Now for the Gossip on Bush's Missing Nat'l Guard Service

Billmon has posted at least some of the prevailing rumors about why six months of George Bush's Air National Guard service still remain unaccounted for, despite the few scraps of paper that White House press secretary Scott McClellan waved at the press gaggle yesterday while claiming they ended all questions. They did not end all questions. Here's Billmon:

"As you might have already guessed, there is a substance abuse subtext to this particular line of inquiry. Pilots usually have a good reason for refusing to take a physical -- and urinanalysis is often one of them. You may remember this 1999 story about claims that Bush did community service for cocaine possession at a Houston nonprofit group in 1972. That story, however, was quickly overwhelmed by this story, about the somewhat lurid past of the author who first floated the Houston allegations.

"Now I've been told -- by an anonymous source whose accuracy and credibility are absolutely unknown -- that a close tracking of Lt. Shrub's movements in the late summer and early fall of 1972 might lead to some interesting places of a, shall we say, therapeutic nature."

What Billmon is getting at ... is that there's a chance that the Alabama story (that Shrub was working on the Senate campaign of Republican candidate Winton Blount, an old family friend) was nothing more than a cover for his voluntary incarceration in a recovery program for cocaine addiction. All of which makes such perfect sense that ... it can't possibly be true.