According to the Washington Post, a bronze bust of young lieutenant G.W. Bush was unveiled Thursday, Feb. 9th at National Guard Headquarters. He is, the article said, probably its most famous alumnus. Perhaps it should have said the most infamous.

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"I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well-placed... managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units...Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country."
From Colin Powell’s autobiography, My American Journey, p. 148

According to the Washington Post, a bronze bust of young lieutenant G.W. Bush was unveiled Thursday, Feb. 9th by the National Guard Association of the United States at the National Guard Memorial Building in Washington D.C. He is, the article said, probably its most famous alumnus.

Perhaps it should have said the most infamous.

" I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."

George W. Bush

What a travesty!! What an insult to all the Guardsmen risking their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq today! A statue of any one of them would be more honest.

George Bush (with a little help from Daddy’s friends) joined the Texas Air National Guard to escape having to go to Vietnam. Guardsmen today cannot escape the war their commander-in-chief lied them into by enlisting in the Guard rather than in the regular military as the lucky could at the time G.W. enlisted. And, thanks to “stop loss” many of them are having to risk their lives in more than one tour of duty in what General McPeak calls Bush’s “vanity war.”

Would Bush have been so quick to go to war if he actually knew anything about combat? Many soldiers, parents, and veterans (including some generals like General Zinni who knew combat and who thought this war would be a tragic mistake) would like to know.

Lt. Colonel Jerry Killian was the head of the 147th fighter interceptor squadron to which Bush was assigned in Houston in 1970. According to Mary Mapes and others, in April 1972 Bush walked away from the Guard. Killian tried to get him back, ordered him to take a physical, worked with him to try to get him to show up for alternative guard duty, and then was pressured by his superiors to fill in paperwork that would get Bush off the hook for having been gone for a year and a half.

G.W. Bush served his country neither honorably nor well. His fellow guardsmen in both Texas and Alabama offered rewards for anyone who remembered seeing Bush show up for duty during long stretches of his service.

It would seem that nearly all of his fellow Guardsmen would remember serving with a congressman’s son. Especially one as cocky and as much of a partier as G.W. always was. But, Bush apologists would have us believe that men who served honorably in the Guard – even some who are Republicans and voted for Bush -- are all liars, and the proven liar (about nearly everything), G.W. Bush, is telling the truth.

In fact, Bush says very little about his service.

Ben Barnes, who admits that he interceded to get young Bush into the champagne unit of the Texas Air National Guard has since expressed regret over that intervention, and guilt about the young men who may have died in Vietnam because of his intervention on behalf of men from prestigious families.

It has been suggested that Bush’s military records were scrubbed (and words are blacked out in Bush’s records) some, possibly, to cover up arrests that should have kept him out of the Guard. But, Bush did what he always does in such circumstances; Promoted the person most likely to know the truth about such allegations.

In 2002, he promoted Lt. General Daniel James III, head of the Texas Air National Guard at the time of the alleged scrubbing, to head the national Air National Guard. http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/2002/05/28_scrubbed.html

Mary Mapes, the longtime CBS producer fired over the 60 Minutes segment on Bush’s military records and the allegations that he received preferential treatment to get into the TANG has written a book “Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and The Privilege of Power” about the 60 Minutes debacle, and was interviewed on Democracy Now, on Feb. 9th and 10th 2006. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/10/1434202
She believes the documents she used on that now infamous “60 Minutes” segment are authentic. She says they have never been proven not to be. She believes her firing was political.

The CBS story was investigated by men who had worked in the Reagan and Bush,Sr. White House. She believes the CEO of Viacom, parent company of CBS, was afraid of retribution from the White House if “60 Minutes” stood firm with the story. The White House itself never disputed the documents. They didn’t have to. The right wing echo chamber did it for them. And “60 Minutes” and Viacom caved to their bellicose, bullying techniques.
In 1972, Bush needed to leave Texas, possibly (some Texans say) because he was getting into so much trouble there. He asked permission to transfer to an Alabama unit, so he could work on the political campaign of “Red” Blount. But he left for Alabama before that permission was granted. He finally received permission to transfer five months after the fact, but we know Col. Turnipseed did not remember Bush reporting for duty.

Glynn Wilson wrote an extensive article on Bush’s “lost year” in Alabama in 1972 in the Feb. 2, 2004, “Southerner Daily News.” http://www.southerner.net/blog/awolbush.html

We know Bush was grounded from flying for the last three years of his service, and that after May of 1971, he never took another physical examination while in the Guard.

He received an honorable discharge, and that proves, he says, that he did his duty.

No. It proves he was well-connected and knew he did not have to play by the rules others did. Killian’s secretary said as much in the 60 Minutes interview in which she disputed the authenticity of the documents “60 Minutes” had brought forward. She said he was charming to her, but he seemed to think he was above the rules everyone else had to live by, and the other Guardsmen resented it.

But even though she did not believe the actual documents were authentic, she did believe the information contained within them was correct.

Bush’s entire life had been and continues to be about never having to face consequences. Because of who his Daddy is, and because of the broadcast media, which has been his chief enabler throughout his political career, the consequences that would be meted out to poor, less well-connected men were somehow never applied to G.W. He even became president after losing a presidential election because the contested state was the one in which his brother served as governor, and its secretary of state was his Florida campaign manager. We know his brother and Ms. Harris removed the names of tens of thousands of legal black voters from the Florida voter rolls prior to the election to ensure fewer votes would be cast by black people, 90% of whom vote for Democrats.

Such chicanery is standard operating procedure in Bush’s life, and always has been.

If Wilson’s article is correct, Bush actually bragged about the cops picking him up for drunk driving “all the time” in New Haven when he was a student at Yale, but letting him go when they found out who he was. He has always known – his life itself is the proof -- that the rules that apply to others do not apply to him.

Besides, an honorable discharge is not automatic proof of service or character. The Washington D.C. sniper, a Gulf War veteran, received an honorable discharge in spite of two summary courts-martial.

However, as a BuzzFlash.com reader observed in “Supreme Irony” May 24, 2002, the most salient fact regarding George Bush’s military service is that Bush was a fighter pilot for the Texas Air National Guard, and by all accounts, for a time at least (he, reportedly, later had problems, especially with landings, and was put back on a trainer plane – “Fear of Flying,” the Nation Sept. 29, 2004) a good one. As such he undoubtedly flew mock intercepts. Therefore the “supreme and sad irony” is that he is the one president, who in the summer of 2001-- when the increased “chatter” about terrorist attacks had George Tenet’s “hair on fire” and Richard Clark frantic with concern – was uniquely qualified to have known what precautionary actions to take; Especially after he received numerous presidential daily briefings warning that something was up, including the PDB on August 6th titled “Bin Ladin determined to strike in US”

An engaged president, even one who hadn’t served in the air national guard, after receiving the August 6th briefing, at the very least would have put the air national guard on high alert and ordered fighter jets up 24/7. But, Bush did nothing.

So, Bush actually went AWOL twice. Once when he failed to perform his duties in the Air National Guard for-- even the White House cannot deny -- at least several months, and the infinitely more important 2nd time when despite the increased “chatter” in the summer of 2001 and numerous warnings from our own and foreign government officials, he did not interrupt his month long vacation in Texas to put the ANG on “high alert” or to take any other steps that might have prevented the tragedy of 9/11.

[from awolbush]
Decide for yourself. At awolbush copies of Bush's military documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act can be viewed.

· Suspended from flying August 1972...

· Annual Officer Effectiveness Report, 5/2/73: "Not Observed" from May 1, 1972 to April 30, 1973...

· In June of 1973, Air Force HQ asks for more information...

· ...and in November, Major Rufus Martin tells them he has none to give.

The rest of the documents
obtained through FOIA by Martin Heldt can also be viewed at awolbush and other sites on the net.

The late, great, Col. Hackworth who was against going to war with Iraq, wrote in “Once More a Nation Divided” that we should stop sniping at each other over the Vietnam War and the military records of Bush and Kerry – we should let it go. He defended both Bush and Kerry’s service, but heaped contempt on the Swift Boat liars.

I respected Hackworth. I would have let it go. Until the statue! Until, once again the spinmasters are trying to make Bush a hero. Something he definitely is not.

And now a bronze bust of this cowardly failure as a Guardsman; the man who would not go to war and who walked away from stateside duty, the man who lied this nation into a war from which his family and campaign contributors are profiting financially, the man who has made our soldiers less safe by promoting torture, the man who has tried to cut military and veterans’ pay and benefits at every juncture, and who said he would veto the bill co-sponsored by John Kerry that would pay for body armor for those Bush put in harms way by asking the rich (a group which includes both Bush and Kerry) to forego a small percentage of their tax cut for one year, the man who had the gall to stand and challenge the terrorists to “bring it on,” a statement that many parents and soldiers said they wanted to wring his “f---ing neck” for – has been given a place of honor in Washington, along side those who DID serve honorably.

What a travesty! What a sad joke. The man who has destroyed our country and dragged her honor through the mud should be immortalized, if at all, in orange prison garb and in shackles.

To read more articles on Bush’s non-service go to awolbush, http://www.awolbush.com/ topplebush, http://www.topplebush.com/militaryrecord.shtml and BushWatch, http://bushwatch.org/awol.htm

Authors Bio:

Lonna Gooden VanHorn was born and raised on a small farm in Minnesota. She is the mother of 6, a grandmother, and the wife of a Vietnam veteran.



Formerly a person who did not "get involved" in controversy, the constant lies and deceit of the Bush administration have motivated her to become a trouble maker in her old age.



Archives of some of her articles may be accessed "here"

"here" and "here"

Click here to view her "book on wheels"



Activist, Mother of six. Wife of a Vietnam veteran.