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CAMPAIGN TRAIL
Up to his old (dirty) tricks
BY DOUG IRELAND, ALTERNET
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Just what was Lieutenant George W. Bush doing during those long months in 1972 while he shirked his military duties and ducked orders from his superiors in the National Guard? He was serving as the political director for the US Senate campaign of Winton "Red" Blount, the wealthy CEO of an engineering and construction firm who headed the US Chamber of Commerce before being appointed Nixon’s postmaster general (whereupon he promptly fired some 33,000 employees as the postal service was put on a for-profit basis). Blount’s opponent was veteran Alabama senator John Sparkman, a conservative Southern Democrat who had been Adlai Stevenson’s running mate on the national ticket in 1952. Blount ran a filthy, race-baiting campaign against Sparkman, focused in part on the issue of busing to achieve school integration. Even though Sparkman had co-sponsored the "anti-forced-busing" bill in the Senate, the Blount campaign covered the state with billboards proclaiming, "A vote for Red Blount is a vote against forced busing ... against coddling criminals ... against welfare freeloaders." Blount also was a ferocious supporter of the Vietnam War (which Lieutenant Bush’s daddy was vigorously defending as the US ambassador to the UN), and young Bush was in charge of distributing the smear-campaign literature that linked the conservative Sparkman (whom Blount labeled a "liberal" — sound familiar?) to the head of the Democrats’ national ticket that year, the anti-war George McGovern. The smear pamphlets accused Sparkman of favoring drastic cuts in the military budget, of abandoning American POWs in Vietnam, and of supporting "amnesty for draft-dodgers" — none of which, of course, was true. So while Lieutenant Bush was avoiding Vietnam through cushy service in the National Guard — and then not even fulfilling the duties which his uniform obliged him to perform, as "higher-ups" in the Nixon administration’s military machine pressured Bush’s commandant to let him off the hook — he was also learning how to run a pro-war, dirty-tricks, mud-slinging campaign. If 60 Minutes had bothered to tell us what Lieutenant Bush was doing while dodging his military commitments — namely, serving a sewer-politics apprenticeship that included tarring an opponent with sympathy for those who didn’t want to go to Vietnam — the noisome hypocrisy of his time in the Guard would have been startlingly apparent. The "soft on terrorism" charges against this year’s national Democratic ticket, which were trumpeted in September at Bush’s Madison Square Garden coronation, echo the smears of the 1972 Senate campaign on which the president cut his political teeth. It was mendacity and deceit that Bush practiced 32 years ago — as it is today. And that is the real meaning of his time in the National Guard.
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