"The most striking and telling piece of 'evidence' that Lt. G. W. Bush was never AWOL is the plain, simple, hard, chiselled-in-granite fact that he was never accused or charged with having been AWOL throughout the entire period of his service."

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!!

Other Air National Guard pilots who were with Bush at the time (that is, at the times he bothered to show up) have said that he was very sporadic in his attendance, and several officers wrote him up for not showing up. You ignore the fact that the secretary who typed up the document, a copy of which Dan Rather referred to in the infamous 60 Minutes broadcast, said that even though Rather didn't have the original, the informtion was accurate. And it is an incontrovertible fact that Bush did not show up for the required physical and was grounded as a result. But by that time, he had stopped bothering to show up at all.

The reason Bush got into the Air National Guard in the first place--in order to avoid the possibility of being drafted and sent to Vietnam--and jumped ahead of some 500 applicants--was because Papa Had Influence. And then, the little weasel couldn't be bothered to meet that obligation.

These are facts know to one hell of a lot of people.

Sorry, Teribus, but your "plain, simple, hard, chiselled-in-granite fact" is not chiselled in granite at all, it's chiselled in Silly Putty. If he wasn't charged, it was for the same reason he jumped the line to get into the guard in the first place. Family power and privilege.

I'm astounded at the lenghts of nincompoopery some people will go to in an effort to deny well-established facts and try to defend quite probably the worst president and one of the most corrupt regimes this country has ever had.

Don Firth