Replies

You seem to have to have looked more closely at the evidence than I did. I gave up when the experts were arguing about what they saw at the microscopic level...and still couldn't reach agreement. Also, you present as proven things that were, and still are, under dispute such as the stuff about the "th" and whether or not the TANG could have afforded typewriters capable of producing the "memos".

CBS gave Senator Kerry a pass on an amazingly thin record as a politician in the past thirty years but pursued the merest possibility of evidence of mal/nonfeasance by Lt. Bush in the distant past

Generally true.

The story of "Lieutenant Bush skipped Guard Duty" collapsed under the weight of the evidence of the fraudulence of the supporting "documents

No it didn't. Quite the contrary...but proof that would stand up in court never surfaced.

My experience and reading tell me that whether or not clever young men serve in the armed forces and/or fight in combat is a matter of choice. That's even more true when the men are from rich and powerful families.

Viet Nam was a very unpopular war. All sorts of clever young men avoided service and combat. So when people tell me that young George obtained entry to a well-known rich-man's safe-haven, that he avoided duty when he felt like it and some of his officers refused to criticize him for it, and that he got out the same way - all through family influence I believe it. When some of the principals - such as the guy who claimed to have actually done the family's bidding and the former TANG secretary - confirm it, I believe it.

Nor was this kind of thing limited to VietNam. It occured in all wars. Sometimes it was blatant when people avoided service by buying substitutes to take their place. More often, the dodges were more subtle; 4-F, special assignments, vital national work at home, etc. I'm not fooled by any of them.

Only a journalist like Rush Limbaugh - a journalist who is dedicated to the truth rather than to a staying in the good graces of go-along-and-get-along Establishment journalism

That's hilarious since Rush presents himself as a partisan entertainer and always has.

Don't fool yourself. Being objective when reporting the news is probably beyond human capability. Some are much better than others, no doubt about it. But everyone is biased by self-interest and limited vision.

The story of "Lieutenant Bush skipped Guard Duty" collapsed under the weight of the evidence of the fraudulence of the supporting "documents

No it didn't. Quite the contrary...but proof that would stand up in court never surfaced.
My experience and reading tell me that whether or not clever young men serve in the armed forces and/or fight in combat is a matter of choice. That's even more true when the men are from rich and powerful families.

Viet Nam was a very unpopular war. All sorts of clever young men avoided service and combat. So when people tell me that young George obtained entry to a well-known rich-man's safe-haven

The specifics of history matter. Viet Nam became a very unpopular war after the Tet Offensive. It didn't really happen overnight and - though I've seen on FR a posting which purports to document that John Kerry was ambivalent about Viet Nam while he was still in college - it wasn't well started on that road (at least in the popular press) until after Tet.
That matters to me in the sense that since Kerry is a year older than Bush, they made their decisions on the military at different stages of that evolution. Had Kerry been a year younger than Bush, and thus had Kerry like Clinton been in college when the ~~antiwar protests~~ draft riots were in full swing, Kerry's choice might have been to go to law school instead of signing up for the Navy and ending up in Viet Nam. In such case Kerry very well might have availed himself of choices which would have kept him out of harm's way.
But in fact the time Bush entered TANG was a time when antiwar sentiment was further developed than it was when Kerry entered the Navy. Bush did not, and has at no time claimed any different, sign up for an active combat arm which would have been sure to have gotten him to Viet Nam.
But he did join an inactive combat arm. Training as a fighter pilot isn't the way to guarantee you won't be activated and sent into battle. In fact the training to get you up to flying status isn't just a Weekend Warrior thing - you have to go into effectively active status for a significant time in order to train enough to attain flight status. Training to be a fighter pilot is expensive and time-consuming, and when Bush joined TANG he could not have known that the military would not decide that it needed to activate him after he was trained. And there is such a thing as an "operational accident" to consider the possibility of before you sign on for fighter pilot duty, even as a reserve.
Bush became an operational reserve fighter pilot, and maintained flight status until US involvement in Viet Nam was wound down. At that point the USAF pulled a boatload of fighter pilots back home and deactivated them. Many of them loved to fly and joined the Air National Guard. And suddenly the paucity of ANG fighter pilots turned to a glut. Instead of being an asset to the Guard, Lt Bush was competition for limited flight hours among all those combat veterans.
So if you were the commander of Bush's TANG fighter wing, would you at that point exercise yourself to make sure that Lt. Bush maintained flight status? Or would you not in fact prefer that he leave flight status and do something else? If you were in Lt. Bush's shoes in that circumstance, might you not in fact choose to do something else, and feel free to commit to an out-of-state political campaign?

Only a journalist like Rush Limbaugh - a journalist who is dedicated to the truth rather than to a staying in the good graces of go-along-and-get-along Establishment journalism

That's hilarious since Rush presents himself as a partisan entertainer and always has.

Exactly. Being objective is beyond human capability.
That being so, claiming to be objective is arrogant. And identifying yourself as an entertainer and as a partisan whose perspective has a name (and that name is not a virtue such as "moderate" or "objective") is actually an exercise of the virtue of humility.
Journalists who position themselves as being objective - or who claim objectivity outright - are the last ones you should beleive.

you present as proven things that were, and still are, under dispute such as the stuff about the "th" and whether or not the TANG could have afforded typewriters capable of producing the "memos".

My professional career was in an office in a defense contractor. I saw tons of memos in my day. And before the advent of word processing I never saw a memo which could possibly have been confused with a product of Microsoft Word. Nobody was using a machine of the complexity which would have supported that sort of quality; if you had seen that sort of document back in the early/mid seventies you would have instantly taken it for the product of a print shop.
It would have been absurd to pay the price of a car for a "typewriter" capable of that, and it would have been absurd to take the trouble to operate such a complex machine for a memo. And some of these "memos" purport to have been written to file. Not meant to see the light of day, and yet they were made on the most complicated to use typewriter ~~in the office~~ that they had no reason to have in the office?
More likely than buying a white elephant like that, TANG might have gotten a hand-me-down typewriter from the USAF. And don't even think of trying to convince me that Killian typed those "memos" himself on such a complex machine. Killian's family says he didn't type - and my experience of such a meliu was that engineers didn't type either. I was one, and had taken a typing course in HS thinking it would help me in college. And I found that you "positioned" yourself in a bad way if you ever laid hand on a typewriter in the office. And a test pilot told me he had the selfsame experience, only worse.
On top of that, the Air Force used 8-inch wide paper back then. If you laid out a memo to look right on that size of paper, what would it look like when copied it onto eight-and-a-half by eleven paper? And wouldn't it be off-center?
Those "memos" were made on Microsoft Word, long after their putative dates. They were made by someone who had some experience of military correspondence but who was not immersed in Air Force culture circa 1973. They were not closely held for three decades, then suddenly copied promiscuously (as would be indicated by the poor quality of the copy) without reaching anyone but Bill Burkett. They were made in 2004 by Bill Burkett or someone he knows personally, and they were deliberately reduced in quality by repeated copying of copy of a copy, to obliterate any possiblity that experts could be certain that the signatures were bogus.
If TANG had had a machine capable of emulating Microsoft Word, the products of that machine would not have been limited to four memos about a lowly Lieutenant, however well-connected.