corrente

OK. The Republicans are good. This we know. After Bush dumps the records on the press and claims they're "complete," Waura comes out and makes two arguments to defend her Boy (can't he do it?). Waura says: (1) She knows Bush did his Guard duty because he told her so. Then she says (2) anyone who says Bush didn't do his duty is insulting the National Guard.

And there the matter rests: Nobody says a thing about point (1), since we all know Bush is a liar anyhow, but nobody picks up on point (2)—not McAuliffe, not Kerry, presumably so as not to insult the National Guard troops who are, after all, serving ther country under conditions of great danger in Bush's Iraq fiasco.

And we let Waura get away with reframing the issue, as did the SCLM.

The issue is not that Bush "served" in the Guard, as Waura and the SCLM would have us believe.

The issue is not that Bush served in a champagne unit owing to the political pull of his Daddy.

The issue is not that there are no records showing the Bush did his duty, and that witnesses who claim to have seen him are unreliable.

The issue is not even that the records Bush released are not complete, even though (of course) he claimed that they were. (One of the records, the crucial DD-214, is missing (back here), which alone should raise the question of whether the records have been, well, tampered with.)

The crucial issue is: Bush was suspended from flying because he didn't take his flight physical. Why?

With that as background, we now come to this crucial post by the ever-essential Orcinus, who analyzes this story, by an actual investigative journalist, such as are no longer to be found inside the Beltway, which he summarizes as follows:

Bush was subject to the Human Reliability Program, a set of stringent regulations designed to prevent nuclear weapons from being handled by people who were unreliable:

While Bush's defenders expend a great deal of energy downplaying the HRP rules and their role in the Air Guard, the reality is that they were in fact a point of emphasis during the time period in question:

Thousands of pilots and other military personnel have lost their job assignments under the human reliability regulations, which were established in the 1960s, according to academic researchers.

The regulations were made stricter in the 1970s when the military started screening for drug abuse, said Dr. Herbert Abrams in a 1991 research paper.
... "The military takes this very, very seriously," said Lloyd Dumas, professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the author of Lethal Arrogance, a 1999 study of human foibles and dangerous technology.

"People of a lesser rank can even remove their superiors (under HRP). It's one of the few areas where rank doesn't matter," Dumas said.

Bush's suspension, his spotty final year of military service and his failure to take his flight physical are puzzling, Dumas said.

"If Bush was under the Human Reliability Program, there should be a paper trail. And if there's not, that's very, very unusual," the University of Texas professor said.

So now the question is: Will anyone in the Washington press corps pick up on this development? Will any of them ask Scott McClellan or Dan Bartlett whether Bush in fact was under the HRP rules? And if so, where are the accompanying documents?

Fat chance. But we can ask it!