May 9, 2003

The Power of the Blogosphere

Every so often, the blogosphere amazes me. The past two days, it did it again, and re-confirmed my belief that the blogosphere is both the most powerful journalistic media tool ever devised, and the foundation of a new kind of what I in the past have called collaborative peer-reviewed journalism.

On Wednesday morning, I was checking out AndrewSullivan.com and noticed his post regarding a Paul Krugman column in the New York Times that revived the "Bush was AWOL from the National Guard" accusation in light of Bush's carrier landing/speech. I thought it was worth repeating, so I created my own post linking to Sullivan's. But I wasn't done. I'm a journalist. I had three questions Sullivan hadn't answered - questions, in fact, that it seems no one had yet answered in the coverage of Bush's National Guard service:

1. Was the Texas Air National Guard really a good place to avoid combat?
2. Was the Bush family name really so big back in 1968-73 that it would have helped Bush get a cushy and safe spot in the Guard? And, related to that, did the Bush family name by 1972 make it likely the Alabama colonel would've remembered Bush being on his base?
3. Is the lack of a paper trail for some parts of Bush's claimed service record all that extraordinary in the military?

So much for the notion that Bush joined a unit chosen to avoid the chance for combat.

Next came the issue of Bush's family connections, often portrayed as "famous and powerful" by the anti-Bushies. You know the meme: Bush got his Guard spot thanks to the "famous and powerful" Bush family name.

But back in '68, Bush the Elder wasn't so big and famous. In May, when GWB enlisted in the TANG, his father was a first-term, back-bench, minority-party congressman running for re-election. Bush the Elder hadn't yet been United Nations Ambassador or chairman of the Republican National Committee or CIA Director or vice president or president. Two years later, Bush the Elder lost a Senate race. In 1972, when GWB was allegedly getting away with being AWOL from that base in Alabama, his father was ambassador to the UN.

So much for the "family connections" angle to the AWOL story - and if GWB used daddy's fame in Texas to get accepted into the Guard, he used family connections to join a unit that was serving in Vietnam, not one that was a guaranteed way to avoid combat.

And so much for the claim that the Alabama colonel's failure to recall, 31 years later, if Bush was ever on the base, being the "proof" the anti-Bushies claim it is. With only four years in Congress and a failed Senate campaign in Texas, Bush the Elder's fame probably hadn't spread to Alabama by '72. Bush the Elder was ambassador to the UN by that year, but most people probably can't name the UN ambassador. There's little reason to believe the colonel would have singled out Bush 31 years ago for special memory three decades later. His lack of memory proves, merely, that he can't remember.

My third question centered on the paperwork. There appear to be missing or incomplete records in GWB's military service records, as pieced together by the Boston Globe and the New York Times. The anti-Bushies spin the lack of records of Bush being on the base in Alabama in late '72 as proof he wasn't there. But, as blogger Jane Galt commented on her blog: "As they say in statistics class, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

Indeed.

So I asked, on my blog, almost casually: The anti-Bushies spin the lack of paperwork as proof positive that Bush was "AWOL." But a more benign explanation is easy to see: the paper clerks screwed up the paperwork. That's not unheard of in the military, is it? Within minutes, I was receiving emails from current and former members of the military stressing that, in fact, such paperwork snafus involving fitness reports, service evaluations and such, were common.

So much for the missing paper work being the smoking gun the anti-Bushies claim it is.

The story has since taken on a life of its own - Technorati.com lists dozens of sites linking to my "Bush AWOL?" posts, with many adding further evidence to support the view that Bush wasn't ever AWOL (and some that slam me) and I have received numerous emails from military folks thanking me for standing up for the Guard. One, reprinted below, thanks me for refuting the myth that Guard service was a way to avoid Vietnam. And fellow Tennessee blogger Rich Hailey, an occasional contributor to my blog, explained on his site why the anti-Bushies' blather about Bush's failure to get a flight physical in 1973 is much ado about nothing.

In the end, I answered all of my questions - and the blogosphere helped fill in the details. But I still had one more question. Why did my original post become the talk of the blogosphere yesterday? Instapundit has linked to me before, and it's never resulted in the avalanche of other links and emails. And half my original post was stuff Andrew Sullivan had posted the day before. Is it because I took a journalistic, rather than a partisan, tone, in examining the facts - and because my focus was not on the same "evidence" and the same "spin" that the anti-Bushies and pro-Bushies have bandied back and forth on and off for years, but on answering those three new questions? I think so.

And the Internet and the blogosphere helped me do it.