Media turning a blind eye and deaf ear to G.W. Bush�s missing year of military service

By Martin Heldt

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September 26, 2000�In this age of prima donnas it is hard to imagine that a pen could ever have cut deeper than a sword.

We've grown fat feasting on the mush that makes Regis and Oprah indistinguishable from Sam and Cokey.

Still, in a nation engorged on media you would think that some coverage would be given to the year that George W. Bush skipped while a member of the Texas National Air Guard.

After all, he is running for president.

But the only newspaper to give any objective coverage of this has been the Boston Globe with its May 23-24 and July 28 piece.

Other than that it has only been through the courage of publications like Online Journal and Tom Paine.com that this story is being told at all.

It is not as if the information hasn't gone out. Just last week the Chicago Tribune's John Kass was sparked by a reader's complaint to ask a question about Bush's service:

"How did you get into the National Guard during Vietnam? Have you ever been told about politicians pulling strings to help you?"

I immediately sat down and posed a new question for him to ask Bush: "What did you do during the year you skipped National Guard duty? "

I also emailed him the facts of the story along with Bush's National Air Guard documents and a link to even more of Bush's military records which I have placed online.

I won't hear anything back from him. Just as I haven't heard anything back from the scores of others in the press who have had a chance to see the documents.

I have been far from alone in the effort to tell this story. Dozens have joined with me in making media contacts. We have all shouldered the task of sending the documents and facts to small local papers, midsize papers, big papers, magazines like Newsweek & Time, the Internet behemoths MSNBC and CNN, and all the reporters we could find.

It has been a tremendous grassroots civic action.

We aren't spreading rumor and innuendo. This is not the story of a search for missing records. We have the pertinent records.

This is not a hunt for credible eyewitnesses and first hand statements. The officers involved have stepped forward. We have their testimony and we have the signed statements of those no longer living.

This is the story of how George Walker Bush walked away from a years duty while in the National Guard.

And now it is a story of how the prima donnas in the press have helped him get away with it.