Blue Blood Bush steals $1Million from taxpayers

By now everyone knows that George W Bush used his blue blood lineage to get into the National Guard to avoid the draft. Avoiding the draft is what many did at that time to avoid going to Viet Nam, so, by itself, taking advantage of what options one had to avoid the draft is not, by itself, an issue. What happened from that point on is.

Numerous documents have come to light showing that Mr Bush failed to fulfill his obligations and was AWOL for about half the time he was supposed to be serving his country.

The following, printed in today's NY Times, is rather telling:

One fall day in 1973, when Mr. Bush was a new student at Harvard Business School, he was wearing a Guard jacket when he ran into one of his professors. The professor, Yoshi Tsurumi, says he asked Mr. Bush how he wangled a spot in the Guard.

"He said his daddy had good friends who got him in despite the long waiting list," recalls Professor Tsurumi, who is now at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. Professor Tsurumi says he next asked Mr. Bush how he could have already finished his National Guard commitment. "He said he'd gotten an early honorable discharge," Professor Tsurumi recalls. "I said, 'How did you manage that?' "

"He said, oh, his daddy had a good friend," Mr. Tsurumi said. "Then we started talking about the Vietnam War. He was all for fighting it."

Professor Tsurumi says he remembers Mr. Bush so vividly because he was always making outrageous statements: denouncing the New Deal as socialist, calling the S.E.C. an impediment to business, referring to the civil rights movement as "socialist/communist" and declaring that "people are poor because they're lazy."

From what has come to light so far, it would appear that in 1972 something went badly wrong. The politest comment being made so far is that perhaps "Mr. Bush went through personal difficulties that he's embarrassed to talk about today." Mr. Bush's performance ratings deteriorated, he skipped his flight physical, he stopped flying military planes forever, he transferred to Alabama, and he did not report to certain drills there as ordered. Mr. Bush was a no-show at required drills.

The next year Mr. Bush skipped off to Harvard Business School. He still had almost another year in the Guard he had promised to serve, but he drifted away, after taxpayers had spent $1 million training him, and he never entirely fulfilled his obligations.