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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Or, alternatively, he supported the war because he thought it was right and consistent what he had been saying since 1998. Then he started to tact for political purposes.

The more usual criticism of him is that he didn't support the war, but voted for it to maintain his political viability.

I wasn't trying to persuade you that he was right. My point was that it's logically consistent.

I suspect not. It has been in most of his recent speeches. It's the new new thing. He said yesterday in a speech that it is wrong that we are building firehouses in Iraq and closing them here. His new tact seems to be to argue that the money for the war is better spent in the US. That is a legitimate position to have, but not given his prior statements. And if he has that position, then he should just come out and say that he is against the Bush policy of "staying the course."

Please recall that the party line before the war was that it wouldn't cost this much. Remember how Iraqi oil was going to pay for it all?

You seem to think that he wants to cut and run. I don't see any sign of that. I think he's trying to get elected without making promises that he'll regret later. The sad truth is that we're going to be stuck there for a while, trying to make it work.

It is, however, a crying shame that Bush is asking National Guardsmen and Reservists to make sacrifices that he will not ask the rich (or as he calls them, his base) to make.

Which one?

We've been arguing about whether there's more than one, but instead of backing it up, you're back to a cute two-word answer.

And as I said in my PM, we can agree to disagree. It's very hard to convince anyone of anything on these board. In that regard, do you still believe the NG documents are real?

I tend to doubt it, but I haven't followed it closely the last few days so I don't know the latest details, and I heard on the radio tonight (NPR -- either All Things Considered or Marketplace) that CBS still stands by its reporting, which I don't get and makes me thinks there's still something going on I don't understand.

On the broader question of Bush's service and deriliction thereof, there was a damaging new document released in the last few days -- something else the White House hadn't released! Imagine! -- that the conservative bloggers I've checked have been studiously ignoring. Kevin Drum does a nice recap of the state of play:

BUSH AND THE MEMOS....One of the reasons I'm annoyed by the whole Killian memo fiasco is that even if they're real they don't really add much to the story. After all, here's what we already know:

• [1]Former Texas Speaker of the House Ben Barnes pulled strings in 1968 to get George Bush into the National Guard so that he could avoid the draft. This isn't something Barnes just cooked up recently for Dan Rather, either. He testified under oath about it five years ago.
  
  [2]In early 1972, with two years still left on Bush's Guard commitment, something happened. Nobody knows what happened, but for some reason he started flying again in training jets that he had graduated from two years previously; he began putting in simulator time; he had trouble making landings; and in April 1972 he made his last flight. He then refused to take his required annual physical and was subsequently grounded.
  
  [3]In May 1972, Bush left for Alabama and disappeared from the Guard. He showed up for no drills for the next five months, and, contrary to White House statements, he never made up these missed drills.
  
  [4]Bush returned to Texas in late 1972, but in May 1973 his superior officers in Houston (one of whom was the now famous Jerry Killian) refused to rate Bush, saying he "has not been observed at this unit" for the past 12 months.
  
  Oddly, though, official payroll records show that Bush was getting paid for attending drills during this period. The problem is that the payroll records documenting his attendance are completely screwy: Bush is credited for the wrong kind of attendance on some dates, he's given the wrong number of points for others, and weekday duty is frequently confused with weekend duty. What's more, even when you add it all up, Bush's attendance still didn't meet minimum National Guard standards.
  
  The combination of these two things bears all the marks of someone backdating payroll records but doing a sloppy job. The likeliest explanation is that in mid-1973, after his superiors refused to rate him, someone pulled some strings and a bunch of payroll records were submitted for the previous year. However, the person who did it just checked off a few days for each month, instead of carefully making sure that the dates and duty types actually matched up the way they would if they were real.
  
  [5]In October 1973 Bush was discharged from the Texas ANG and moved to Boston to attend Harvard Business School. Although the Bush campaign said in 1999 that Bush transferred to a unit in Boston to finish up his service, they now admit that isn't true. Bush never signed up with a unit in Boston and never again attended drills.

There are plenty more reasons to be skeptical about Bush's National Guard service, but leave those aside for the moment. What we know for sure is that Bush began having problems flying in 1972; refused his physical; was grounded; disappeared for five months; probably disappeared for an entire year; failed to sign up with a unit in Boston for his final year of service; and got an honorable discharge anyway.

And he's never come clean about it. We don't need CBS's memos to remind us of that. We already knew it.

Political Animal (several links omitted)

For all the fuss about the forgeries, the White House has already said they had every reason to consider them authentic -- i.e., their content didn't raise any flags.

• Q Scott, on the National Guard documents on "60 Minutes," the First Lady says she believes these are forgeries. The RNC has accused the Democratic Party of being the source of these documents. Knowing then what you know now, would you still have released those documents when you did?
  
  MR. McCLELLAN: Well, that's a hypothetical question, John. We received those documents from a major news organization. We had every reason to believe that they were authentic at that time.

Atrios, by way of DeLong

As Tim Noah has said, it appears someone framed a guilty man.

I've never seen a conservative attempt a good explanation for why Bush started blowing off his service in 1972.