One of the more inexplicable failures of the news media has been their collective failure to investigate the missing year in George Bush's Air National Guard duty in the early-70's (a convenient time-line can be found here). One would think that it would be an easy story: at a time when the President is threatening to send Americans into harm's way, thereby starting a war of dubious value to our national security, his own background deserves to be scrutinized. If, in fact, he did serve a full term in the National Guard, the media could help to discredit one of the favorite shiboleths of the left, that the President "went AWOL" for a year from his military service.

Likewise, if Bush can't account for himself during the year in question, then it goes not only to his credibility as a leader, but also to his lifelong ability to get ahead through family connections, the so-called "white affirmative action" that he has benefited from since he used a 560 verbal SAT to get into Yale. In any event, bogus conspiracy theories are not the sole province of any ideology: for every fabricated story about "Whitewater" and Vince Foster, there were similar tales about Reagan paying off the Iranians before the 1980 election, and those "scandals" weren't discredited until someone actually went out and did some reporting. If the media ignores this story, it isn't going to go away.