Nick Kristof, On Guard

Nick Kristof continues to be troubled by Bush's Guard service; we continue to be troubled by Nick Kristof. After a bit of hand-wringing about Bush's hypocrisy and failure to come clean about his past, Kristof delivers new witness against Bush:

One fall day in 1973, when Mr. Bush was a new student at Harvard Business School, he was wearing a Guard jacket when he ran into one of his professors. The professor, Yoshi Tsurumi, says he asked Mr. Bush how he wangled a spot in the Guard.

"He said his daddy had good friends who got him in despite the long waiting list," recalls Professor Tsurumi, who is now at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. Professor Tsurumi says he next asked Mr. Bush how he could have already finished his National Guard commitment. "He said he'd gotten an early honorable discharge," Professor Tsurumi recalls. "I said, 'How did you manage that?' "

"He said, oh, his daddy had a good friend," Mr. Tsurumi said. "Then we started talking about the Vietnam War. He was all for fighting it."

Professor Tsurumi says he remembers Mr. Bush so vividly because he was always making outrageous statements: denouncing the New Deal as socialist, calling the S.E.C. an impediment to business, referring to the civil rights movement as "socialist/communist" and declaring that "people are poor because they're lazy." (Dan Bartlett, an aide to Mr. Bush, denies that the president ever made these statements.)

Gee, he found a NYC college prof who doesn't like Bush! And evidently we are supposed to take this seriously. Of course, last week Nick Kristof declared Bob Mintz, debunked star of the "Texans for Truth", as a "compelling witness". Kristof delivered a minimalist correction, without noting whether it was Mintz or Kristof that was being duplicitous.

Of course, as noted in the posts, Mr. Kristof could have avoided some of his problems with a bit of Googling. Had he performed a similar exercise with Prof. Tsurumi, he would have found this op-ed piece from March 2004, and this wild interview with Air America from July 2004.

An excerpt from the op-ed:

President Bush and his brain, Karl Rove, are leading a radical revolution of destroying all the democratic political, social, judiciary, and economic institutions that both Democrats and moderate Republicans had built together since Roosevelt's New Deal.

Hmm, it's not just Paul Krugman. Here we go from Air America:

Sam Seder: S / Janeane Garofalo: G / Yoshi Tsurumi, T:

S: ’73-74. Now when we left. I posed the question to you. I would not let you answer. How many times did George Bush come drunk to your class, as a student?

(silence)

S: He’s counting on his fingers. He’s counting

G: Hangovers count as well, because sometimes there is residual.

T: Well certainly he missed quite a few.

S: He missed quite a few classes?

T: And when he came to classes some times he stays half-drunk.

G: But wait, we said at the being that his attendance was good.

Crosstalk

T: But, but he I would say never, but he rarely came to class prepared. It’s easy, he has to come to class after he read a least some assignments or thought about some of the question and other things. Then he goes into all kinds of ranting and the flippant statements to cover up his shallowness.

S: That’s called confabulation. Which he still actually has a problem with. So to be fair to George Bush, we can not prove that he showed up to class drunk all the time.

T: Not all the time, no.

S: Right

G: But he was probably hung over when he was...you know what I mean he’s hung over. It’s college, that’s normal we can not hold, and graduate school, that just normal drinking especially in that era.

T: Well, he was rare even among the 85 students that I had, and he often had a binge drinking problems.

G: Right, but he’s got the severe leaning disability too. He’s probably frustrated because he doesn’t read very well.

T: Yeah. On top of that. On top of that.

So, is he a "compelling witness", or can we find a stronger word? I can't think of a reason to doubt his story.

A hint to my lefty readers - if you have a Bush-bashing story to share, Nick Kristof wants to hear it.

Mr. Kristof: [email protected]

UPDATE: A helpful commenter gives us an alternative view of Bush's days at Harvard; and we learn that Tsurumi was peddling this story in 2000. Hmm, doesn't that *increase* his credibility - if he hated Bush in 2000, it may have been honestly based on his Harvard experience. Then again, plenty of lefties hated Bush in 2000. And he left out the Guard story in his Air America interview, although he says this in his July letter:

Tsurumi said that the younger Bush boasted that his father’s political string-pulling had gotten him to the top of the waiting list for the Texas National Guard instead of serving in Vietnam."

Comments

[Appalled Moderate]

Kristof's source has been trying to get this story out for many years.

Interestingly, his tale does not jibe with MSM stories of Bush's Harvard years .

[TM]

I'm out-done, good job.

I did check the FEC filings, so I am not a total slacker - Tsurumi gave $375 to the DNC in 2000, which hardly seems mentioning.

I expect we could match him to an anti-war rally at baruch, but why bother?

[Jim Glass]

"Nick Kristof continues to be troubled by Bush's Guard service ... Kristof delivers new witness against Bush".
~~~

Haven't the Dems *yet* learned that every time they make the military/ national security/ military leadership the issue, they lose??

"Oh, please, please, don't throw us in that briar patch", says Brer Rove.

This inability to stop obsessing about others not doing their fully military duty seems to be some addictive kind of psychological projection (see Clinton, W.J., and thousands of protestors recently here in NYC) that's really turning pathological.

BTW, Clinton's guy Dick Morris has a column today on how the Democrats' fixation on hating Bush rather than supporting Kerry stands to do them in.
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/28562.htm

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

Speaking of Bob--"Party Animal"--Mintz, you sorta have to admire a guy willing to take one for the team so badly, that's he willing to tell millions of people that he was so hard up for friends in 1972, that he was always on the look-out for anybody new who might transfer from out of state, and be willing to pal around with him.

[TM]

...that he was always on the look-out for anybody new who might transfer from out of state, and be willing to pal around with him.

pre-internet, pre-blogs.

And Media Matters is whining that no one is paying attention to Prof. "Bush was driunk in class" Tsurumi.

Problem solved!

[Forbes]

85 students, and Bush stands out. Wouldn't we have heard this story 4 years ago from at least 20 students. As much as the media wants to tell this story, haven't many HBS graduates been contacted by now? Editors at The Times, Globe, and WaPo undoubtedly know many of his classmates from Harvard, but we get some prof from Baruch. Did anybody check to see whether this guy was actually at HBS at the same time as Bush, and that he actually had him as a student. There seem to be a lot of elderly folks in this story with convenient memories, that don't exactly stand up beyond first impressions.

[TM]

Hmm, some folks look at the Air America excerpt and say, c'mon, they were kidding around about Bush being drunk in class.

How droll.

But in that vein, armchair psychologists will want to try and guess the tone of these purported conversations Tsurumi relates to us. Was Young Bush seriously presenting his viewpoint to this humorless twerp (hmm, THAT is not fair and balanced!), or was Bush just winding him up - a bit of the old goad, tell the prof that Social Security needs to be rolled back and watch him get all red, tell him that we should fight in Vietnam, (but not me) and watch him splutter.

Just a thought. He does characterize Bush as shallow and flip, yet also tells us they had this seemingly-serious chat about his Guard sevice. Which is it?

[Slartibartfast]

Do you mean to tell me that sometimes students attend class after a mid-afternoon barley snack? Horrors.

I've been medium well done, and still managed to take legible notes in my communication theory class, and even remembered most of the lecture content.