LOSER

Josh Marshall on the Weasel in the White House:

Let’s start with this. What’s the signature pattern of Bush’s life?

When he faces a challenge or a tough scrape, he lets his family and friends bail him out. He has always let others do his fighting for him.

You see it in his failed businesses, where well-heeled family friends again and again came in to bail him out. It’s there in the legal scrapes. And it’s there in the whole matter of ducking service in Vietnam — first by getting his father’s and his father’s friends’ help in jumping the queue to get into the Texas Air National Guard, and then again with help cleaning up the subsequent unfortunateness while he was serving in the Texas Air National Guard.

(As was reported this week in Salon, despite assurances to the contrary from the White House, the president still refuses to release his complete Vietnam-era service record.)

The pattern has even come up repeatedly on the campaign trail. Since the president came onto the national political stage, he has faced three main opponents — Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), then-Vice President Al Gore and now Kerry. Each served in Vietnam, though under very different circumstances. And President Bush has had his lieutenants and surrogates attack the service of each one.

So here, with Hughes, we have the same pattern repeating itself. The president knows he’s vulnerable on this issue — after all, he says he supported the war at the time, but he did all he could to avoid the fighting himself.

So he gets Hughes to do his dirty work for him. That means that to shift attention from an earlier time when he couldn’t fight his own fights, Bush is now repeating the pattern.

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