Dubya's Lost Weekends
George W. Bush Was Never AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard — He was on a Top-Secret Special Assignment, Touring with the Rolling Stones!
The "gap" in George W. Bush's military service — May, 1972 to July, 1973 — closely coincides with the Rolling Stones' North American and Pacific/Australia tour that ran from June, 1972 to February, 1973.
Our proposition: During George W. Bush's "absence" he was the co-pilot of the Rolling Stones' fabled tour plane (with the legendary "Sticky Fingers" lips logo emblazoned on its tail), having been planted there by high ranking U.S. Government officials to keep an eye on the British rock band and possibly even as an agent-provocateur, encouraging behavior that might cause the band to be arrested, thereby aiding the re-election bid of President Richard Nixon.
Given the number of creative, cloak-and-dagger-loving dirty tricksters working for Nixon, it's no stretch to imagine that some especially clever CREEPer (Committee to RE-Elect the President) connected the dots between the following disparate facts and came up with a plan convoluted and outlandish enough to make Ian Fleming envious:
1) J. Edgar Hoover routinely sent FBI agents undercover to infiltrate organizations he deemed subversive. These undercover agents would frequently incite the organization to perform illegal activities intended to lead to members' arrests, and to discredit or neutralize the group. By the early 1970s, hippie peacenik agitators topped Hoover's list of the dangers facing America.
2) Nixon's need to stroke Hoover — who loathed him — in order to gain access to the FBI files on his political "enemies" thereby gathering enough ammunition to undermine any serious competition in the upcoming election. Major points with his hardcore supporters could also be scored if he could come up with a way to deport some noisy, long-haired, foreign-born troublemakers.
3) It was on this tour that the Stones first used their own private jet, a McDonnell-Douglass DC-9, rather than regularly scheduled commercial flights, and they needed a flight crew that would pass FAA muster.
4) The Chairman of the Republican National Committee, George Herbert Walker Bush, had a son, George W., with solid bona fides as both a pilot and a party animal.
5) It was well known that the Stones' tour would be filmed, and it wasn't all that much of a leap to believe that filmmaker Robert Frank might record — however unintentionally — ample enough evidence of the Stones' drug use and debauchery to allow the U.S. Government to deport them.
This would explain why there's no record of George W's service in "Alabama," except for pay-stubs (a bonus extra for CREEP that W was already being paid by the Texas Air National Guard), and the forms requesting a transfer. It would also explain why no one in Texas or Alabama saw him the whole time. They couldn't have. He was partying down with the "Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World", while simultaneously spying on them so deeply undercover for the U.S. Government that no file of his daring mission could be allowed to exist.
But what of the infamous, incriminating film, you ask? The documentary made of the tour, Cocksucker Blues, is virtually banned owing to decades-long lawsuits, court orders and government red tape. Why? According to those who've viewed bootleg copies, the Stones' flight crew frequently partakes in the mile-high debauchery and would have been subject to any criminal prosecution aimed at the band.
So, why did this brilliant plot fail? Clearly, the flight crew's enthusiastic misbehavior didn't help, but that could have been got around. The bigger question is why there isn't even a rumor of a record of such an intriguing and audacious act of political skullduggery? Hoover died in May, 1972 just as the mission was getting underway. Nixon was soon caught up in Watergate, and whatever files there were on this long-shot sideshow got fed to the nearest paper shredder and any conversations about it became gaps in White House tapes. Bush Sr. went to the CIA and learned how to stonewall so well even he doesn't know what he knows. The documentary film has been kept under wraps owing to the incriminating footage of W, and possibly other government ops, "keeping up with the Stones".
As for what W knew and what he remembers of it, well, he spent nearly two decades after his bacchanalia with the band on a howlin' hell-raise, so you can't really blame him for not remembering his whereabouts for a few months — Mick and Keith sure don't — and Robert Frank isn't talking.
And did Hoover and Nixon's nefarious plan to ruin the Rolling Stones really fail, after all? I mean, have you heard what they've recorded since Exile on Main Street?
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