. Cut taxes and people work harder, producing higher taxable income.
This is assuredly true in the extremes — at the 90% maximum tax rate of the Eisenhower years, top earners probably threw up their hands and said, why bother — but otherwise this smacks of standard economists’ doctrine where if one line on the blackboard goes up, the other must come down, as if it were a Newtonian law of physics. This ignores the fact that we have no option other than to work to support ourselves and put our kids through college no matter whether tax rates rise or fall. Laffer seems to presume that we’ve been free to exercise discretion in whether or not to work hard in reaction to today’s taxes rates, that in a kind of Pavlovian reaction, we will surge forward if taxes are cut with a burst of new-found energy and productivity, with the government making more money from our expanded effort.
An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal tells us, “A higher rate on the next dollar a worker earns discourages him from working more. The highest tax bracket is especially important as top earners produce the most and innovate the most”. That questionable assertion is the rationale for cutting the tax rates for top earners, far and away the group that benefits the most from the reform proposals of all the candidates.
Jeb Bush would cut the top rate from 39.6% to 28%. He wants symbolically to match Reagan’s 1981 cuts. So do Kasich and Christie . Trump would make the top rate 25%, as would Jindal. As a sort who probably haven’t been near a form 1040 in years, all make a fetish of cutting the number of tax brackets from the current 7 to, usually, 3 — as if that’s what make taxes complicated rather than the 74,000 page tax code that Carly Fiorina wants to cut to three pages.
Let’s make it really simple with a single rate, say the others who have announced plans. They want a single “flat tax” rate for all: 20% for Santorum, 15% for Carson, 14.5% for Paul, 10% for Cruz. Huckabee would do away with income taxes altogether, substituting a 23% national sales tax. All would cut corporate rates from the current 35% to as little as 0% (Jindal).
It’s easy to see that the Laffer Curve can’t come to the rescue, and why none of the candidates is making much of an attempt to pretend that these steep tax cuts will lead to such growth that tax receipts will soar beyond the lost revenue of the cuts. Instead they are counting on a new gimmick in budget forecasting called “dynamic scoring” to somewhat ameliorate the runaway debt their plans produce. The argument is that if taxes are cut, growth will follow and it’s only fair that forecasting should factor that in, even though there is nothing consistent in past experience to go on, and the amount of growth to plug in is whatever you hit on the dartboard.
So while the Tax Foundation says Jeb Bush’s plan would produce a $3.6 added deficit over 10 years, he says that growth would back that down to $1.6 trillion. We don’t see Santorum’s true shortfall, because he cites an imagined net of $1.1 trillion “after increased growth and job creation” (and even that will be wiped clean with his cancelling Obamacare and its costs). Ted Cruz does the same, ducking the raw revenue loss of his 10% flat tax and assuming less than $1 trillion “with dynamic scoring” when, clearly, a universal tax rate so low would lead to government hemorrhaging. The only candidates not playing this game seem to be Jindal’s, whose flat tax would result in a $9 trillion 10-year deficit — a 22% drop in government revenues — and Trump’s plan which leads to a $10 trillion drop.
Even Marco Rubio, who went counter to the rest with a top tax rate of 35%, would run up a $4 trillion debt because of doing away with all taxes on capital gains and dividends and advancing a costly social program of child tax deductions.
As should be clear, the deeply reduced tax rates of the other candidates leaves the government with huge revenue losses so that the trillions can be transferred largely to their patrons in the top income class.
but it’s doctrine
The candidates may not be able to make extravagant Laffer Curve claims, but the indoctrinated still carry on. Republicans cite what followed the Reagan tax cuts as incontrovertible proof that reduced taxes produce the growth that brings in higher tax receipts. It’s a difficult case to make when the subject is the vast U.S. economy with so many other forces at play, but they need a mystical gospel to justify the tax cuts that attract votes. “When Reagan reduced the top marginal tax rate from 70 to 28 % in the 1980s, the Laffer Curve effect was indisputable. The economy exploded, tax revenues nearly doubled over the decade”, says Stephen Moore.
“Doubled” is an astonishingly dishonest claim because Moore used dollars unadjusted for inflation so he could compare 1980’s $517 billion to 1990’s $1,032 billion. This table, properly adjusted for inflation, proves him to be a charlatan (fiscal 1989 included as policy overlapping from Reagan’s last year; similarly, 1980 really belongs to Carter): 
No surprise that revenue in fact fell for the first few years as a consequence of the tax cuts and to such a degree that the 1986 Tax Reform Act had to raise taxes because the government was in trouble, but Moore doesn’t mention that.
Of Jeb Bush’s “growth” plan The Wall Street Journal said in September, “The Reagan tax reform cut the top rate to 28% from 50% [sic]. That reform helped to sustain the 1980s economic boom and set the stage for growth through the 1990s”. Thus does doctrine even claim that Reagan deserves the credit for Clinton’s boom years.
What about the Bush tax cuts? Are they used to prove the Laffer Curve? Revenue rose (see table) but, “For the last four years tax receipts have consistently come in below expectations…revenue remains far lower than anyone would have predicted before the tax cuts began”, wrote 
economist Paul Krugman in 2006. “In January 2001, before tax cuts were known, the budget office forecast $2.57 trillion in fiscal 2005. Even with the recent increase in receipts, the actual number will be at least $400 billion less.
What about now? Look at North Carolina, says Moore. In the 2012 election, Republicans took the governorship as well as control of the legislature. In 2013 they rapidly enacted tax cuts (and extreme voting right changes challenged by the Justice Department) that dropped the personal and corporate rates by a quarter. According to Moore, the state budget office says that, despite tax cuts, revenue increased by 6%, a Laffer triumph it would seem, but we’ve seen how Moore fudges data.
The state cut unemployment benefits to the lowest in the nation: from $535 weekly to $350 with no extensions beyond the minimum 20 weeks, the shortest in the country. Moore calls this “tough love” and says that owing to the peaceful, weekly Moral Monday demonstrations (this writer lives in North Carolina), “the state boiled over with rancorous political rallies”. The question, though, is whether the $2.8 billion saved by these cuts are being counted as revenue improperly attributed to the Laffer theory, which is tied only to tax cuts, not budget cuts.
what’s the matter with kansas
Which brings us to Kansas. Laffer himself was behind the current engineering of the recent Kansas’s experience. Governor Brownback set out to slash taxes; growth would more than make up the nominal reduction in government revenue. “We’ll see how it works”, said Brownback. “We’ll have a real live experiment”. The Republican legislature approved the various tax cuts in 2012 and 2013.
It did not go well. The radical tax cuts, with cuts in public services and a tax increase focused on lower income people, led to a $400 million budget, which in led this year to an embarrassing reversal, the largest tax hikes in Kansas history to cover the shortfall, passed by the legislature at 4AM one morning in May. “I think it’s clear that the tax cuts were promoted as having these quick and strongly positive results, and they haven’t”, says Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review.
Proof of its efficacy lacking and derided by economists though it be, the perpetrators of the Laffer Curve are nevertheless enjoying the success of their napkin doodle tremendously. Laffer, Rumsfeld and Cheney met again for lunch last year, 40 years later, at the same hotel to reminisce. They even made this video to flaunt what has so successfully given cover to the unabashed conservative drive all these years to dissociate ever lower taxes with ever higher debt.
Cheney holds up Laffer’s re-drawing at reunion lunch
Nov 4 2015 | Posted in
Taxes |
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Just as Jeb Bush moves to have brother George play a supporting role in his campaign, the Robert 
Redford film “Truth”, about the Dan Rather fiasco at “60 Minutes” in 2004, has sent the rightist media into fits.
The “60 Minutes” segment was intended to expose George W. Bush’s sketchy service record in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war, but as evidence it featured memos supposedly written by Lt. Bush’s commanding officer in 1972, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, that were quickly pronounced frauds. They were clearly produced on typewriters with features that didn’t exist in the ’70s, so said bloggers who pounced on the documents. The failure of Rather and the “60 Minutes” research people to spot those obvious differences was the stunner. The report, which aired just two months before the Bush vs. Kerry election, backfired so badly that Rather would lose his job after 24 years as anchor.
The “60 Minutes” segment (actually, “60 Minutes II”, which aired Wednesdays) was viewed as political revenge for the “Swiftboating” of John Kerry earlier in 2004. In that slander, a group primarily of veterans of the gunships that plied the Vietnam rivers had produced attack ads, funded by prominent Texas Republicans, Bush fundraisers among them, that challenged Kerry’s version of his service as a Swift boat commander in Vietnam and even the legitimacy of the combat medals awarded him. The ad campaign was revenge for Kerry’s speaking out against the Vietnam War in a famous appearance before Congress, never mind that these vets had not served alongside Kerry and were not eyewitnesses to their claims.
Throughout 2004 in the run-up to the election, print media and television news organizations had raised questions about Bush’s military performance. Were strings pulled to get him into the Texas guard unit, where’s the proof that he showed up for duty during the time he transferred to the Alabama national guard, was there the alleged pressure to “sugarcoat” his performance rating, is it true that he was grounded for failing to take his annual physical exam? The “60 Minutes” piece hoped to put all the pieces together and had the documents to prove them true.
taking the bait
“The only journalistic sin worse than disastrously misreporting an important story that turns out to be untrue is disastrously misreporting an important story that is true, so no one believes it anymore,” begins a current article about the movie at theintercept.com. That perfectly summarizes what happened after Rather’s “exposé” aired. The story became the memos, not Bush’s service, and the media newshounds went baying after where the memos came from and who perpetrated the fraud. Months of reporting by news organizations of Bush’s service gaps vaporized. The subject of Bush’s service became so infectious that no one would touch it again — until now with the movie’s release.
For a film to come along that could re-open examination of Bush’s military shortcomings has the right-wing media scrambling to once again bury the story. The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal moved outside contributors aside on the op-ed page so that one of
its own could write, “Dan Rather, Still Wrong After All These Years”. Ruppert Murdoch’s New York Post called the movie “wacko”. Fox News Sunday brought out Karl Rove to denounce the movie. Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard featured a lengthy critique titled “Rather Shameful”. And CBS has turned down a multi-million dollar advertising campaign for the movie by Sony Pictures, refusing to run the ads on its network. None made any attempts to refute the claims about Bush’s service, as the evidence is not on their side. Most simply devolved into a panning the movie. “It’s astounding how little truth there is in ‘Truth,'”, said a CBS spokesperson, going no further to support that claim.
avoidance
Rather’s report, with producer Mary Mapes, had two parts. The first had former speaker of the Texas house, Ben Barnes, admit that he made a well-placed phone call to help get Bush into the Texas Air National Guard “while others not from prominent or wealthy families died in Vietnam”, a regretful Barnes said on the program. Just 12 days from losing his student draft deferment upon graduation from Yale, Bush was accepted in late May 1968 into the Texas Guard, a “champagne” unit that met one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer and was unlikely to be transferred to Vietnam, where casualties were running 350 a week. The Washington Post reported in 1999 that “Bush had scored only 25% on a pilot aptitude test, the lowest acceptable grade”, leapfrogging several hundred who not only had most likely scored higher, but who were ahead of him on the waiting list. “But his father was then a Congressman from Houston, and the commanders of the Texas Guard clearly had an appreciation of politics.”
Dorothy Rabinowitz, in the Journal‘s op-ed, says Barnes had admitted that he did not know whether his phone call had any effect and an independent review panel found that Bush didn’t jump the line because there was no line. The Weekly Standard‘s piece cites the same panel in claiming the unit was “hurting for pilots.”
Either way, it was “a unit which was put together for the specific purpose of making sure that people who joined that unit wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam”, says Rather. (It’s fair to remind that Rather did not have all his facts wrong.) As corroboration, in the 1988 presidential race, Republicans went after Lloyd Bentsen, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in Michael Dukakis’s campaign, for having pulled strings to get his son into that same Texas guard unit so that he would not have to serve in Vietnam. One of the men in the unit at the same time as Bentsen’s son was George W. Bush.
Many joined national guard units then because, unlike in the Iraq War, few were deployed to combat roles. In that same election, no less than the Republican vice-presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush’s running-mate Dan Quayle, had ducked into an Indiana guard unit and was immediately accused of using his wealthy family’s connections to avoid Vietnam. But this time the one accused of avoiding Vietnam was George Bush Jr. seeking re-election as Commander in Chief of the entire U.S. military.
Once asked by a reporter whether he tried to avoid the draft, Bush grinned and said, “Hell, no. Do you think I’m going to admit that?”
grounded
The second part of Rather’s exposé hoped to document that Bush had been grounded for failure to report for flight training and the mandatory pilots’ annual physical. There it was in black and white in a memo dated 1 August 1972:
“Failure to accomplish annual medical examination”…”On this date I ordered that 1st Lt. Bush be suspended from flight status due to failure to perform to USAF/TexANG standards and failure to meet annual physical examination…as ordered…Officer has made no attempt to meet his training certification or flight physical”.
Except that bloggers immediately spotted the varied-width spacing given to letters (“m” and “w” wider than the rest, “I” and “l” narrower) on the page, a feature they said didn’t exist in the 1970s. That was enough to bury the “60 Minutes” report in doubt as truth took a back seat to scandal. Never mind that there was a typewriter with proportional character spacing , the IBM “Executive”. (This writer typed an entire instructional manual — copyright 1975 — on that typewriter but its font doesn’t quite match the memos displayed on “60 Minutes”. But that may be because since CBS had only faxed and photocopied duplicates which could have introduced slight distortion). [5]
The public took away from the outcry about paper forgeries that the contents of the memos, too, were lies. But they were not. Their content was accurate. The paragraph above from the memo “60 Minutes” displayed claiming that Bush was grounded? Here is the actual order, which no one else in the media seems to have:
Anyone who has been around military paperwork (as has this writer) will recognize this as authentic in language and graphic style.
the secretary
“Rather Shameful” cites a New York Times headline from the week after the broadcast that read, “Memos on Bush are fake but accurate, typist says”, but the authors glide right on past” typist”, instead grousing that “the Times got it half right; the story was fake, but it was also inaccurate”. But it wasn’t.
Marian Carr Knox was not a “typist”. She was secretary to Col. Killian, Bush’s commanding officer. She had worked alongside the pilots at Ellington for two decades and told “60 Minutes II” that Killian had started what he called a cover your back file of memos about the problems with Mr. Bush’s performance.
Killian’s family said the memo files never existed, The Weekly Standard assures us. At the time of the broadcast, Col. Killian’s son said that his father never wrote such memos. Ms. Knox said of the younger man, who was not involved, “He has no way of knowing”. About the memos, the Times article quotes Ms. Knox saying, “The information in them is correct”. She had typed memos like them containing “the same information”.
She confirmed that Bush was ordered to take the annual physical required of all pilots. When he failed to show up, Bush thus disobeyed a direct order from his commanding officer. “It was a big no-no to not follow orders. I can’t remember anyone refusing”. More than a “no-no”, it is a court martial offense.
Ms. Knox confirmed what the other memos said: that Killian was being pressured to give Bush a positive officer training report. She also attested to what has been widely averred, that Bush had skipped many weekend drills. For the other pilots, “It was sort of gossip around there, and they’d snicker about what Lt. Bush was getting away with. There was even a resentment. Plain and simple, Bush didn’t think he had to abide by the rules that others did”, was her blunt assessment.
Grounded for Missed Medical — or Was it Something Else?
In a New York Times interview, retired Lt. Col. Bill Burkett claimed he saw some of Bush’s military records being destroyed in the mid-1990s. Bush’s file was sanitized of embarrassing information, Burkett alleges, at the direction of Daniel James III, who headed the Texas National Guard when Burkett was his chief military adviser and Bush was governor of Texas. Relying on Burkett’s account is rather shaky. It was he who supplied the memos to “60 Minutes”, then gave three versions of where he had gotten them, and later admitted to the CBS anchor that he had lied about it.
Curious, though, that as president, Bush in 2000 appointed James to head the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C. An investigation by The Spokesman-Review of Spokane made a case for Bush having been grounded by the Human Reliability Program, a set of regulations used “to screen military personnel for their mental, physical and emotional fitness before granting them access to nuclear weapons and delivery systems”. The mission of the Texas Guard and units like it was to protect U.S. air space during the Cold War. The F102s flown by Bush pulled round-the-clock runway alert duty and could be fitted out with air-to-air nuclear-tipped missiles intended to destroy Soviet bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The Bureau would not answer the Spokesman-Review’s questions. Defense Department officials had directed the Bureau not to respond to questions about Bush’s military records.
In April 1972 the military began drug and alcohol testing for the first time. Bush himself has said, during the 2000 campaign, that he quit drinking in 1986 and had not used any illegal drugs since 1974 — which was after the end of his military service.Bush never flew again from May 1972 forward. Once grounded in August 1972, Bush never flew for the Guard again, after taxpayers had spent $1 million in 1970s money to train him. He never released his service records and has never attempted to refute the allegations about his service failings.
Nov 1 2015 | Posted in
Politics |
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On departing the Texas Air National Guard for Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend the Harvard Business School, George W. Bush signed a document that said:
“It is my responsibility to locate and be assigned to another Reserve forces unit…If I fail to do so I am subject to involuntary order to active duty for up to 24 months.”
He had eight months to go to fulfill his service obligation. The Boston Globe, which uncovered this pledge, reported on the same day of September 2004 as Dan Rather’s “60 Minutes II” exposé (adjacent story) that Bush then never signed up with a Boston-area unit. But the media chased after the claim of forgeries and fraud rather than the substance of Bush’s service record. The Globe‘s efforts were eclipsed.
The pledge was standard issue for guardsmen. In return for permission to relocate, guard members pledged to find and join a unit there and continue service.
The Globe was at the forefront in shredding claims by President Bush that he fulfilled his service obligation. In addition to the article published concurrent with the “60 Minutes” program, the newspaper had placed online a dozen articles from its ongoing investigation going back to May 2000. Dan Bartlett, White House communications director, had told The Washington Post in a 1999 interview that George W. Bush had joined a Boston area Air Force Reserve unit to complete the eight months remaining in his six-year contract with the U.S. military. Confronted with its findings, The Globe quotes Bartlett as saying, “I must have misspoke”.
The Globe‘s probe into Bush’s disappearances during a 6-year requirement followed a month in which the media was entirely distracted by a smear campaign against Kerry’s service record. Squabbling over whether or not Kerry should have gotten Purple Hearts, versus documents attesting to Kerry’s brave and honorable service, the media had managed to completely ignore the George W. Bush cover-up of his own service. To Bartlett, the Globe and “60 Minutes” reporting was just “dirty politics” 55 days before the election, whereas the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth takedowns of John Kerry 80 days before the election were apparently just good, clean fun.
Bush’s Years of Living Dangerously
In a February 8th interview in 2004 on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, George Bush told Tim Russert, “I served in the National Guard, flew F102 aircraft, got an honorable discharge, put in my time, proudly so.” But had he – fully – put in his time? There are questions about whether he served at all during the last two years of his six-year commitment.
The Pentagon refused to release his complete service record which left the media to ferret out pieces of the missing puzzle. Apart from the failure to report in the Boston-Cambridge area, there was the Alabama question.
During his 6-year service commitment span, Bush went in May 1972 to Alabama to work on a political campaign of interest to his dad. Just as required in his transfer to Cambridge, he would have needed to sign up with Alabama’s guard while away from Texas. Neither The Boston Globe nor the Associated Press could come up with any evidence that Bush reported for duty in Alabama that summer and fall. “To my knowledge, he never showed up,” then-base commander, Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, told The Globe “If we had had a first lieutenant from Texas, I would have remembered.'”
Neither his administrative officer at the time, Kenneth Lott, nor the then-squadron operations officer of the Alabama Guard have any recollection 
of having seen Bush, according to The New Republic. In fact, no one who served at the Alabama unit remembers a George W. Bush at all. Neither do his attendance records for 1972 remember him — the numbers down the right column of the insert at left are points earned by attending each weekend session — 4 points per weekend — and they show zero for Bush from May through September. Perhaps more to the point, he could not have attended sessions in Alabama those five months without having been officially transferred — the military is punctilious about such matters — and his transfer from the the Texas Guard to an Alabama squadron was not approved until September 1972. That raises the question of whether Bush simply left in May for Alabama without clearance from the Texas unit and that his absence was simply papered over months later.
Federal law stipulated that a Guard officer miss no more than 10% of training sessions in a fiscal year, and absences beyond that could not be carried forward or backward to other years. Air Force policy required that a missed session be made up within a span of 15 days before a planned absence to 30 days after. A Guardsman in violation of these limits was subject to various punitive measures, chief among them a transfer to active duty for up to 24 months.
These rules were adhered to with added stringency for pilots, owing to the high taxpayer cost of their training.
Failure to report outside these limits was classified as absence without leave (AWOL), and Bush failed to report for a five-month stretch beginning in May 1972. White House insistence that these missed sessions were made up at later dates would have violated the 15- and 30-day limit cited above. In any case, no subsequent attendance records support the White House claim.
In that “Meet the Press” interview, Bush said, “There may be no evidence but I did report. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been honorably discharged”. First, the military keeps meticulous daily records of the whereabouts of everyone (this writer typed such “morning reports” around that time). Second, dishonorable discharges are so damaging to one’s future that honorable discharges are routinely given and are no proof of continuous service. On that, the White House sought to mislead an unknowing public; one needed to almost commit murder to earn a dishonorable.
More Regulations Violated
In the first half of 1973, according to attendance records below, Bush was twice allowed to cram three weekends into a single month — in advance of the two months following January and July, when he would not attend at all. This was in violation of the 15- and 30-day regulation if, indeed, he attended at all. The Boston Globe reported that nobody connected with the Texas unit recalls seeing Bush during these cram sessions, leading to suspicions that Bush was given credits for active duty he did not perform. That looks to be the case from the following:
George W Bush asked to be discharged from the Texas Guard to attend the Harvard Business School in a letter dated Sep. 5, 1973. That resulted in his transfer from the protective cocoon of the Texas Guard to the Air Reserve Personnel Center (ARPC) in Denver, the national headquarters that had no interest in coddling Texas’ favorite sons.
ARPC had already demanded of Texas on June 29 that, “ratings must be entered on this officer”, for whom neither mandatory evaluations nor medical exams were on record for over a year. The Texas unit had on 3 May 1973 written in an Officer Effectiveness Report that, “Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit”, that he had “cleared this base on 15 May 1972”. 
Yet simultaneous with these documents, as well as for months before and after, the Texas unit was awarding Lt. Bush attendance credits — the “12”s and “4”s seen at left. Texas would finally report to ARPC that George W Bush was “not rated for the period 1 May 72 through 30 Apr 73”.
Was Bush a Deserter?
Once ARPC in Denver conducted its standard performance review and discovered that the Texas Guard could not account for Bush’s whereabouts for an entire year,and that Bush’s ratings and medical records were not up to date, it could not rate him, as shown below, and could only classify him as a “non-locatee”,
its euphemism for deserter. This was reinforced by the Center’s many attempts during the remaining nine months of his obligation to find George W. Bush through written communications to a number of addresses. Bush never filed an address with Denver; Denver did not know where he was.
This led to ARPC transferring Bush to “Inactive” status as a “non-locatee” around Jan. 30, 1974, an action that would transfer him to his local draft board in Houston for induction into active service. That, of course, never happened. More than anyone, researcher Paul Lukasiak doggedly pursued the issue.of Bush’s military service. He concluded,
“If, as the record indicates, ‘strings were pulled’ after the Houston draft board found out about Bush’s situation, it would behoove the string-pullers to involve as few people as possible in ‘cleaning up’ Bush’s records. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the last three documents found in the Bush files have one name, and one name only, associated with them,”
That one name was a Capt. Kostelny, who, interestingly, signed none of them.
None of Our Business
Bush answered “Yeah” when Tim Russert asked in the Feb. 8 “Meet the Press” interview if he would allow to be released “pay stubs, tax records, anything to show that you were serving during that period”. The White House then quickly released a sheaf of documents (including Bush’s Yale transcript with the grades blacked out) that included military records that entirely skirted the controversial 1972-73 period.
In early July, in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from numerous newsgathering organizations, the Defense Department announced that microfilmed payroll records in Denver covering Bush’s disputed service period had been inadvertently destroyed. There had been no mention of this alleged mishap when the White House released its dossier in February after the Russert interview, even though payroll records for the period were conspicuously missing. Defense then deflected any further questions, saying they would require a new FOIA application.
Nov 1 2015 | Posted in
Politics |
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