The Wingmen Assert the Following:

1. Bush enlisted in the ANG knowing that he and his unit could be sent to Vietnam.
Critics and opponents of George W. Bush have accused him and others of “hiding” in the Air National Guard (ANG) to avoid service in Vietnam. Such an accusation is invalid. If the ANG was a “haven” from the war, tell that to the New Mexico ANG, the Colorado ANG, the Iowa ANG, and the New York ANG. These states sent F-100 fighter-bomber squadrons to fight in Vietnam during the spring of 1968; simultaneously, Bush, then a student at Yale, took the Air Force tests to enlist in his state’s ANG.

History shows that individual ANG units had been flying supply mission in Vietnam since 1965. During Bush’s tenure in the Texas ANG, his unit could have been sent to fight in Vietnam on a moment’s notice. However, such an order to further mobilize the Guard or Reserves would have had to come from President Johnson and/or Secretary of Defense McNamara. According to Lt. Col. William Campenni, who flew with Bush, “Johnson and McNamara . . . deliberately avoided use of the Guard and Reserves for domestic political calculations, knowing that a draftee only stirred up the concerns of one family, while a call-up got a whole community’s attention.”

While Bush could have chosen a desk job in the Guard, he chose to become a fighter pilot, a duty imbued with risk, and, as illustrated above, potential for a combat assignment.

http://www.wingmenforbush.com/

As the wife of a deployed career Marine and daughter of a career Naval Officer, I’ve never understood the ignorant malice of the antiwar Left.

I grew up during the Vietnam era. It was a troubled – and troubling – time. The nation was rocked by protests, riots, and civil unrest. All this was understandable, even to a small child of 6 or 7. Though my father and my friends’ fathers were fighting a war many Americans opposed, I could understand the pain and the passion of those who wanted us out of Vietnam. Anyone who appreciates the terrible cost of war must understand those troubled by that cost.

What was never understandable to me was the vicious spite and hatred of those who lined up outside military bases screaming epithets like, “Baby killer” to men who had been drafted. You would think we might have learned something as a nation in the nearly four decades since we abandoned the South Vietnamese to the tender mercies of a Communist-led genocide. But sadly, hate is alive and well in modern America:

This is what a president does.

US President Barack Obama has paid his respects to 18 Americans killed in Afghanistan, the first time he has honoured the fallen in this way.

NPR notes that,

The dramatic image of a president on the tarmac was a portrait not witnessed in years.

Why?

His predecessor, George W Bush, visited the families of dead troops but never received the bodies at the base, in Dover, Delaware.

Mr Bush also did not go to military funerals, telling the military newspaper Stars and Stripes three years ago that he preferred to meet families privately.

Notice how no one at Firedoglake wonders what took President Obama so long? The ban, after all, was lifted in February. Obama could have visited Dover at any time during the past 8 months – 10, if you take into account the fact that there was no need to have the press document his visit for the TV cameras. But I don’t think the facts matter to these people at all. Their hatred is so strong that it blinds them to anything but simmering anger and poisonous contempt. To them, fallen warriors are nothing more than cannon fodder, conscripted against their will – even in death – to fight an obscene war against a President who is no longer in office. Consumed by hatred, they just can’t let it go.

What they cannot understand is that unlike Barack Obama, who makes sure the few sops he throws to the military are well documented by the press, George Bush understood our wish not to be used as photo ops. It ought to be simple to understand why George Bush was never photographed at Dover: under George Bush, the press were not allowed at Dover. So there would be no photograph. But more importantly, President Bush understood that the families of the fallen had given enough. The last thing grieving families want is to have a camera or a microphone shoved in their faces; to have legions of Secret Service, White House aides, and other support staff invade an exquisitely private moment that ought to be reserved for those who knew and loved the deceased. Our funerals are not public spectacles, but private observances of grief. Our last President, unlike the antiwar left, understood and respected that.

To gain an idea of just how military families view having the President turn the homecoming of their loved ones into a photo op, one need only look at what happened when the families whose loved ones came in on this flight reacted to the news of Obama’s visit.

Of the 18 families involved, 17 declined to allow the media to photograph the return of their loved one. But more than that, 6 of the 18 (that’s one third) were undecided until they learned Obama would be there. According to the article, nearly two thirds of Gold Star families have allowed the press to be present.

…11 of the 17 had already reached a decision against coverage before they were notified that Obama would be there, said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.

The knowledge that the President of the United States planned to attend seems to have reduced the number of families willing to allow press coverage from 67% to 5%. It’s hard to think of a more damning indictment of the idea that the families of the fallen want to be used as political props.

What takes more courage? To stand on a deserted tarmac in the dead of night and salute for the cameras? Or to meet with the families of the fallen – even those who don’t support the war?

If the reality based community weren’t afraid to venture out of their bubble, they might try talking to Rachel Ascione about whether the President grieves for our fallen warriors, whether he just brushes their grief aside lightly:

Ascione wasn’t sure she could restrain herself with the president. She was feeling “raw.” “I wanted him to look me in the eye and tell me why my brother was never coming back, and I wanted him to know it was his fault that my heart was broken,” she recalls. The president was coming to Florida, a key swing state, in the middle of his re-election campaign. Ascione was worried that her family would be “exploited” by a “phony effort to make good with people in order to get votes.”

Ascione and her family were gathered with 18 other families in a large room on the air base. The president entered with some Secret Service agents, a military entourage and a White House photographer. “I’m here for you, and I will take as much time as you need,” Bush said. He began moving from family to family. Ascione watched as mothers confronted him: “How could you let this happen? Why is my son gone?” one asked. Ascione couldn’t hear his answer, but soon “she began to sob, and he began crying, too. And then he just hugged her tight, and they cried together for what seemed like forever.”

Ascione’s family was one of the last Bush approached. Ascione still planned to confront him, but Bush disarmed her in an almost uncanny way. Ascione is just over five feet; her late brother was 6 feet 7. “My whole life, he used to put his hand on the top of my head and just hold it there, and it drove me crazy,” she says. When Bush saw that she was crying, he leaned over and put his hand on the top of her head and drew her to him. “It was just like my brother used to do,” she says, beginning to cry at the memory.

Before Bush left the meeting, he paused in the middle of the room and said to the families, “I will never feel the same level of pain and loss you do. I didn’t lose anyone close to me, a member of my family or someone that I love. But I want you to know that I didn’t go into this lightly. This was a decision that I struggle with every day.”

As he spoke, Ascione could see the grief rising through the president’s body. His shoulder slumped and his face turned ashen. He began to cry and his voice choked. He paused, tried to regain his composure and looked around the room. “I am sorry, I’m so sorry,” he said.

But this is more ‘reality’ than the reality based community is ready for. It conflicts with how they wish to see the world – a stark, black and white version of The Truthiness in which it becomes more comforting to believe that our leaders are callous and cold (no matter how many military families say that’s untrue), that they lie (no matter that the official record says otherwise), that they are using our military (no matter that our armed forces are all volunteer and that they keep volunteering).

When hatred is so strong that its adherents fear the truth, no factual rebuttal is likely to pierce the wall of lies that surrounds the willfully ignorant. But the truth remains, regardless of their stubborn refusal to admit it.

I was lucky enough to meet the President of the United States not once, but three times during my husband’s last deployment to Iraq. The third time he was slightly late.

You see, he’d been talking with a Gold Star family in the Oval Office just moments before he met with us and appeared on national TV. And just as he did when he met with Rachel Ascione, he gave them all the time they needed.

No one who has ever seen the President in the company of our armed forces or their families could doubt the genuine love and respect he felt for us. And that feeling was mutual. It mattered. It gave me comfort during those long, dark months when my husband was on the other side of the world. And that’s a comfort I no longer feel from a President whose idea of supporting the troops consists of turning their homecoming into a photo op.

http://www.villainouscompany.com/vcblog/archives/2009/10/taking_comfort_1.html

With Axelrod and Emmanuel behind Obama, you know this was contrived and created for public consumption. It was not earnest, everything Team Obama does is scripted, planned, staged, and controlled.

Bush did not play golf during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Zzzzt, I’m so sorry. That’s incorrect.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/15/georgebush.usa

Bush did VOLUNTEER,Yes,VOLUNTEER to go to war in NAM.

Zzzzzt, sorry. Wrong again.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bush072899.htm

“In a sense he was trying to remain a centrist in a time when there wasn’t anything left at the center,” said Craig Stapleton, who is married to Bush’s cousin and has been a confidant of Bush’s for 25 years. “All of the sudden everybody moves and you’re still standing in the center. He didn’t dodge the military. But he didn’t volunteer to go to Vietnam and get killed, either.”