Careful, pal. George Bush joined* the Air Force National Guard in the summer of 1968. In the very month he signed up, Texas Air National Guard F-102 pilots were flying missions in Vietnam (Project Palace Guard). If you had a Bachelor's degree in anything other than Science, Engineering or Math, you could not go into the regular Air Force pilot training program. So he joined the TANG.
Perhaps you remember Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff from 1976 in which he chronicled, in the first chapters, the dangers of flying in certain fighter aircraft. Which plane was cited as most dangerous in the Air Force? Bush's plane, the F-102 Delta Dart (page 24). While Bush was in his year-long training for the F-102, the Air Force decided the F-102 was less suitable for close support tasks than other newer aircraft in the arsenal, and ended their service in Vietnam.
After getting out of flight training for the F-102, the Air Force and the TANG reassessed the horrible safety record of the F-102 and determined that they had lost too many of the planes and too many pilots and ended the F-102 program (almost 30% of the F102s produced crashed or were destroyed in accidents on the tarmac---USAF Aircraft safety records). Flying fighter aircraft is not like driving cars, where you can get out of your Chevy and drive a Ford instead. Each aircraft has a long training period, and by then the war was winding down. Nixon announced the end of the draft December 7th, 1971 ( I'm an expert on that subject because I was in my 6th day at Fort Knox when he made the announcement). Ground combat ended in April of '72 and flight slots for Vietnam were hard to get, even if you had been trained in the "right" aircraft.
So where was George? I got out the same time as President Bush, and where was I in those last months, a medical corpsman with excellent ratings? --painting rocks, mopping the mess hall and being asked if there wasn't some "early drop" I qualified for.
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* Who joined the Air National Guard the same month as George "Silver Spoon" Bush? Why none other than poor Dickie Gephardt, son of the humble down-trodden milkman. Dick Gephardt seved less than half the duty days of that supposedly duty-shirking Bush, and that may be the real reason why Gephardt sank from the 2004 primary race like a wingless F-102. Dick was just too darn inconvenient for the Dems attack plans.
"Who joined the Air National Guard the same month as George "Silver Spoon" Bush? Why none other than poor Dickie Gephardt, son of the humble down-trodden milkman. Dick Gephardt seved less than half the duty days of that supposedly duty-shirking Bush, and that may be the real reason why Gephardt sank from the 2004 primary race like a wingless F-102. Dick was just too darn inconvenient for the Dems attack plans."
Dude, I make no distinction on this subject between Dems and Reps. The Dems are certainly more egregious, hypocritical and unprincipled, but in both cases we have a political elite that lords over us, the serfs, passing laws and spouting rhetoric that they themselves often dont live by. Until we collectively choose not to be, we're ruled by elites who live in their own privileged world and manage to get away with things the average Joe would never be able to get away with.