Dubya, Treebeard, and facing bullets from your country's enemies

I watched most of the evening coverage of the Democratic National Convention, and have read a fair amount of the punditry written about it, but frankly haven't had any reactions I thought original enough to merit posting here.

I was rather surprised to hear Barack Obama proudly announce that he was from the "Land of Lincoln!" and to hear Theresa Heinz Kerry quote Lincoln's first inaugural speech ("mystic chords of memory," "better angels of our nature").  There are indeed a number of parallels between the wartime elections of 2004 and 1860-1864, but the Dems are on the wrong side of those parallels in my view.  Making the full comparison, however, would take more effort than I'm up to at the moment.

So what was I writing during the convention?  Heh.  I was trying to educate John Derbyshire, who writes for National Review Online and its group blog, The Corner, about the respective military records of George Walker Bush and John Forbes Kerry.  Derb's first two posts on the topic were, I thought, factually mistaken in asserting that while Kerry had willingly sought out combat, Dubya had pulled strings to ensure he'd avoid it.  So I was very gratified indeed when on Friday, in his third post on the subject, Mr. Derbyshire eventually reprinted, in considerable length, three key paragraphs from my second (typically long-winded) protesting email, which I'd sent him on the morning before Senator Kerry's acceptance speech:

RE: KERRY, GWB, VIETNAM [John Derbyshire]

Just one more from the tarpit. A reader in Houston urges me to correct my statement of yesterday: "We all know what happened when time came for George W. Bush to make his Vietnam decisions. His family, like 90 percent of well-connected elite families in America at that time, made a few phone calls & got him a stateside billet. This option was not open to most Americans."

Not so, says my reader: "The assertion that Dubya signed up for the Texas Air National Guard to avoid serving in Vietnam ... [is] simply untrue. It's untrue for the very simple -- objectively factual, easily verifiable -- reason that the TANG unit young Bush signed up for was indeed in hot combat in Southeast Asia's skies at the very moment he signed up for it, and Bush or anyone else joining that unit would reasonably have expected that its pilots would still be in hot combat over Southeast Asia as long as the war continued!

"As it turned out, that TANG unit was no longer in combat by the time Bush was trained to fly its planes. And so Bush didn't get shot at by his country's enemies. Rather, his unit intercepted and shadowed Russian aircraft (flying out of Cuba) that were routinely probing American airspace in the Gulf. World War III didn't break out, and no, Bush wasn't shot at by the Russians, and no, he can't now claim to have the combat experience that Kerry can claim. Yes, he'd be a more appealing candidate today if he could claim combat experience. He can't, and he's never tried to. But the explanation for that is not what you've claimed -- that is, that Bush used his connections to join a part of the armed forces which was guaranteed not to see combat."

"(Ironically, exactly the opposite thing happened to Senator Kerry. Joining the Navy, as he did, was unlikely to put him into hot combat, and indeed he saw none on the ship on which he served most of his time abroad. When he volunteered to join the Swift Boats, they weren't seeing hot combat either. It was only a change in their mission, after he'd volunteered for them, that resulted in his country's enemies shooting at him. And after four months and three bandaide wounds with the Swift Boats, he promptly got his ticket punched, collected his medals and his 8mm films of his dramatic re-enactments of his combat experiences, and headed back to a stateside post as an admiral's aid, and thence to an early discharge so he could run for Congress. The medals eventually went over a Capitol fence in a war protest; the 8mm footage will be onscreen at tonight's Democratic National Convention.)"

I hope this is correct. I can *absolutely guarantee*, though, from years of experience in this business, that within half an hour of this being posted I shall get some equally indignant, equally long, and equally self-assured e-mail from someone arguing an entirely different version of events. Since no-one is going to pay me to dig to the bottom of this, which would take weeks -- if it actually has a bottom, which after 35 years is by no means certain -- I present my reader's account as offered (though edited without prejudice), declare myself respectfully agnostic, and CLOSE THE SUBJECT.

The only edit of consequence was that Derb linked a research piece from Aerospaceweb.org rather than the post that I'd cited from blogger Bill Hobbs.  I have no complaint about that change — both resources report the same facts, which isn't surprising because, as Mr. Derbyshire originally wrote, "Facts is facts" (if you bother to get them right).

And of course, Derb is quite correct to note that notwithstanding the objective, easily verifiable historical facts regarding young Dubya's willing embrace of the risk of being shot at by his country's enemies, his political enemies will continue to distort his military record and trot out the old AWOL meme.

Nevertheless, I'm well pleased to have been able to better publicize some of Dubya's history.  I hope that perhaps a few readers of The Corner might have been bucked up a bit in their support for President Bush as a result, or at least that I've helped neutralize what the President's opponents might have exploited as an (unfair) criticism of him by someone who's normally one of his supporters.  I disagree with Mr. Derbyshire on quite a few of the issues about which he regularly writes, but in this instance I credit him for hearing me out, doing some independent online research to verify what I was writing to him, and publishing the result.