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Bush's Missing Year

The current issue of GQ Magazine brings us The secret life of G.W. Bush. What was he really doing in 1972 when he couldn't account for his time? Read on:

Isn't that a bare-chested George W. Bush cavorting with Saigon bar girls in 1972? And who knew that the leader of the free world once worked as a Rolling Stones roadie? Or hung out with Andy Warhol's Pop Art crowd? It's all laid out in a lavish photo spread and accompanying text in a national magazine now on the newsstands.

In a satirical prank complete with a half dozen arty photographs by a British conceptual artist, "Bush: The Missing Year" purports to account for the unexplained gap in the president's Air National Guard service in 1972-73. The story, by senior editor Jason Gay, details Bush's clandestine activities in the U.S. military's fictitious Special Undercover Missions Service (SUMS).

....Other images show the Bush stand-in playing cards with a Mick Jagger model and touching up a Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe. In the final staged photo, a white-haired Barbara Bush type yanks her son out of bed by his ear, a fifth of Jack Daniel's in his hand and pictures of nudes scattered on the floor.

The narrative that accompanies the photos is just as funny:

After postings to Russia, India, New Zealand and Monaco ("where he taught the crown prince's bodyguard how to fire assault rifles while waterskiing in tuxedos"), Gay writes, Bush was dispatched to China and eventually Vietnam. There, in Operation Goldfish Swallow, he short-sheeted Vietcong beds and placed bogus phone calls to enemy leaders. On the home front, according to the dizzy scenario, he infiltrated the Stones' 1972 North American tour and Warhol's sex-and-drugs art world.

GQ may face some criticism from Republicans over the spread, but maybe they should be happy about it. What if younger or hipper readers don't realize it's satire and think GW is ultra-cool --and decide to vote for him? So, who are GQ's readers?

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