The Bush-AWOL story has developed legs recently, and the President was thrown a number of softballs from Tim Russert this morning on that very topic. My position has been that there was nothing there; Bush was honorably discharged, and whether it happened because he actually completed his requirements or because someone in the chain of command decided to turn a blind eye to the antics of a VIP's son, was in the end just a biographical anecdote, not important in determining who should lead our country thirty years after the fact.

Kevin Drum, however, has been looking closely at a document that Bush supporters have claimed showed he put in the points to complete his service, and has come to an even more interesting conclusion: the President was transfered out of the Texas Air National Guard for failing to complete his physical, and into something called the "Air Reserve Force", which was supposedly a paper unit where soldiers who were being disciplined were sent as a possible prelude to being sent overseas. Since American troops were being withdrawn from Southeast Asia at the time, and considering that his father was a powerful figure in Washington, Bush was allowed to "serve" out his time in the Reserves. In other words, it would remove the AWOL allegation only to replace it with a charge that he shirked his duties.

If true, this is a devastating charge. Since the discovery of the aforementioned document, the supporters of the President have devised a history of his participation in the TANG over his last two years of service that now becomes completely inoperative. In other words, Bush Lied Again.

Moreover, Mr. Drum is not the first person to have deduced this; a casual search of Google brought me to this site, where the same conclusion was reached three years ago, and the document in question has been available for perusal by members of the news media since 2000. Another liberal blogger, Jesse Taylor, believes that there may be a more benign interpretation of these documents, relating instead to his request to attend Harvard Business School in 1973. In any event, now that the President has agreed to release his entire military file for inspection, we should be closer to getting definitive answers.

UPDATE: Calpundit continues to kick everyone's ass on this story. Here, he points out that the first set of drills Bush got credit for were in the last weekend of October, 1972, ten days before the election on which he was supposedly working. There were no drills scheduled in Alabama that weekend, so it means that if he did anything, it must have been in Texas. Although Mr. Drum doubts that Bush would have taken a weekend off on the eve of an election for which he was the political advisor to do Guardsman drills, it is possible: the Senate candidate Bush was working for, Winton Blount, was getting trounced by the Democratic incumbent, John Sparkman (who ended up winning by 30 points), and then-President Nixon, who was the principal political benefactor of Bush's dad, had already taken steps to mend fences (see page 10) with Sparkman. Our Wartime President may have simply decided to abandon ship.