Quote of the week: “I'm wondering if McCain's been taken prisoner and being held as a POW by the Kerry camp, in the Kerry Hilton, somewhere in the basement of the DNC. The McAwful Hilton [an apparent reference to DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe]. I mean, where is McCain? Really. I mean, the question is -- to me -- is serious.” -- Rush Limbaugh, 9/9

Week ending September 10, 2004
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“I'm wondering if McCain's been taken prisoner and being held as a POW by the Kerry camp, in the Kerry Hilton, somewhere in the basement of the DNC. The McAwful Hilton [an apparent reference to DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe]. I mean, where is McCain? Really. I mean, the question is -- to me -- is serious.” -- Rush Limbaugh, 9/9

Media Matters Action Network's new book in bookstores soon

Media Matters Action Network, the advocacy organization associated with Media Matters for America, has published a new book, Misstating the State of the Union: Right-wing media distortions about the Clinton and Bush presidencies. The book will be available soon in bookstores and from Amazon.com.

New records further demonstrated Bush's failure to fulfill National Guard duties; easily distracted media focused on bogus Bush defenses

In a desperate attempt to distract attention from the overwhelming documentary evidence suggesting President George W. Bush failed to fulfill his Vietnam-era duties as a member of the Texas Air National Guard, right-wing Bush-backers have flooded the media with a stream of misinformation about Bush's Guard service; this misinformation is detailed below.

Media provided forum for discredited Bush defender

In a September 10 article, Salon.com senior writer Eric Boehlert reported that major media outlets are still portraying discredited retired Lieutenant Colonel John B. “Bill” Calhoun as a witness to Bush's service in the Guard:

[A] Bush supporter who asserted that he saw Bush serve his National Guard duty in Alabama in 1972 returned this week to retell his already discredited story and was embraced by several news organizations that are not Fox News -- ABC News, CNN and the Associated Press.

[...]

[R]etired Lt. Col. John “Bill” Calhoun told ABC News Wednesday that he saw Bush “five or six times” with the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery, where he said the two men occasionally ate lunch together. For the White House, Calhoun's story is invaluable because in the more than three decades since Bush supposedly served in Alabama, Calhoun is the only member of Bush's unit to come forward to say he remembers performing drills with the future president of the United States.

[...]

When Calhoun first emerged in February, he announced he'd seen Bush “eight or 10 times” on the base performing drills between May and October of 1972. But within 24 hours of his statement, the White House released Bush's military pay records -- which aides touted as definitive proof of Bush's service -- definitively proving that Bush was not credited for any training in Alabama for the months of May, June, July, August and September 1972, and that Bush showed up only in late October. So how could Calhoun have seen Bush several times in one summer if Bush's own records indicate he was never there?

Calhoun's story is even less believable in light of the fact that Bush in 1972 originally tried to transfer from his Texas Air National Guard unit in Houston to a National Guard unit at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. That request was eventually denied, so Bush ended up at the Montgomery unit where Calhoun served. But again, according to Bush's records, he didn't even apply for the transfer to Montgomery until September and didn't show up until late October. How did Calhoun see Bush performing drills throughout the summer of 1972 when Bush didn't even request an assignment there until the fall?

[...]

Incredibly, even though Calhoun had been exposed as telling a yarn in February, and despite the recent Boston Globe and CBS reports, he was once again treated as a credible source by several major news outlets that either didn't know the basic facts surrounding the National Guard story or are incapable of doing a simple Google search. Or perhaps didn't care that Calhoun's story was bogus.

On Wednesday, Calhoun was featured on ABC News, attempting to refute a new TV commercial made by Texans for Truth, a group of National Guard veterans, which asserts that Bush never showed up for duty in Alabama. ... On Wednesday, while interviewing Bob Mintz, a veteran who appears in the Texans for Truth ad, CNN's Wolf Blitzer mentioned Calhoun, asking how it was that Mintz never saw Bush if another man in the same Alabama unit did? ... Earlier in the week, the Associated Press, in an otherwise strong piece about Bush's service, noted, “One member of the unit, retired Lt. Col. John Calhoun, has said he remembers Bush showing up for training with the 187th.” ... Unsurprisingly, Fox News was the most aggressive and egregious in presenting Calhoun's tale.

Media repeated Bush's bogus discharge defense

FOX News Channel hosts Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, CNN's Judy Woodruff, and other media figures and outlets have repeated the White House's defense that Bush got an honorable discharge; thus he must have fulfilled his requirements. CNN's Wolf Blitzer even called the discharge the “bottom line.”

But Bush's honorable discharge is far from the “bottom line.” In February, an article (subscription required) in The New Republic debunked the Bush claim that an honorable discharge means he fulfilled his duty:

Far from being a mark of exemplar service, the honorable discharge is better thought of as a standard severance, something every soldier receives unless there's significant evidence of misconduct and a commanding officer eager to brave the paperwork, panels, and disciplinary hearings required to send the soldier home with anything less. Like any number of other officers, Bush could have ducked out of his service for months and still received an honorable discharge.

Going missing from military service and then squeaking out with an honorable discharge has a rich history among politicians. Current U.S. Representative Bobby Rush, a Democrat from Illinois, served in the army through the mid-1960s, becoming progressively more involved with radical antiwar groups. In 1968, after Martin Luther King's assassination, he went AWOL from his unit to help found the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers. Weeks later, he was honorably discharged.

In 1999, a Texas sheriff up for reelection saw his candidacy unravel after local newspapers reported that, despite a subsequent honorable discharge, he'd skipped out on Army service for several months in 1976 to “patch things up with his ex-wife.”

[...]

A few years ago, a guest columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ruminated on going AWOL from his unit routinely with a “case of beer” to drink himself “into oblivion.” “I don't know how, but I did manage to get an honorable discharge.”

[...]

Perhaps more striking is how often serious questions of misconduct have been flat-out ignored. John Allen Muhammad, convicted last November for his participation in the D.C. sniper shootings, served in the Louisiana National Guard from 1978-1985, where he faced two summary courts-martial. In 1983, he was charged with striking an officer, stealing a tape measure, and going AWOL. Sentenced to seven days in the brig, he received an honorable discharge in 1985.

Right-wing pundits falsely claimed Ben Barnes has changed his story

Media Matters for America noted a nasty and false smear gaining steam in the media: that former Texas Speaker of the House Ben Barnes, who has long said that he helped get Bush into the National Guard, has changed his story:

On the September 8 broadcast of CBS's 60 Minutes, former Texas House speaker and Lt. Governor Ben Barnes told anchor Dan Rather that as House speaker in 1968, he recommended Bush for the Guard to his “longtime friend” Brigadier General James Rose, the head of the Texas Air National Guard. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, a September 7 memo to GOP leaders by Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie sought to portray Barnes as an unreliable witness, claiming falsely that Barnes' recent statements contradict sworn testimony in 1999 in which Barnes said he had not acted at the behest of the Bush family. Conservative reporters and commentators [including Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity] have repeated this false claim ... In fact, Barnes has been entirely consistent on this issue. He said the same thing in 1999 and on 60 Minutes: that he called Rose at the behest of Houston oilman Sidney A. Adger, a friend of the Bush family who is now dead.

Are Killian documents fake? We don't know, but we do know criticisms of them are phony

In the wake of CBS News' disclosure of documents in which Bush's squadron commander indicated that he was being pressured to “sugar coat” his evaluation of Bush, right-wing blogs and media began promoting a theory that the documents were forged -- a theory the mainstream media quickly adopted.

Much of the “evidence” that the documents are fake has been proven wildly inaccurate. For example, ABC, The Washington Post, and Cybercast News Service all suggested that the “proportional spacing” used in the documents' typing was extremely rare in the 1970s. But IBM typewriters featured proportional spacing as early as the early 1940s, as the IBM website and two IBM print ads prove.

ABC and Cybercast News Service also both claimed that the superscript type used in the documents was unavailable on typewriters in the 1970s. ABC, for example, reported: “The memos include superscript, i.e. the 'th' in '187th' appears above the line in a smaller font. Superscript was not available on typewriters.”

But superscript was available on typewriters in the 1970s -- and was used on typewriters at the Texas Air National Guard. In fact, superscript appears in at least one previously-released document from Bush's official Guard file, available for viewing here.

Media quickly moved away from important questions about Bush's guard service

Even if the Killian documents are not authentic, it's clear from all the available documentary evidence that Bush did not show up for duty when he was supposed to and has lied about it -- though the media is focusing instead on the relatively insignificant question of the Killian documents.

Matthew Yglesias of The American Prospect noted the media's inability to recognize that the documentary evidence establishes that Bush shirked his duties:

Questions about whether or not George W. Bush shirked his responsibilities in the National Guard, pulled strings to get into the National Guard, performed poorly while in the National Guard, and violated the law by disobeying direct orders are, I think, a bit too complicated for our media to sort out. On the one hand, there's all this documentary evidence suggesting Bush is in the wrong. On the other hand, there's Bush and the White House staff saying he's right. It's the president's word against the documents, so who's to say? We learned during the swiftvets controversy that having all the documentary evidence on your side, and only the word of politically motivated liars against you is hardly proof in the press' eyes that you're right.

Right-wing media falsely claimed Bush didn't invite scrutiny, because he hasn't talked about his service

FOX News Channel commentators, among others, have repeatedly insisted that Bush didn't deserve attacks on his military service record, unlike Kerry, who they claim invited the widely discredited attacks on his Vietnam service by touting his service as an important credential qualifying him to be president. Setting aside the absurd implication that Kerry brought vicious lies on himself, it's simply not true to say that Bush has never touted his National Guard service in a political context:

[A]s MMFA has previously noted, even before this election cycle, Bush attempted to use his military record to bolster campaigns for public office, including for president in 2000. During his 1978 congressional campaign, he circulated campaign literature falsely claiming he had served in the Air Force. During his 1978 congressional campaign, he falsely claimed he had served in the Air Force, and when questioned about that claim in July 1999, as Salon.com's Boehlert reported in a February 5 article, “Bush's then-spokeswoman Karen Hughes told the Associated Press it was accurate for Bush to suggest, as he'd done in a previous campaign, that he served ”in the U.S. Air Force," when in fact he served in the Air National Guard." Bush also lied about his military record in his 1999 autobiography about how long he flew jets for the Guard. These lies have gone virtually unreported by the media.

And while "[f]ormer President George H. W. Bush has attacked those who have questioned President George W. Bush's service record during the Vietnam War," the Center for American Progress noted, “it was George H. W. Bush who orchestrated a similar attack on his opponents in 1988.” The elder Bush's campaign co-chairman, John Sununu, accused Senator Lloyd Bentsen (the vice presidential candidate running with Bush's opponent, Michael Dukakis) of “helping his son get into the National Guard.”

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.