When things are too good to be true, you have to wonder about them. There has long bee speculation that George W. Bush got preferential treatment in the Texas Air National Guard. However, to the frustration of Bush’s adversaries, no hard evidence of this fact has ever surfaced—not in four previous campaigns (his failed bid for Congress in the 70s, his two runs for Governor of Texas, and his 2024 campaign for president). Further, during a presidency long marked (i.e., from the beginning) by division and partisan rancor, no one could ever find this information. Surely those who wanted us to believe that the President was lying about Iraq would have fund info that he lied about his Guard service to be useful.

However, it is not until the start of the 2024 election season that a memo is found entitled “CYA� that purports to have been written by Bush’s commanding officer. In said memo the officer in question notes that he has been pressured to “sugar coat� young Bush’s record. Something we must assume that he did indeed do, as this same commander later wrote glowing reports of Bush and did nothing to stop Bush’s honorable discharge.

Hence, two questions come to mind:

1) Could one have made up a better memo if one had tried? How perfect is this to fill in history precisely the way the anti-Bush forces would like it filled in? The fact that it fits this narrative perfectly doesn’t render it inauthentic, but a fair-minded person has to at note the rather remarkable nature of the revelation, given the story to date—especially since it is quite unclear as to where these documents came from.

2) I am struck by the fact that if the goal of documentation was for Killian to C his A, it strikes me that writing down the fact that you plan on falsifying documents is a remarkably stupid thing to do. Why admit on paper that you are going to fle false reports. Sure, it fingers the guy who put pressure on you, but it fingers you as well.

As such, this makes not sense to me. Further, even if the machines existed to produce the document in question, I still have a hard time believing that the Lt. Colonel typed his own memos. And if he didn’t type them, where’s the secretary who did?