Lying skank alert

Q: When do you know Ann Coulter is lying? A: When any orifice on her body is open. This includes her pores.

From her recent appearance on MSNBC's Hardball:

COULTER: Yes. No. That’s true. And though I have to say, in the current President Bush’s defense, he was a pilot. I mean, it wasn’t like the typical avoiding ... the military service by serving in the National Guard. He was a pilot in the National Guard. He was training to be a pilot. It’s a dangerous National Guard duty. If the Vietnam war had continued, he would have gone to the Vietnam war as a pilot, so -- I mean, he is a pilot, though he was not -- he did not serve in wartime.

Just to set the record straight, from the Boston Globe of May 23, 2000:

One-year gap in Bush's National Guard duty

But 22 months after finishing his training, and with two years left on his six-year commitment, Bush gave up flying - for good, it would turn out. He sought permission to do ''equivalent training'' at a Guard unit in Alabama, where he planned to work for several months on the Republican Senate campaign of Winton Blount, a friend of Bush's father. The proposed move took Bush off flight status, since no Alabama Guard unit had the F-102 he was trained to fly.

...

Lieutenant Bush, to be sure, had gone off flying status when he went to Alabama. But had he returned to his unit in November 1972, there would have been no barrier to him flying again, except passing a flight physical. Although the F-102 was being phased out, his unit's records show that Guard pilots logged thousands of hours in the F-102 in 1973.

What it boils down to is this: As a National Guardsman, George W. Bush blew off two years' worth of expensive flight training, paid for by taxpayers during wartime, by failing to report for duty or take a physical, thereby forcing the Texas Air National Guard to revoke his flight status. This abandonment of his duty meant that in no way could Bush have been called up for flight duty in Vietnam.

All those servicemen who cheered his "flyboy" schtick on the USS Lincoln should ask themselves which brig they'd have served in had they pulled the same kind of stunt. And they ought to wonder about any commander-in-chief who takes his commitment to his service so lightly.

[Via Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler, who of course also demolishes Coulter's suggestion that Bush's TANG duty was not a "typical avoiding ... military service."]