Mr. Shaman
08-13-2004, 06:16 PM
"The early winter of 1968 was a season of acute anxiety for the young George W. Bush. As his academic career at Yale sputtered to an inglorious denouement, the war in Vietnam was hurtling forward at full-bore with the onset of the Tet Offensive. In those perilous months, there were 350,000 US troops in Vietnam, dying at a rate of more than 350 a week. From Bush's perch in New Haven, elite hamlet of his birth, the draft loomed, casting a chill shadow over his future.
Bush faced limited options. Unlike his warden-to-be Dick Cheney, this randy bon vivant wasn't prepared to anchor himself down in early wedlock, which would have entitled him to a marriage deferment. There were too many oats yet to be sown. How many seeds in how many fields? Tough to say precisely, but in the ripe phrase of one of Bush's drinking buddies from the 1970s: "he bedded nearly every bimbo in West Texas, married or not."
Alas, the remedial scholar's grades at Yale, already puffed-up beyond all merit courtesy of his legacy admission, proved to be so paltry that the escape hatch of graduate school was out of the question, too.
Only one sure sanctuary remained: The National Guard (http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair08122004.html)
At the time Bush applied to the National Guard, there were 100,000 other young men in line before him, stalled on a crowded waiting list hoping their number would be called before they were sucked up by the draft and dropped onto the killing fields of the Mekong Delta. In Texas alone, there were 500 applicants frantically vying for only four open slots for fighter pilot-training in the Air National Guard.
"I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I choose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanesI don't want to play like I was somebody out there marching when I wasn't. It was either Canada or the service. Somebody said the Guard was looking for pilots. All I know is, there weren't that many people trying to be pilots."
By other accounts, it was during this time in Ellington that Bush began to refamiliarize himself with his narcotic of choice at Yale...cocaine. In his college days, Bush not only snorted, he dealt. Among the haute monde at Yale, he was known as one of the top purveyors of primo Colombian powder in New Haven, dispensing the crystal snow from ounce bags.
Just as he stiffed the Flight Evaluation Board in 1972, Bush now refuses to offer an explanation for his illegal and unjust war that has killed and maimed tens of thousands. "I'm the commander--see, I don't need to explain," Bush brayed in his best Mafia capo syntax to Bob Woodward. "I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel I owe anybody an explanation." That's the distilled essence of George W. Bush from his very own mouth: a bellicose and imperious buffoon who has never once been held to account for the mayhem he leaves in his wake.
So yet again Bush has succeeded in doing the impossible: he has sullied the once heroic term "draft evader."
:hitout:
Bush faced limited options. Unlike his warden-to-be Dick Cheney, this randy bon vivant wasn't prepared to anchor himself down in early wedlock, which would have entitled him to a marriage deferment. There were too many oats yet to be sown. How many seeds in how many fields? Tough to say precisely, but in the ripe phrase of one of Bush's drinking buddies from the 1970s: "he bedded nearly every bimbo in West Texas, married or not."
Alas, the remedial scholar's grades at Yale, already puffed-up beyond all merit courtesy of his legacy admission, proved to be so paltry that the escape hatch of graduate school was out of the question, too.
Only one sure sanctuary remained: The National Guard (http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair08122004.html)
At the time Bush applied to the National Guard, there were 100,000 other young men in line before him, stalled on a crowded waiting list hoping their number would be called before they were sucked up by the draft and dropped onto the killing fields of the Mekong Delta. In Texas alone, there were 500 applicants frantically vying for only four open slots for fighter pilot-training in the Air National Guard.
"I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I choose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanesI don't want to play like I was somebody out there marching when I wasn't. It was either Canada or the service. Somebody said the Guard was looking for pilots. All I know is, there weren't that many people trying to be pilots."
By other accounts, it was during this time in Ellington that Bush began to refamiliarize himself with his narcotic of choice at Yale...cocaine. In his college days, Bush not only snorted, he dealt. Among the haute monde at Yale, he was known as one of the top purveyors of primo Colombian powder in New Haven, dispensing the crystal snow from ounce bags.
Just as he stiffed the Flight Evaluation Board in 1972, Bush now refuses to offer an explanation for his illegal and unjust war that has killed and maimed tens of thousands. "I'm the commander--see, I don't need to explain," Bush brayed in his best Mafia capo syntax to Bob Woodward. "I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel I owe anybody an explanation." That's the distilled essence of George W. Bush from his very own mouth: a bellicose and imperious buffoon who has never once been held to account for the mayhem he leaves in his wake.
So yet again Bush has succeeded in doing the impossible: he has sullied the once heroic term "draft evader."
:hitout: