Thanks...just fired off the following e-mail:
Mr Matthews should check the credibility of his guests before reporting errant stories:
Feb. 13, 2004, 11:37PM
Story of purged Bush files has been around the block
By MICHAEL HEDGES
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- A White House reeling from questions about President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service was hit this week by explosive new charges: A retired Guard officer claimed he witnessed a 1997 effort to purge Bush's files of damaging material.
By Thursday night, Bill Burkett of Abilene was a cable news phenomenon, telling his account of Bush aides and Texas guard officers conspiring in a cover-up.
But lost in those accounts were details of a long and bitter feud -- which could provide a motive for this story -- between Burkett and a cadre of friends and the Texas guard.
And while Burkett told a consistent story this week, he had published a more controversial account earlier.
In an essay Burkett wrote for an anti-Bush Web site in March 2003, he claimed he was sent to Panama, where he contracted a fatal disease, as retaliation by the Texas Guard after "refusing to alter personnel records of George W. Bush."
But in a telephone interview Friday, he backed off the claim that he was ordered to falsify Bush's records.
"That statement was not accurate, that is overstated," he said. He insisted the other allegation -- that he witnessed an effort to sanitize Bush's Guard record -- was true.
Burkett first raised his claim in the late 1990s and repeated it to a number of reporters in 2000. He alleged that he overheard Bush's one-time chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, tell a Texas Guard general to make sure there were no embarrassments in Bush's Guard record.
The story was not published then but was resurrected this week in major newspapers and on cable network talk shows as controversy swelled over whether Bush, who may face Vietnam War combat veteran John Kerry in the presidential election, completed his Guard service in the United States during that war.
In Burkett's account, he said he overheard both sides of a speakerphone call between Allbaugh and Gen. Daniel James III during the summer of 1997.
About 10 days later, he said he was approached by George Conn, a friend who coaxed him to the museum on the base in Camp Mabry in Austin, near the office of former Guard Gen. John Scribner. There, in a garbage can, he saw several pieces of paper.
"My eyes fixed on the first page," he said Friday. "It had Bush, George W. Lt1. What I did next still bothers me. I browsed through the top five or six pages."
All of those directly involved -- Allbaugh, Conn, James and Scribner -- emphatically deny Burkett's charges.
"This is baseless, groundless hogwash," Allbaugh said.
Conn, now a civilian working for the military in Germany, told the Boston Globe he had no recollection of the events described by Burkett.
Allbaugh said that during the governorship Bush asked him to find out if his Guard record was available. "What I found out then, for the first time, was that most of it was in Denver," Allbaugh said. "We did review it and there was nothing in there."
Details of Burkett's story rang false to some Guard officials.
For one thing, Texas Guard officials said no personnel records were ever stored at the museum. Also, even if the records had been scoured in 1997, it would have been too late. The bulk of the material in Bush's Guard records had been transferred to a Colorado facility where records are permanently stored and copied on microfilm, Guard officials said. Some Bush Guard records emerged from that facility this week.
Burkett could produce no one to directly corroborate his story. He said Friday that a few people knew about it around the time it happened. But he said two of those refuse to come forward, fearing retaliation by current Guard officials, and he didn't want to expose them.
A former Guard officer, Dennis Adams of Austin, did confirm Friday that Burkett told him about the records destruction in 1997. Adams said he was not surprised when Burkett told him what he'd overheard and seen.
"I have no doubt he is telling the truth," Adams said. "Bill is one of my heroes. He was trying to take on certain rotten SOBs inside the Guard."
Burkett and some friends from his Guard days have been involved in an ugly dispute with the Texas National Guard and officers appointed by then-Gov. Bush for several years.
One of those friends, Harvey Gough, said this week that he became so incensed at what he saw as malfeasance by the Guard's senior officers that he hired a private detective to delve into James' personal life. James is the son of former Gen. Chappy James, the first black four-star general.
Through a spokesman, James denied all of Burkett's charges.
Burkett, Gough, Adams and others have waged an ugly feud with the Guard over what they said was fraud, waste and corruption.
Burkett sued three officers in the Texas Guard in the late 1990s, claiming that they blocked him from receiving medical support after he went to Panama on a Guard-related mission and contracted a debilitating disease. Gough alleged in a lawsuit that he was subjected to anti-Semitic remarks from one of James' staffers, and when he complained, James retaliated by court-martialing him. Both lawsuits failed.
Burkett also raised charges against James and others at Texas legislative hearings in the late 1990s.
Rep. Bob Hunter, R-Abilene, conducted one of the hearings and said this week that there was no substance to Burkett's charges.
Burkett's writing about Bush and the Texas National Guard can be found on a number of anti-Bush Web sites. On the eve of the Iraq war in March 2003, he described Bush as one of "the three small men," along with Hitler and Napoleon, who sought to rule through tyranny.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2402474 One more reason why MSNBC is the lowest rated cable news network as their propensity to create news from the left just makes them look ridiculous in the eyes of ordinary Americans!
The scary thing to me is the closed-minded determination of many to believe ill of Bush.
I have a cow-orker who bought lock, stock, and barrel into every slur against Bush. When I explained, based on my 25 years of active and reserve service, why the allegations about his reserve service were groundless, this guy--20 years younger than me and with no service--called me "naive."
I'm sure he will glom onto this bogus story about cleaning up Bush's record and believe it like Gospel--even after I tell him about microfiche records and that no records were ever held at the museum.
For him, and I'm sure there must be millions like him, the liberal line is the default, "moderate, balanced" position, and everything else is "right-wing ranting." For him, the civil expression of positions with which he disagrees is "offensive" and wrongful. And he really thinks he's reacting to the "lack of civility" and not the idea ideas themselves.
Trying to talk with this guy is like trying to reason with some malign Stepford wife created by Stalin. No matter how restrained one is, how careful one is to avoid inflammatory language, he becomes increasingly abusive with every fact presented, wraps up by calling me "arrogant" and my arguments "surreal," and holds to his original positions as though no arguments against them had been brought to his attention.
This is a classic example of the third type of tyranny described by Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind," and it is frightening. The school system is catching our young when they are malleable, and turning them into their own jailers by teaching them, "This position is by definition is open minded; all other positions are by definition closed minded, and are to be rejected without further consideration. The mere expression of these positions is proof of intellectual and moral deficiency, and is wrongful and offensive." Such people cannot be reasoned with.