“The Crimson reported Kerry called for U.N. control of troops in 1970″. — Harvard Crimson The content of Kerry’s 1970 views is not as important as the inevitability that both their radicalism and their contradictions with his recent positions will be grist for Karl Rove’s mill (“…a spokesperson for President Bush’s reelection campaign said Kerry’s 1970 remarks signaled the senator’s weakness on defense.”). Robert Reich defends Kerry’s comments as appropriate for the time, when he was a just-returned veteran and the Vietnam war still raged. It goes without saying, but did Dubya even have a coherent thought about a political position in his head in 1970? Here’s a cogent observation from Rafe Coburn:

I kind of feel like people are having trouble seeing the forest for the trees when it comes to President Bush’s service in the National Guard. The issue here is that Bush took the rich man’s way out and went into the National Guard on the wings of a political favor, and then said Sunday in his interview with Tim Russert that he supported the war in Vietnam. Everything after that is window dressing. Even if he showed up and was the most conscientious National Guardsman during his time of service, he still decided he was too good to fight in a war that had his support. Isn’t that the character issue here? The fact that the paperwork is jumbled and they can’t find any actual people who will admit that they saw him doing his duty is a side dish.

It is equally, but not more, important to contrast their positions back then as it is to compare their ‘war records’ and, thanks, Rafe, for thinking through this latest troubling hypocrisy on Bush’s part. But it is taking the easy way out to punt on the AWOL issue. It would be far more than a ‘side dish’ if the commander-in-chief shirked his duty and is trying to cover it up with clumsy half-truths. You cannot blithely dismiss the dearth of evidence supporting Bush’s claim to be up-and-up on his National Guard duty as a paperwork snafu when a far more dire possibility exists.

But if Bush was more of a hypocritical ‘draft dodger’ than a deserter, let us hope the press and the Democrats bulldog him on the issue as the Republicans did to Clinton.