The Ming Report

GUTTER SNIPING

February 13, 2004 - When the release of payroll records raised more questions about just when Lt. George W. Bush showed up for his National Guard duty in 1972 and 1973 the Whitehouse called it "gutter politics" and released a dental record to prove that the President got his teeth cleaned in Alabama on January 6, 1973. Coincidentally less than 24 hours later Matt Drudge, the Republicans favorite smut merchant, moved a rumor that Senator John Kerry had an affair with a mysterious woman, an AP employee who fled to someplace in Africa on Kerry's orders. Within hours Rush Limbaugh, the Republicans favorite addict, had it on the air with his own twist:

If Kerry denies this, that's not going to be good enough. We're going to demand pay stubs, and we're going to demand dental records from Kerry and the alleged woman to prove that the affair never happened, and we're not going to stop there. We're going to go places, we're going to find anybody that saw them together, we're going to demand to know where they were. Did you see them? We're going to go all through this, ladies and gentlemen. I'll tell you what - it does not give new meaning to the name John F-ing Kerry, it validates it.

In 1999 when he was confronted with the persistent questions of cocaine use George said he wasn't going to answer and play the Washington game of "gotcha" and the chorus rose in a crescendo decrying "the politics of personal destruction." It rang hollow then after four years of the Republican leadership's march to the sewer in pursuit of the blue dress. It rings hollow now when the credibility of the Bush Administration and the President has become a central issue politically at home and diplomatically abroad.

With each release from the President's National Guard service record new questions arise. This morning it was the release of an unedited version of his application to be accepted into the Texas Air Guard showing that he reported arrests and convictions in New Haven and Texas that prompted reporters to ask whether he had received the required waivers.

The Kerry rumor coincidentally surfaced at the same time that new questions about the President's military records surfaced. A retired Lt. Colonel, Bill Burkett, claims that he witnessed the sanitizing of the records at the request of the then Governor's aides. If true it is a devastating revelation. Burkett presents himself as positive and credible in his CNN interview being broadcast this morning. Should the allegations Burkett makes be corroborated - and the Colonel claims that others were present and witnessed the incidents that he recounts - it indicates a criminal conspiracy at the highest levels of the Texas Air National Guard and which extended into the Governor's office. That is not a plunge into the gutter.