A Not-So-Obvious Point

A Not-So-Obvious Point - Powerline's Rocket Man tackles the current Democrat trope - that Bush was AWOL/deserted the Guard.

The post as a whole is a fairly complete digest of the facts - which have been gurgitated for the past four years, and will no doubt require full court reiteration this year for those who can be saved.

But in the interest of absolute accuracy, I have to point this out. Rocket Man says:

The Democrats would have voters believe that while John Kerry was risking his life in Vietnam, George Bush was skipping Guard meetings in Alabama. But note the chronology: The peak of American involvement in Vietnam was in 1968 and 1969. It was in those years that Kerry piloted a boat on the Mekong River. At that time, Bush, who is 2 1/2 years younger than Kerry, was training to be a fighter pilot,

...all of this is true.

and could reasonably have expected to be posted to Vietnam at some future point.

Probably not true.

Bush flew the F102 Delta Dagger, a plane designed for shooting down Russian bombers and not much else. The plane served with Air Defense Command (ADC), a no-longer-extant part of the USAF intended to...well, shoot down Russian bombers and not much else. The F102 wasn't built to dogfight with planes like the nimble North Vietnamese MiG-17s, or drop bombs - like the F4s and F105s and F100s of Tactical Air Command. It certainly couldn't carry nukes or jungle-flattening loads of conventional bombs like the B-52s of Strategic Air Command, either. Both TAC and SAC served in Vietnam - ADC never did, to the best of my knowledge (Fingers? Am I right?)

ADC - and the Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard units attached to it never fired a shot in anger; Democrats will no doubt say "Hah! Because there was never a threat of an air attack on the US!" Well, in hindsight, that's both right and wrong, as we found on on 9/11.

Anyway - Bush flew the F102 (some Democrat moonbat acquaintances of mine said he never got his wings, which is poppycock), and probably would never have been deployed to Vietnam.

As a side note, though - the Democrats are really piling on the National Guard, lately, making it sound like Powderpuff Football. Do they have any idea how many people in this country are in the Guard? And how that line of rhetoric sounds to them?

And how few of them wind up in Quinnipiac polls?

Posted by Mitch at February 4, 2004 03:03 AM