when you have jesus, you have the great american voting public. they don't care about viet nam. they hate atheists. kerry, to them, is an atheist. it appears hopeless.

As he did in '72 he did in '01. No difference, except the whole nation was watching in '01 when he disappeared for most of the day and then addressed a frightened nation by videotape from a safe undisclosed bunker somewhere. Wish he had stayed there.

Jo, do you have a working link for that “more sinister” explanation for ARPC’s failure to hold Bush to the fire over his shirking of duty post Alabama? Is he alluding to that link you posted a couple of weeks back, dense in paperwork excerpts, that showed that, without saying as much, the ARPC was clearly considering Bush a deserter when they couldn't get in touch with him at HBS, and that the discharge date and change of MOS to Executive Support were probably put in after the fact by someone at ARPC to cover Bush's ass?

This is a wonderful document but it illustrates precisely the problem with making an issue of this: with 184 footnotes in 34 pages and heavy in military jargon, it requires a graduate degree in the bureaucratic arcana of military personnel practices to really follow (we barely could). The Bush campaign knows damn well that many things in W’s records can easily be taken out of context to make him look good.

Hopefully, tonight’s 60 Minutes II will have solved that problem.

What I don't understand as a veteran is how many of the vets are supportive of Bush when it is clear from Shrub's record that he was a dirtbag even by standards for enlisted soldiers much less officers.

There is simply no excuse for missing a drill other than a family emergency or serious illness, let alone missing a required physical that impacts a unit's readiness.

The only difference between '72 and '01 is that in '72, he had 'buddies' covering his ass and doing his duty for him while he took time off and partied in Birmingham. In '01, there was no one to cover for the little shirker.

"In '01, there was no one to cover for the little shirker."

Um ... the "liberal media" have done yeoman work to cover for the little shirker for almost three years now. Don't they deserve a bit of recognition?

The "24-hour active alert" of Oct. 6, 1972, coincided with the Yom Kippur War -- the last time, to my knowledge, we increased DEFCONS. I know we were flushing F-4s from our active inventory to the Israelis (where they would reconfigure them). We needed fighter-interceptors to pick up missions during that critical period.

1. Timely
   
2. Strategery
   
3. Webb wins
   
4. Huh?
   
5. Bunnypants in Bagdad
   
6. Outage
   
7. Filthy Lucre Watch
   
8. Playing the numbers
   
9. My letter to Countdown
   
10. Jefferson's Nigerian Scams