Salon: In the same league as Fox

[kskiska]

Don't major outlets like ABC News and CNN know better than to trot out a discredited former Guardsman as a source for stories about Bush's military service?

Working on the premise that you can fool some of the people all of the time, a Bush supporter who asserted that he saw Bush serve his National Guard duty in Alabama in 1972 returned this week to retell his already discredited story and was embraced by several news organizations that are not Fox News -- ABC News, CNN and the Associated Press.

With controversy raging over revelations that President Bush failed to fulfill his obligations to the Texas Air National Guard, particularly after he refused to undergo a physical and moved to Alabama, retired Lt. Col. John "Bill" Calhoun told ABC News Wednesday that he saw Bush "five or six times" with the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery, where he said the two men occasionally ate lunch together. For the White House, Calhoun's story is invaluable because in the more than three decades since Bush supposedly served in Alabama, Calhoun is the only member of Bush's unit to come forward to say he remembers performing drills with the future president of the United States.

Calhoun is a self-confessed die-hard Republican who has been in regular contact with campaign officials about his Guard story. Large rewards have been offered -- by cartoonist Garry Trudeau, among others -- to any former Guardsman who can prove that Bush showed up in Alabama to serve, yet nobody has yet claimed the cash prize. And Calhoun won't win the money, either.

When Calhoun first emerged in February, he announced he'd seen Bush "eight or 10 times" on the base performing drills between May and October of 1972. But within 24 hours of his statement, the White House released Bush's military pay records -- which aides touted as definitive proof of Bush's service -- definitively proving that Bush was not credited for any training in Alabama for the months of May, June, July, August and September 1972, and that Bush showed up only in late October. So how could Calhoun have seen Bush several times in one summer if Bush's own records indicate he was never there?

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http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/10/calhoun_bush/index.html