Exactly What Those Suddenly Found Bush Military Records Show

Paint this one anyway you like and it still looks extremely bad.

Corrente points us to the AWOLProject.

Will people care? I dunno. You have to research the matter and you have to compare Lt. Bush's treatment against other people in the service at the time (those that would have been on the express plane to 'nam for such behavior).

But you know what? While I don't like the fact that Bush and its people have lied and cooked up his military records, I don't think I could have gone to Vietnam (and granted, I was 10 in 1968 and female) either. My brother did, and it forever changed him. It took a young man with little experience and a rather sadistic personality and devolved him into even less of a human being. I remember seeing others come back no longer the smiling, optimistic young men they'd been on leaving and, of course, I remember plenty who never came back at all.

My family was working poor. At least in part because of that, my family has a long history of sending its men to war. My father was an Army sergeant who used to run distraction raids to try to free American POWs from Japanese interrment camps. One of my brothers and several of my cousins went to Vietnam.

I knew early on, while still a child, that I could never go to war and do what they did. Not because I was a child or female (although I was both at the time), but because I cannot pick up a gun and aim it at anyone. I can't take orders without knowing why I need to perform them or what the repercussions will be. And because I believed then, as I believe now, that wars are all too often something our leaders create, and our young blood must fight and die in.

From my vantage point, Afghanistan and Iraq don't seem dissimilar at all from Vietnam. And hence my problem with having a man who used his privilege to escape service not just lying about it, but ordering men and women to fight.

How's this different from Clinton, you ask? Clinton did not pretend to be a military man. I don't think the man or woman in the president's seat has to be.