Could this be what Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot <$Ad$>was talking about?
We’re still trying to get to the bottom of what mystery article in a ‘national publication’ Racicot was referring about when he told Juan Williams that President had volunteered for service in Vietnam but had not been ‘selected’.
The only thing we can come up with is this.
At a few points over the last decade President Bush has claimed that he tried to sign up for something called the Palace Alert program, which would have taken him to Southeast Asia.
Now, it seems odd on the face of it that the president’s family would pull all these strings to help him jump the queue for a safe spot in the Texas Air National Guard only to have him take the first chance to go to Vietnam. But, as this 1999 interview in The Washington Post makes clear, even the dates don’t add up …
WP: Were you avoiding the draft?
GWB: No, I was becoming a pilot.
WP: You wanted to serve?
GWB: Yes I did.
WP: But when you were asked do you want to go overseas, you said no.
GWB: I didn’t know that. But I actually tried to go on a Palace Alert program.
WP: That was later.
GWB: It was. After I became a pilot.
WP: Palace Alert program was being phased out.
GWB: Not really, a couple of my buddies got to go. …
WP: … But they’d already graduated.
GWB: That’s true. I couldn’t go until actually I’d gotten my â
WP: I was curious about the sequence. You got out of combat school on June 23, 1970. Palace Alert programs were all closed down overseas as of June 30. So could you have gone even if you signed up for it?
GWB: I guess not if that’s the case, but I remember going to see [the supervisor] to try to get signed up for it. You just ask the commander to put you in. He said you can’t go because you’re too low on the totem pole. I’m not trying to make this thing any grander than it is. …
D’oh! as Homer Simpson would say.
As far as I know, there’s no documentary evidence that Bush ever tried to sign up for this program which, in the words of the Post, “dispatched qualified F-102 pilots in the Guard to the Europe and the Far East, occasionally to Vietnam, on three- to six-month assignments.”
But, as the interview makes clear, even if he did, he seems to have tried to get on board about a week before they shut the program down.
That’s sorta like when you show up a couple hours late to shovel manure. “Oh, you guys’re d’ … Oh, I’m … I’m sorry, man. I really wanted to come here and help out, but … Wow, I feel terrible. Is there anything else I can … maybe next time? Hey, I’m gonna go grab a sandwich, okay?”
As I said earlier, even the president doesn’t even try to push this line anymore. Two weeks ago he told Tim Russert that he’d never volunteered to go to Vietnam.
