Paul Krugman:

"To understand why questions about George Bush's time in the National Guard are legitimate, all you have to do is look at the federal budget published last week. No, not the lies, damned lies and statistics--the pictures. By my count, this year's budget contains 27 glossy photos of Mr. Bush. We see the president in front of a giant American flag, in front of the Washington Monument, comforting an elderly woman in a wheelchair, helping a small child with his reading assignment, building a trail through the wilderness and, of course, eating turkey with the troops in Iraq. Somehow the art director neglected to include a photo of the president swimming across the Yangtze River.

(snip)

There is, as far as I can tell, no positive evidence that Mr. Bush is a man of exceptional uprightness. When has he even accepted responsibility for something that went wrong? On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that he is willing to cut corners when it's to his personal advantage. His business career was full of questionable deals, and whatever the full truth about his National Guard service, it was certainly not glorious."

One of the more curious aspects of the idolatry that Bush seems to inspire from some quarters is this view that he is a man of honesty and integrity. I've come to verbal blows with people who were absolutely convinced that the President was a principled man of courage, a leader with a "vision", rather than just a politician with an ideologically relativistic view of the truth. That is why it is important to hold him (and any other politician, for that matter) to a higher standard when it comes to the words that come out of their mouths. It is as bad to recklessly misstate the facts as it is to intentionally do so.

On the National Guard issue, it is becoming clearer that the "modified limited hangout" position of releasing partial documents isn't going to work, and that the President will have to bite the bullet pretty soon and release everything; stuff like today's record of a visit to the dentist in Alabama is becoming like Chinese water torture for the Republicans, keeping the story alive longer than it needs to be. Bush seemed to catch a break later in the day when an Alabama guardsman told the Washington Post that he recalls seeing the future President eight to ten times between May and October, 1972, for about eight hours each time, performing clerical work and reading flight magazines. That statement conflicts with the payroll records the White House released earlier in the week, indicating that Bush was missing up until the last weekend of October, as well as the fact that Bush's transfer to Alabama duty wasn't approved until September of that year. Releasing the entire file will clear up such discrepancies, and the alternative is so much worse from a political standpoint, regardless of whatever drug tests he might have failed (or whatever it is he's hiding) that I think the end of this story will come sooner rather than later.