National En Guardsman

But wait, the White House told us they'd released all the records long ago.

The real question now is: what other documents does the White House have? Obviously they've had these sitting around for a while, and just as obviously they've held them back even though they claimed in February that they had made available every known document related to Bush's National Guard record.

So what else are they hiding? And when are they going to approve AP's FOIA request to view all relevant microfilm records directly?

Oh, and Josh Marshall has the transcript [screwy link, for some reason] of Dan Bartlett's feable response on CBS last night.

DAN BARTLETTT: For anybody to try to interpret or presume they know what somebody who is now dead was thinking in any of these memos, I think is very difficult to do. What we do know, and what we know from people who are alive today, is that President Bush performed his duties well as a pilot, that he sought and received permission -- in those very same documents, it says what he was doing. He was not getting out of drills, he wasn't going to be physically there to do the drills because he was going to be in another state to perform his civilian occupation, which was very common in the Guard then, and it is very common in the Guard today -- that it's a civilian occupation which allows them to also fulfill their military obligation. And President Bush was working with the commanders at that point, at that time, to find out how he could fulfill his duties, as well as meet the duties in civilian life [emphasis added]. That's one of the beauties of the National Guard system, that you can do both.

The bottom line is, is that President Bush would not have received the honorable discharge that he was granted when he returned from Alabama if he had not met his requirements.

Bush was "working with the commanders," huh? So, they bent over backward to get him into the Guard, then bent over backward to get him out.

As I've said many times before, this is a scandal of Bush's own making. Everyone knew he was a callow and irresponsible bum early in life. Everyone knew he had to have benefited from being the son of George HW Bush. He could simply have owned up to that, admitted that he did everything he could -- like a lot of young men at the time -- to avoid Vietnam, and I don't think many would have held that against him. On the contrary, most folks seem totally sick of re-fighting a war that ended 30 years ago.

Instead the administration has stonewalled over coming clean with his Nat'l Guard records and lied about the particulars, while at the same time holding him up as a pillar of valor, courage, and resoluteness...a "War President." Bad strategy.