Ahhhh … the plot

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Ahhhh … the plot thickens.

We noted earlier that Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot went on NPR this morning and told Juan Williams that the president had volunteered to go to Vietnam, but hadn’t been chosen. That is, of course, a demonstrably false statement, which even the president himself says is false.

Well, this afternoon Racicot held a conference call with reporters. And during that call, I’m told, he was asked just what he was talking about when he said that the president had volunteered to go to Vietnam.

According a participant in the call, Racicot said that he had read this in a ‘national publication’, but he couldn’t remember which one.

One of Racicot’s aides, who was also on the call, promised he’d later provide the mystery article to the reporter who had asked the question.

Now there’ve been a few articles I’ve seen in which friends of the president’s from the time in question have said that at the time Bush expressed some interest in volunteering for service in Vietnam. But there is no evidence for this in his records. The one piece of evidence we have is that the president said on his enlistment papers that he did not want to serve overseas. And the president himself just two weeks said he didn’t volunteer for service in Vietnam.

So, now we know that Racicot didn’t mispeak. He’s standing behind what appears to be a demonstrable falsehood and pegging his claim to some article in a ‘national publication’.

Racicot is going around the country and hitting every media outlet around attacking John Kerry’s record on national defense — which he is certainly entitled to do. And at the same time, he’s peddling blatant falsehoods about the president’s military service that not one publication has yet chosen to call him on.

Go figure …

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