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IAN WILLIAMS to Greet the REPUBLICANS TONIGHT, SUNDAY, 29 AUGUST, at the BOWERY POETRY CLUB. Ian will read from his new book, Deserter: George Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past. ALL ARE WELCOME!!! MEET IAN WILLIAMS to Agree/Argue, and buy a book. 308 Bowery at Bleeker Street, New York City, 6 p.m. Ian will deliver a rendition of his work in progress “Bushowulf” an epic saga of the young Bush as war hero in Anglo-Saxon style alliterative verse.

BILL HARTUNG, author of How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? will also speak in the event called, "Soldier of Fortune: From Draft Dodging to War Profiteering".

Ian Williams is a journalist and U.N. Correspondent for The Nation and a weekly columnist for www.MaximsNews.com Order his new book from Amazon.com, Deserter: George Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past. See his Bio. See his columns listed below. IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com

UNITED NATIONS -- 29 August 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com / One thing we can be sure of: George W. Bush will not have any Vietnam veterans he served with parading on the platform in his Convention. Because he was not there.

And he certainly won’t have any of his comrades out of arms from his year in Alabama while he was in the National Guard there – because he did not turn up there either.

He is also unlikely to have Ben Barnes, the former Speaker of the Texas House who now admits that he fixed things so the young George W. Bush could jump the long line to get in the Texas Air National Guard and avoid Vietnam.

"My name's Ben Barnes. I was Speaker of the Texas House when George W. Bush went into the National Guard. He got preferential treatment. I know. I gave it to him. His family sent a representative to my office and asked me to move their son up on the waiting list. And I did. It was wrong. He was jumped over hundreds of others in line. Some of them went off to Vietnam and died. I made a mistake supporting that war. And as other, less-privileged kids were going off to be killed, I helped the son of a congressman avoid combat. I wish I had not. But I think it's time people know. And it's time for George W. Bush to stop attacking the people who did serve."

We can be fairly sure that although the Vietnam War will join the increase in the number of Americans living in poverty, or without health insurance and the record deficit as subjects to be avoided throughout the convention, there will still be a ghostly whiff of napalm burning in the morning,.

“Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” with whom I debated last week on MSNBC’s Deborah Norville Tonight, show the depth of the wounds that Vietnam inflicted on many Americans.

David Gardner and Larry Thurlow after several days of battering— as their former close comrades in arms denied their stories— looked more and more like faith based fundamentalists: Kerry was a traitor for returning and opposing the war, so for them, all else was quibbling.

At least their new ad, accusing Kerry of slandering “all” veterans with his post-war testimony of atrocities, gets to the core of their beef with the Democratic contender.

Even when confronted with evidence that Kerry had quoted others as saying such things, when tasked with the evidence of the massacres at My Lai and the testimony of many others about the war crimes and atrocities that took place, they cannot forgive Kerry for mentioning them before Congress.

When asked why they were so unforgiving about Kerry, but prepared to support a President who dodged the war by joining the Texas Air Guard (and even then went missing) Gardner simply asked, "Why bring that up?"

When told it was because the ads they were running were paid for by Bush’s minions with a not-too-difficult-to-discern motivation for nurturing all these bitter memories of Kerry, he couldn't even muster an answer.

One could not help wondering, since their campaign has Karl Rove’s cloven hoofprints all over it, whether he had programmed them to instant suicide rather than hint any Bush connection to their 527.

"Kerry cannot be president, he cannot be Commander in Chief,” they assert as a fundamentalist dogma.

So it is preferable to have a spoilt frat boy who dodged the war in the guard, and then went missing and ducked his flight medical, as Commander in Chief?

Someone whose two medals on his Vietnam era portrait were for small arms marksmanship, and the Air Force Outstanding Unit Award – which he was wearing, say some researchers, several years before his unit actually won it.

But these are not the only false colors he will be wearing. The place and timing of the Convention are a macabre attempt to ride home to victory over the ruins of the World Trade Center .

For a president whose cabal did so much to create Al Qaeda and the Taliban with their ill-conceived support for fundamentalists in Afghanistan, and ignored all the warnings of an impending attack, it is perhaps fitting that he should have Rudy Giuliani as a keynote speaker.

Sir Rudy is perhaps the least chivalrous knight in the realm, who celebrated family values and his deep attachment to Catholicism by announcing his impending divorce at a press conference – without telling his wife.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the then-mayor was searching for a location for an emergency command centre.

In the teeth of warnings that building a bunker on the 23rd floor of a complex that had already been a terrorist target in 1993 might not be a good idea, he had put this controversial $16m-headquarters in ... the World Trade Centre.

The 6,000-gallon fuel tank that was intended to provide enough fuel to keep the lights of his office burning on for three days kept the building burning for several more.

The $1.4m-a-year lease with one of his campaign contributors would have lasted even longer: 20 years.

Rudy put it there in defiance of New York City regulations because he said Port Authority rules superseded his own city’s!

The resulting fire blacked all of downtown when the building fell on the Con Edison substation in the basement, and resulting floods from fire brigade hoses knocked out downtown’s telephones when the water reached the neighboring Verizon station.

New Yorkers with long memories will remember that, unbowed by his own incompetence, Giuliani then floated the idea of canceling the election and reappointing himself as an emergency measure.

William Safire – Warped, on Speed, or Just Running Mad Again? 13 July 2004

Hastily Contrived, Verbose, and Fudged: Security Council Resolution 1546 16 June 2004