There have been several "chicken hawk" threads and I give the same answer I gave then. History is repleat with good generals being bad presidents, and good presidents being bad generals. As a combat vet I do not believe that one is determnative of the other. I fought in Viet Nam under Johnson, who was the worst thing to happen to the American Armed Services, possibly in it's entire history. Yet he is generally regard as a caring President, with extensive civil rights and Great Society programs. And Johnson was a Naval Officer during WWII.

In my view Bush is an excellent Commander in Chief, no matter what his background. He clearly laid his objectives out, choose probably the best Cabinet in half a century, gave then the time and resources they requested, and then got the hell out of the way.

Clinton and Carter (one a Naval Officer, the other a true draft dodger) were two of the most inept Commanders in Chief in the past fifty years. If you're old enough to remember the "Debacle in the Desert", or the fact we were horribly late in the Balkans (after waiting forever for "Old Europe" to do nothing with NATO).

Gore was a clerk typist in Viet Nam, but whether he was in any greater danger than Bush bringing in a single seat jet fighter, is open to debate, as I believe there were far more cases of pilots in the US being killed in accidents, etc, than there were clerk typists being killed in Viet Nam (Gore was not exsposed to enemy fire and did not earn a combat infantrymans badge).

I have many friends in the current military; my family has had one and some times several members in the military in combat for every war the US has fought since the Civil War. I honestly can say that they all, to a man (and two women) regard Bush as the right man for the job, and I suspect that when the elections are held, they will vote en masse for him, no matter what the final outcome. If you see him on the deck with the carrier crew, he was perfectly at ease, and they with him. They clearly like him, trust him and are willing to fight for him. And he in turn has honored them, by flying out to their ship. They will talk of this for years, and probably more than whatever missions they undertook during the actual combat operations.

Now to clear a couple of other matters:

Kat, if Clinton did get a blow job, it would explain his immediate preoccupation with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" right after he took office. And perhaps his pathetic attempts to reduce manhood to raping defenceless women... (talk about leaving yourself open...)

And the second, since as Carol pointed out, the time that Bush was alleged to be "missing" was six months, and those drills occur for two days out of every month, in reality Bush has been castigated by the Desperate Left for missing exactly 12 days... (talk about pathetic...)