http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040214/D.../D80N1IDO0.html

As anyone who is or has been in the military can tell you, everytime you report to a duty station or leave a duty station there is a record of it in your official records.

The fact that "But the records provided no evidence Bush served in Alabama." therefore proves that Bush did NOT show up for duty in Alabama and should be calledd tyo task for how he managed to pull that off.

this whole thing did not make sense from what i saw on TV. i mean the issue in general.

as i noticed, he was a jet pilot. here is a guy who is a pilot... who has no record of training? does the national guard train jet pilots by home study courses? last i checked... there was quite a bit of actual flying involved... all of which is logged in numerous places.

Bush is lying about this in my opinion... if he was there... it would be easy to prove. Considering the political price to be paid for not being able to prove it... the simple fact that they cannot prove conclusively that he was there with anything more than vauge, circumstantial evidence tells me that they can't prove it.

that being said... he will most likely still be the next president. Kerry seems ok though and seems like he would be a good president considering the choices of candidates.

I have tried to read through it all, but none of it made sense to me. Since I have never been in the military, I do not know what their operating procedures are.

We have bigger issues to worry about in my opinion....

Bush is far from perfect, but his policies will be better then Kerry's anyday...

PLus Kerry might be pulled down soon with that chick in Kenya.

this is all politics. its all about attacking credibility and playing the cards they have to play. Iraq has not proven to be a good weapon at all (as i suggested it wouldn't be when they arrested Saddam).

i have not really been paying a lot of attention to all this... i am just glad that as the dust is settling, Dean is out of it.

this is all politics. its all about attacking credibility and playing the cards they have to play. Iraq has not proven to be a good weapon at all (as i suggested it wouldn't be when they arrested Saddam).

i have not really been paying a lot of attention to all this... i am just glad that as the dust is settling, Dean is out of it.[/b][/quote]


Well I was hoping Dean would be the Democratic nominee... :-)


But Dean is a nutcake, and unstable.... at least Kerry is sane.

I haven't read anything, but I will say that in the past year I've been dealing with the military, they have to be the most unorganized group of people I have EVER dealt with. What's even more amazing is how things haven't changed in the 40+ years since my Dad was there. :unsure:

It's kinda funny ... some of the same people who could reach great depths of righteous indignation over Bill Clinton's avoiding service seem very unconcerned about the fact that GW failed to live up to the obligations he took on when he became a member of the Guard. What happened to the concern about the President being a liar?

When you get right down to it, Bush, Clinton, Kerry, and John McCain are ALL fairly representative of their generation and its relationship to "The War." In Bush's case, he used the pull of a Congressman daddy to bypass the waiting lists and get into the Guard.

When Bush told Meet the Press that suggesting his service in the Guard was avoiding Vietnam and an insult to modern Guardsmen, I laughed out loud. Comparing the Guard and Reserves of today to the slackers of that period is the real insult. The pay records prove that Bush may have actually committed fraud, when viewed in the context that there is little else to back up his claim of service, particularly when nobody remembers him. Again - getting yourself assigned TAD to another unit and not showing up was a fairly common trick in the Guard and Reserves at that time, as was getting paid for drills you didn't participate in.

Is it an issue? Yup - it is to some. Is it important? I've always thought the attention given to Clinton's record was pretty stupid. This WAS just as stupid - until lately.

The importance is not whether he served or not.

The importance is over his current denials.

Wouldn't it be nice to have world politicians who said

1 "Fuck yeah I inhaled"
2 "My Dad was rich and powerful...would you turn up?"
3 " Cocaine....WHERE???...bastards are holding out on me"
4 " WMD? Look I just hate Arabs , OK..... the lot of them"
5 "Fuck the French"
6 " Did I? Course I fuicked her.She was gagging for it"

;-))))))))

I didn't loathe Clinton for not serving as much as I loathed him for writing that he loathed the military. The military is not for everyone, and there are some people I wouldn't want in the military anyway -- like Muslims, for instance, given their proclivity to be traitors as we've seen in the news of the last few years, most recently a week ago.

I think it's a good thing for a President to have been a soldier, preferably a combat veteran, since he is the CIC. I think he ought to have some first hand experience suffering what a soldier suffers before he has the power to commit their lives to policy decisions.

Bush served, somewhat, apparently, but his service is not exactly what I'd call distinguished -- at least not in a positive way. Like PD said, it was (and still remains) very easy to "get over" in the Guard, by transferring units, transferring status (active reserve/inactive reserve), starting and quitting various military schools, or even physically manipulating records (security and organization is very loose in the guard/reserves).

Hell, the paperwork could very well have taken 6 months to get Bush processed and he might have been sitting around in rehab for all I know.

Bush is a politician, and as such, I trust him to tell me the truth just about as much as I trust him to volunteer to fight in the front lines anytime he deploys troops.

Kerry's service, while notably superior in some aspects, doesn't exactly classify him as a war hero in my mind (putting in to be taken out of combat after a few scratches). But it's his affiliation to communism which disgusts me more than anything else.

But this is all neither here nor there -- government is no longer answerable to the people -- we have a permanent political class and that will not change, therefore we will always have shitbag, power-hungry, self-serving liars and frauds in power at all levels of government, local, city, state, national. Even the fucking school boards are filled with scumbag shitheads.

What were we talking about?



Last edited by Buff at Feb 16 2004, 12:53 PM

What were we talking about?[/b][/quote]
me kicking your ass :ph34r:

yep you are correct. I was in the Army in the mid 1960's. i was able 2 buy a new VW in Germany, because they were over paying me. of course i had 2 pay it back. We had a pay record check, guy were writing to there congress men because they wrn't getting paid. Couldn't believe the 1st month I got over paid, think it was 5 or 6 hunderd, wasn't making but $90.00 a minth then.

i think it could be successfuly argued that the military is in fact one of the best run organizations in the world. effectively organizing, training, housing, feeding, entertaining, transporting and supplying hundreds of thousands of people is no small task, yet it gets done with amazing effeciency considering the size and logistical issues that need to be overcome.

JMHO
:)

Buff,

Some good points there mano :)

I will call Kerry somewhat of a hero in my eyes, not just because he got a silver star, a Bronze star for valor and 3 purple hearts, but because on 2 occasions under fire he turned around his boat and rescued soldiers that alot of troops might have left for dead. He didn't just get scratches, I think he got shot 3-4 times in like a 4-5 month period or something like that.

Got out of yale, from a rich family and joined up, didn't get drafted, gotta give him kudos on that.

He did come back and protest the war very strongley, but if anybody has the right to do that, which we all do, he sure does being a vet on the front lines (river/ bay) and taking bullets for our country..

All that aside I knew that I loved and respected John Kerry very much when a few years ago, he did the 1 year pow mia hearings in the Senate. I watched it almost every night on c-span. He, and ranking member Sen. Smith from NH (x-senator) did a great job, and I will always cheer Kerry for that, especially when most pentagon people wanted the pow / vietnam thing to just finally die..

We will have to disagree on that.

I found the military to be one of the most inefficient, stupidest-run, wasteful enterprises on earth. Its budget is in the stratosphere and the sheer waste in terms of manpower and labor is absolutely unfathomable. Once you get into the food and supplies waste and fraud, it's unreal.

You have no idea what an abject disaster the military is in terms of total missallocation of resources. If ever there could be a definitive example of the failure of socialism, the military is it.

:o :blink: :yowsa: :zzz:

Oh, what would Machiavelli say?

Compared to what? How would you improve it?

the marine corps runs pretty smooth, it's really simple.
take the shit the army doesnt want anymore and use it to kill the enemy as quick as possible.

also, anytime you can get hot food helo in on top of a fuckin mountian in korea in a snow storm that's decent support :)

Compared to what? How would you improve it?[/b][/quote]
Compared to Microsoft.

I don't know that it can be improved.