{"id":1258,"date":"2004-02-16T10:57:47","date_gmt":"2004-02-16T15:57:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/1258.html"},"modified":"2004-02-16T10:57:47","modified_gmt":"2004-02-16T15:57:47","slug":"fridays-document-dump-was-largely-meaningless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/fridays-document-dump-was-largely-meaningless\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday’s ‘document dump’ was largely meaningless"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like a lot of other people, I heard on Friday afternoon that the White House was finally going to release George W. Bush’s full service record, presumably to settle the AWOL controversy once and for all. Unfortunately, that isn’t what happened.<\/p>\n

The first clue that something was amiss was the timing. The White House released a one-inch thick file of documentary “evidence” at 6:30pm on the Friday afternoon of a holiday weekend. This isn’t the way to clear the air; it’s a way to bury a story.<\/p>\n

The news reports analyzing the newly-released files explain the bottom line: there’s nothing new here.<\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a> had the best observations of the bunch:<\/p>\n

The records show Bush was an eager fighter pilot who said he wanted to spend a lifetime in aviation. But they provide no evidence that he did any military service in Alabama, to which he had requested a transfer in May 1972 to work on a Senate campaign that ended in November 1972.<\/p>\n

And the records show officials from Bush’s home base in Texas declining to provide details of his activities between May 1972 to April 1973, even though such documentation was requested by National Guard headquarters.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

[T]he tone of Bush’s military file changed abruptly, and with no documented explanation, in May 1972, when Bush sought to transfer to Alabama. That began a period of months in which, the documents suggest, Bush did not actively pursue Guard service and the Guard did not actively pursue him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Friday’s “document dump” doesn’t raise any new questions, but it certainly doesn’t answer any old ones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like a lot of other people, I heard on Friday afternoon that the White House was finally going to release George W. Bush’s full service record, presumably to settle the AWOL controversy once and for all. Unfortunately, that isn’t what happened. The first clue that something was amiss was the timing. The White House released […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}