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George W. Christ?
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective 

Monday 05 May 2003 

In the 835 days Americans have passed since the inauguration of 
George W. Bush, we have come to know him as a man who wears 
many masks to suit a variety of political purposes. Even before he won 
the lawsuit that put him in his lofty position, we saw a man who cloaked 
his vision in terms that smacked of humility. "Ours will be a humble 
nation," Bush said during the Presidential debates. There are a number 
of words which can be applied to the actions of this administration, 
but "humble" is not one of them. At the time, however, it suited his 
purposes to make Americans believe he saw himself as unassuming, 
perhaps even small.  

This was the same man, however, who mocked Texas death row inmate 
Karla Faye Tucker so viciously before she rode the lightning to whatever 
awaits us on the Other Side. He was asked, in an interview for Talk 
Magazine during the campaign, what Tucker might say to him if she 
were given the chance to plead for her life. "Please," said Bush with 
pinched face and lips drawn down in a quivering bow as he imitated the 
woman about to die, "don't kill me." Then he laughed.  

You would think we'd have known better 835 days ago. We didn't, 
mostly because the news media decided such stories were without 
merit. Now we are a humble nation that brazenly disregards the entire 
planet as we seek military solutions to diplomatic problems. Now we 
are a humble nation that breaks treaties by the boatload and 'punishes' 
nations that foolishly believe they can make decisions for themselves. 
One is forced to wonder if Bush sat in front of a television as the 
'Shock and Awe' firebombing/cluster-bombing of Baghdad began, face pinched 
and mouth drawn down, saying "Please, don't kill me" in the voice of an 
Iraqi civilian. One is forced to wonder if he laughed afterwards.  

We have come to see a new mask in the aftermath of the attacks on 
September 11. In the 18 months that have passed since that dark day, 
we have been introduced to Bush the Soldier. Draped in flags and the 
veneer of patriotism, Bush has spent a great deal of time and energy 
identifying himself with the very military he described as unfit for 
service during the 2000 campaign. The metastasizing of Bush into some 
sort of military hero reached a crescendo during this past week when he 
landed on the deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln in the co-pilot's seat 
of a Navy S-3B Viking combat aircraft. According to the lore that has 
been rapturously reported on every hour by cable television news 
services, Bush took the stick "momentarily" to pilot the craft. He 
hopped out, garbed in the flight suit of a Navy pilot, and flashed a 
thumbs-up sign across the deck. This, we were told by the media, 
harkens back wonderfully to Bush's service piloting F-102 fighters 
for the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.  

The problem, as with any mask, is that whatever is underneath bears 
little comparison to the mask itself. According to the reports, it 
was appropriate for Bush to don the gear of an actual military pilot, 
because it mirrors the reality of his experience back in the Texas 
Guard. In reality, Bush may as well have put on the standard attire 
of a Mongolian yak herder from the Asian continental steppe. That would 
have been fitting, too, because neither the Navy suit nor the yak gear 
have anything at all to do with Bush the Actual Person. Neither has 
anything to do with history, or with fact.  

An article by David Corn entitled "Bush's Top Gun Photo-Op," which 
appeared in The Nation magazine's online publication this past week, 
described the disturbingly under-reported facts behind Bush's dalliance 
with the Texas Air National Guard:  

Enlisting in the Guard was one way to beat the draft and avoid being 
sent to Vietnam. Is this why Bush signed up? During the campaign, 
Bush said no. Yet in 1994, he had remarked, "I was not prepared to 
shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Not 
was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning 
how to fly airplanes." That sure sounds like someone who was looking 
to avoid the draft and pick up a skill. Obtaining a slot in the Guard 
at that time was not usually easy--for the obvious reason: lots of young 
men were responding to the call of self-preservation. (Think Dan 
Quayle.) Bush, whose father was then a congressman from the Houston 
area, has said no strings were pulled on his behalf. Yet in 1999, the 
former speaker of the Texas House of Representatives told The New 
York Times that a Houston oilman who was a friend of Bush's father had 
asked him to grease the skids for W. and he obliged.  

What Bush did in the Guard. In Bush's campaign autobiography, A 
Charge To Keep, he wrote that he completed pilot training in 1970 and 
"continued flying with my unit for the next several years." But in 2000, 
The Boston Globe obtained copies of Bush's military records and 
discovered that he had stopped flying during his final 18 months of 
service in 1972 and 1973. More curious, the records showed Bush had 
not reported for Guard duty during a long stretch of that period. Had 
the future commander-in-chief been AWOL?  

In May 1972, with two years to go on his six-year commitment to the 
Guard, Bush moved to Alabama to work on a Senate campaign. He 
asked if he could do his Guard duty there. This son-of-a-congressman 
and fighter pilot won permission to do "equivalent training" at a unit 
that had no aircraft and no pilots. The national Air Reserve office then 
disallowed this transfer. For months, Bush did nothing for the Guard. 
In September 1972, he won permission to train with a unit in Montgomery. 
But the commander of the unit and his administrative officer told the 
Boston Globe that they had no recollection of Bush ever reporting for 
duty. And when Bush returned to Texas after the November election, he 
did not return to his unit for months, according to his military records. 
His annual performance report, dated May 2, 1973, noted he had "not 
been observed at this unit" for the past year. In May, June and July of 
that year, he did pull 36 days of duty.. And then, as he was on his way 
to Harvard Business School, he received permission to end his Guard 
service early.  

/CONT/

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