Hightower Lowdown

Is it just me, or do you feel a draft?

In last year's presidential run, young voters were wary that Bush & Co. was quietly preparing for a military draft. The concern was spreading so quickly that George himself was rushed out to denounce what he called "rumors on the internets," and he flatly declared: "We're not going to have a draft—period." Donnie Rumsfeld went even farther, offering this absolute statement: "The idea of reinstating the draft has never been debated, endorsed, discussed, theorized, pondered, or even whispered by anyone in the Bush administration."

The problem for political liars is that they don't know when to stop. They keep piling it on until the lie becomes too extreme and too big to be true. Rumsfeld's denial, for example, was incredible when he issued it, and now we learn that it was patently untrue—ie, a bald-faced lie issued for political purposes. Rolling Stone magazine recently unearthed an internal selective service memo that details a meeting of two of Rummie's top aides early in 2003 specifically to debate, discuss, ponder, and otherwise consider reinstating the draft. Indeed, the head of the selective service later testified before Congress that, following "consultations with senior Defense manpower officials," the agency began preparing a plan to draft Americans who have special skills that the military needs, such as nurses and doctors. A selective service official confides that "with some very slight tinkering, we could change that skill to plumbers or linguists or electrical engineers or whatever the military was short."