Chickenhawk n.

 A person enthusiastic about war, provided someone else fights it; particularly when that enthusiasm is undimmed by personal experience with war; most emphatically when that lack of experience came in spite of ample opportunity in that person’s youth.

CHICKEN HAWK HEADQUARTERS
THEIR FEARFUL LEADERS
(THEY HAVE ALL EARNED THE
MEDAL OF COWARDICE & MEDAL OF DISHONOR)

Name: George W. Bush (R-TX)
Born: 1946
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: You know when a guy walks away from a National Guard obligation during wartime and gets away with it, he must come from "a good family." Not that his daddy had anything to do with his getting a Guard slot in the first place - OH. NO....

Read About Your Presidents Time In The Guard
More On
The Bush Family

Name: Richard "Dick" Cheney (R-WY)
Born: 1942
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Says he had "other priorities." You bet he had other priorities. Imagine how early in life you must begin scheming to get away with what this guy has. He was too busy thinking about Halliburton to go fight Charlie.

Name: I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby
Born: 1950
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby is Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff. He’s had a string of no-doubt well-paying government jobs in State and Defense. He’s also practiced law. In fact, he was Marc Rich’s lawyer for years. Yes — the Marc Rich whose pardon from President Clinton was excoriated by so many high and mighty Republicans. Maybe if Scooter had been a better lawyer, his client wouldn’t have needed that pardon. Speaking of legal questions, “Scooter” is alleged by some to have traded energy stocks while helping his buddy Dick Cheney cook up a new energy policy in secret. He’s also suspected of having inserted the bogus “Niger yellowcake” reference into the President’s State of the Union address. As if all that weren’t enough, he’s also a top suspect in the outing of CIA operative Valeria Plame. Clearly “Scooter” is a ballsy kind of guy, so it’s a complete mystery to us why, when he graduated from Phillips Andover in 1968, he didn’t enlist in the Marines or go Airborne instead of going to Yale.                         Read About Libby's Conviction

Name: Karl Rove
Born: 1950
Employer: Baal
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: This little cherub was born on Christmas Day, 1950. Karl “Bush’s Brain” Rove ran George W Bush's campaign, right down to the tiny detail of deciding Bush was going to run. The hardest part was convincing a horde of Republican skeptics that it could be done. He is said to have said of his boss, he’s “the kind of candidate and officeholder political hacks like me wait a lifetime to be associated with. “Now Karl’s Senior White House advisor. If he really is “Bush’s Brain,” and if the fondest wishes of former US Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV come true, one fine day Karl will be “frogmarched out of the White House in handcuffs.”
Will history record that event as “Bush’s Lobotomy?”

Name: Donald "The Don" Rumsfeld
Born: 1932
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Korea
Notes: When the shooting started in Korea Rummy here was either 18, or about to turn 18. Not to worry for him, though — he spent the war at Princeton, wearing a ROTC uniform. Once the war was over he flew jets for the Navy for a few years. Defenders of Rumsfeld will say he’s no chickenhawk — he served, and it’s not his fault the war ended before he got his commission. To which others answer, “plenty of farmers and mechanics and kids just out of high school served. Anyone as full of whatever that stuffing in him is, could have tried out for a battlefield commission.”

Name: Paul Wolfowitz
Born: 1943
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Deputy Secretary for Defense - yet another Bush administration man in the Pentagon who has no idea what it's like to wear a uniform. He got a BA at Cornell in 1965. Maybe if we'd had a guy as bright as he thinks he is in Vietnam, it would have turned out differently.

Dear Cecil:

Since you've already covered the Bush family's relationship to the Nazis (thank you), I thought maybe you'd also cover another timely topic. I've heard many times and in many places (but none mainstream that I can think of) that George W. Bush was AWOL for at least a year from the National Guard during Vietnam (after "jumping the line" to get a slot in the guard in the first place). For some reason (I'm not sure why), I have trust in the Straight Dope. Can you tell me/us if the person sending others to war in Iraq was really derelict in his military duties? How serious an offense would that behavior have been considered, generally, during the Vietnam war? Lastly, if George was actually AWOL, and that would have been the equivalent of a felony for most people, why haven't we been hearing about this issue? --

Kerry J. Johnson, Bellingham, Washington

Cecil replies:

Yeah, the mainstream media have really kept a lid on this one. We wouldn't know anything about Bush going AWOL if it hadn't been for that obscure underground newspaper the Boston Globe, which broke the story nationally in May 2000. But you're right that coverage has been pretty thin. A few months after the 2000 election, former Bill Clinton adviser Paul Begala said he'd done a Nexis search and found 13,641 stories about Clinton's alleged draft dodging versus 49 about George W. Bush's military record. Why the disparity? We'll get to that. First the basics: Yes, it's true, Bush didn't report to his guard unit for an extended period--17 months, by one account. It wasn't considered that serious an offense at the time, and if circumstances were different now I'd be inclined to write it off as youthful irresponsibility. However, given the none-too-subtle suggestion by the Bush administration that opponents of our Iraqi excursion lack martial valor, I have to say: You guys should talk.

Here's the story as generally agreed upon: In January 1968, with the Vietnam war in full swing, Bush was due to graduate from Yale. Knowing he'd soon be eligible for the draft, he took an air force officers' test hoping to secure a billet with the Texas Air National Guard, which would allow him to do his military service at home. Bush didn't do particularly well on the test--on the pilot aptitude section, he scored in the 25th percentile, the lowest possible passing grade. But Bush's father, George H.W., was then a U.S. congressman from Houston, and strings were pulled. The younger Bush vaulted to the head of a long waiting list--a year and a half long, by some estimates--and in May of '68 he was inducted into the guard.

By all accounts Bush was an excellent pilot, but apparently his enthusiasm cooled. In 1972, four years into his six-year guard commitment, he was asked to work for the campaign of Bush family friend Winton Blount, who was running for the U.S. Senate in Alabama. In May Bush requested a transfer to an Alabama Air National Guard unit with no planes and minimal duties. Bush's immediate superiors approved the transfer, but higher-ups said no. The matter was delayed for months. In August Bush missed his annual flight physical and was grounded. (Some have speculated that he was worried about failing a drug test--the Pentagon had instituted random screening in April.) In September he was ordered to report to a different unit of the Alabama guard, the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery. Bush says he did so, but his nominal superiors say they never saw the guy, there's no documentation he ever showed up, and not one of the six or seven hundred soldiers then in the unit has stepped forward to corroborate Bush's story.

After the November election Bush returned to Texas, but apparently didn't notify his old Texas guard unit for quite a while, if ever. The Boston Globe initially reported that he started putting in some serious duty time in May, June, and July of 1973 to make up for what he'd missed. But according to a piece in the New Republic, there's no evidence Bush did even that. Whatever the case, even though his superiors knew he'd blown off his duties, they never disciplined him. (No one's ever been shot at dawn for missing a weekend guard drill, but policy at the time was to put shirkers on active duty.) Indeed, when Bush decided to go to business school at Harvard in the fall of 1973, he requested and got an honorable discharge--eight months before his service was scheduled to end.

Bush's enemies say all this proves he was a cowardly deserter. Nonsense. He was a pampered rich kid who took advantage. Why wasn't he called on it in a serious way during the 2000 election? Probably because Democrats figured they'd get Clinton's draft-dodging thing thrown back at them. Not that it matters. If history judges Bush harshly--and it probably will--it won't be for screwing up as a young smart aleck, but for getting us into this damn fool war.

--CECIL ADAMS                                      Taken Form The Straight Dope

Back To Bush

Just before Libby was to begin serving his 30-month prison sentence, President George W. Bush commuted the sentence, arguing that it was excessive. The decision drew widespread criticism from across the political spectrum. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times (July 3, 2007), David Dow, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, compared Bush's decision on Libby to his failure to act while governor of Texas on cases where death row inmates requested commutation on

Because President Bush signed a commutation, a rich and powerful man will spend not a day in prison, while 57 poor and poorly connected human beings died because Governor Bush refused to lift a pen for them."       Back To Libby