The Opinionated Bastard

Facts:

• Bush served for 5.5 years in the TANG. 4 years of those were on active duty, because you don’t learn to fly planes one weekend a month.

• Only the last year (1973) is in dispute, when he was on inactive duty and was living in Alabama.

National Guard rules:

• Remember the “one weekend a month” ads? Well, its not every month. Its really 28 days/year you have to show up when you’re on inactive duty. You can do it in batches.

• If you’re in a different state while on inactive duty, you can show up at the local NG place and do your service there. They won’t have “extra” planes for you to fly, though. This rule makes sense if you think about it, people in the NG have day jobs.

Add all these up, and basically, his last year, Bush did his minimum number of days he had to do early in the year, and then didn’t have to show up after that. His time in Alabama mostly involved sitting around being bored, because a fighter pilot without a plane is like lips on a chicken.

The Texas Air National Guard discharged him early, basically because all the National Guard units were stuffed with people.

So this is just election year FUBAR.

One of the thing that bugs me about the Bush “AWOL” story is that no one ever talks to a National Guardsman.

As I’ve said before, yeah, Bush slacked off the last year, after serving 4.5 years in the guard. However, that’s not AWOL, that’s just slacking, and everyone did it.

As this guy puts it:

Bush didn’t avoid his service anymore than I did. We both did what we could to avoid the worst thing a young man can face: boredom.

Plenty of details at these sites:

indcjournal

example of how to reproduce this in Microsoft Word

Powerline broke the story

Basically, the CBS documents were really bad forgeries…someone typed them into Microsoft Word. Its stupidly obvious.

Which I think only highlights the importance of having each candidate sign a Form 180 so that we can be sure that all documentation of their service comes forward. Oh, wait, Bush did that already. Well, I guess Kerry needs to sign this form now.

Not listed on the American B of Forensic Document Examiners, not listed in the White Pages or Yellow pages for Newport Beach which would be surprising for someone who seems to be a freelance document examiner. He's the "Stealth" document examiner...one wonders how he gets business...

He's not on the Superior Court of LA's list of Expert Witnesses though Matley is on that list.

Don't know if it means anything, but it seems like all the reputable document examiners have either given lukewarm endorsements of the signature (yes, its a photocopy of a signature), or outright said that the documents were fake. So one wonders how reputable James Pierce could be...

Yeah, Kerry won the debate. He got Bush off center early when he pissed him off with a bunch of attacks, and Bush never quite recovered. In Bush's defense, how do you argue rationally against lies? More on that tomorrow when I'm not so grumpy.

It’s a given that President Bush has made mistakes.

It’s a given that a “President Kerry” would make mistakes.

My issue with Kerry is that he seems in many ways to be dead set on repeating President Bush’s mistakes, and making new, possibly worse ones.

Our fundamental problem in Iraq seems to be too much top-down imposition of “big projects” with “big goals”. In other words, all the things that bug me about the US government at home. America in civilian accomplishes most tasks with a sort of “positive chaos”. That is, you have millions of people every day making decisions that move us forward at a breathtaking clip. Mistakes get fixed quickly, and things move well. This even applies in our military: We run our military in such a way that we have more sergeants per soldier then any other army. That’s because we expect our sergeants to make decisions that normally only officers in other armies make.

The government on the other hand, being huge and unwieldy, tries to accomplish everything from the top down with huge, overly structured “positive order” campaigns. Its slow, and mistakes drag out for months, years, or decades.

A metaphor even a Bush hater can understand.

President Bush is a crazy suit.

Senator Kerry is an empty suit.

I’ve worked for crazy suits, and I’ve worked for empty suits.

It was better working for a crazy suit, because they made the right decision about half the time, and the wrong decision about half the time, but they always made a decision. An empty suit wouldn’t make any decision (which is usually worse then making the wrong decision), and would blame everyone else when things went wrong because he couldn’t make up his mind.

Perhaps if Bush wore a shirt that said George Tenet made me his bitch, Kerry would wear one that said Al Hubbard made me his bitch.

Background: Al Hubbard, the Communist Party member who founded VVAW never served in Vietnam.

But I’m going to do it anyways.

Megan McArdle of Jane Galt writes a very thoughtful piece on who she’s going to vote for. I didn’t agree with everything in it, but I definitely understood her point of view.

Here’s the conclusion, but as InstaPundit says: read the whole thing.

Ultimately, I’ve decided to take the advice of a friend’s grandmother, who told me, on her wedding day, that I should never, ever marry a man thinking he’d change. “If you can’t live with him exactly the way he is,” she told me, “then don’t marry him, because he’ll say he’s going to change, and he might even try to change, but it’s one in a million that he actually will.”

Kerry’s record for the first fifteen years in the senate, before he knew what he needed to say in order to get elected, is not the record of anyone I want within spitting distance of the White House war room. For all the administration’s screw -ups — and there have been many — I’m sticking with the devil I know. George Bush in 2004.

Just felt like a Rant. I’m in California on a business trip, and I’m in the worst part of California, the North Bay in San Francisco, so I’m surrounded by elitist-yuppie-scum who think they are so enlightened and liberal, when really they are the worst sort of snobs, Mercedes-driving-hippies. I got stuck behind this car on the freeway that was belching black smoke as it proudly proclaimed that it ran on “free used vegetable oil”. No doubt that was why it smelled like burnt french fries.

It’s only been 2 days of gritting my teeth while listening to this claptrap about how the US has killed 100,000 Iraqis (27,000, and that’s about 1/12th of what Saddam would have killed in a year), how our soldiers are nazis, how Iraq is Vietnam, how their free speech is being oppressed, all the same tired rhetoric I became a blogger to escape, and already I’m about to explode.

So here goes.

Technorati Tags: 2000 Election, 2004 Election, Bush, Gore, Iraq, Kerry, Vietnam

As I get older, more and more, it seems to me that whatever people say, the exact opposite is true.

So Barack Obama is going around saying that McCain is running for George Bush's 3rd term.

Except that to me, of the two, Barack Obama seems like a left wing version of Bush.

It's what I call the "Wisdom Deficit". The Left didn't have it quite right with Bush. It's not that Bush was stupid. On the contrary, Bush was smart enough. What Bush wasn't was wise. Wisdom and Intelligence are two different things.

I went to Caltech. I'm a fucking rocket scientist, and I've worked with some of the most brilliant people in the world.

Some of the most brilliant people in the world can also be some of the stupidest.

For me, intelligence vs. Wisdom is the difference between Theory and Practice. You can come up with a brilliantly thought out theory; but it may be a disaster in practice.

Bush wasn't wise enough to be cynical about what the intelligence agencies were telling him. He wasn't wise enough to realize that when General Franks said "I'll plan the invasion, but the occupation is someone else's problem" that meant "You better find someone who can do this." Bush wasn't wise enough to keep watch on some of his appointees (FEMA, FDA, etc.). Bush wasn't wise enough to trust the American people with the real reasons for the Iraq War, so he took the WMD tactic. Bush wasn't wise enough to realize that he needed to sit down with the American people and guide us through the decision process. Bush wasn't wise enough to realize that when American's talk about winning the hearts and minds in a war, its not really the enemies hearts and minds we have to win over, but our own. Bush wasn't wise enough to take speechmaking lessons. Bush wasn't wise enough to realize that the smartest thing you can do some times is change your mind.

I think Obama might make a good president someday. But not now. Right now, he has the same problem Bush had. A deficit of wisdom. Obama doesn't seem wise enough to realize that many of his positions are just wrong, and he's surrounded himself with advisors who are well, clowns and fanatics.

I get that people are angry at Bush. But a left-wing Bush would be a complete disaster. Obama is a left-wing Bush. Same set of problems, just in a different direction. If you feel that the country would be best served by a confused drift to the hard left after Bush's confused drift to the right, Obama's your man.

But I don't think that the country needs confused direction to the Right or the Left. When I look at the candidates positions, it seems to me that in general, they're both right, and they're both wrong. What we really need in a leader is someone who can take the best of both sides and merge them together.

McCain has been my Senator for as long as I've lived in Arizona. I've run into him now and again, and he always had the time and grace for a constituent. When I talked to him about an issue, I learned something. When I disagreed with him and talked to him about it, half the time he convinced me I was wrong, and he always convinced me that he deeply understood the issue. McCain has been wise enough to change his mind.

I've always been proud McCain was my Senator, and someday I hope to be proud he's my President.