It’s as if they just can’t help themselves. Just as the Bush AWOL story is running out of steam, and the need to lie and cover up subsides, Republicans still find it within themselves to try and deceive. It’s breathtaking.
Josh Marshall caught Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot on NPR this morning, interviewed by Juan Williams. When the topic of Bush’s military service came up, and how it might contrast with John Kerry’s, Racicot insisted that Bush “signed up for dangerous duty. He volunteered to go to Vietnam. He wasn’t selected to go, but nonetheless served his country very well …”
This is completely untrue. Williams didn’t call on him on it — he either didn’t know the truth or didn’t care — but Racicot is definitely lying about this. As Marshall explained:
Let’s set aside the fact that pulling strings to get into the Air National Guard in 1968 is, on its face, quite the opposite of volunteering to go to Vietnam. When the president signed up for the National Guard there was a check box asking whether he wanted to volunteer for overseas service. And he checked off “do not volunteer.”
Now, the president’s defenders have tried to explain this in various ways, hypothesizing that some unknown other person checked off the box or, more plausibly, that he was instructed to do so since what he was actually signing up for was to fly planes in Texas. Of late, they’ve brought forward friends or fellow Guardsmen who say — with no documentary evidence whatsoever — that Bush at one point or another asked about serving in Vietnam.
(There is also the president’s claim that he volunteered for something called Palace Alert, a program that would have taken him to Thailand. But I believe there is no record of this. And as noted in this Washington Post interview from 1999, if he did sign up, it would have been within a week of the program’s being shut down — a fact that points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that if he did sign up, he did so to sign up, not to go.)
But however that may be, it is awfully hard to turn the “do not volunteer” into “do volunteer.”
Lies on top of lies. It’s as if these guys don’t even care what’s true anymore, they’ll just say whatever they have to in order to get through an interview and hope that no one notices their deceptions.
Kudos to Marshall for another great catch.