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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (22755)	9/10/2004 5:35:36 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

What CBS didn't say: Just what was Lt. Bush doing during those long months he shirked his duties and ducked orders? He was serving his political apprenticeship as the political director for the U.S. Senate campaign of Winton “Red” Blount, the wealthy head of an engineering and construction firm who was president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce before being appointed Nixon’s Postmaster General (where he promptly fired some 33,000 employees as the postal service was put on for-profit basis). Blount was running against veteran Senator John Sparkman, a conservative Southern Democrat who had been Adlai Stevenson ’s running mate on the national ticket in 1952. Blount ran a filthy, race-baiting campaign against Sparkman, focused in part on the issue of busing to achieve school integration. Even though Sparkman had co-sponsored the "anti-forced busing" bill in the Senate, the Blount campaign covered the state with billboards proclaiming, “A vote for Red Blount is a vote against forced busing…against coddling criminals…against welfare freeloaders.” Blount was also a ferocious supporter of the Vietnam war (which Lt. Bush’s daddy was vigorously defending at the UN), and young Bush was in charge of distributing the smear campaign literature that linked the conservative Sparkman (whom Blount labeled a “liberal”--sound familiar?) to the head of the Democrats’ national ticket that year, the anti-war George McGovern. The smear pamphlets accused Sparkman of favoring drastic cuts in the military budget, of abandoning American POWs in Vietnam, and of supporting “amnesty for draft-dodgers” -- none of which, of course, was true. So, while Lt. Bush was avoiding Vietnam through cushy service in the National Guard, then not even fulfilling the duties which his uniform obliged him to perform, and while his commandant was getting pressure from “higher-ups” in the Nixon administration’s military machine to let him off the hook, Bush was learning how to run a pro-war, dirty tricks, mud-slinging campaign. If “60 Minutes” had bothered to tell us what Lt. Bush was doing while he was dodging his military commitments--namely, serving a political apprenticeship in sewer politics that included tarring an opponent with sympathy for those who didn’t want to go to Vietnam--the odiferous hypocrisy of Bush’s time in the Guard would have been startlingly apparent. The “soft-on-terrorism” charges against this year’s national Democratic ticket which were trumpeted at President Bush’s Madison Square Garden coronation at the end of August echo the smears of the 1972 Senate campaign on which Bush cut his political eye-teeth. It was mendacious deceit that Bush practiced 32 years ago--as it is today. And that is the real meaning of Bush’s time in the National Guard. For more on Bush and the '72 Alabama campaign, see the thorough article by Glynn Wilson, "George W. Bush's Lost Year in 1972 Alabama," in the February 2, 2004 Southerner Daily News. direland.typepad.com