The flap over President Bush's National Guard service shrinks daily, but does not disappear.

* The flap over President Bush's National Guard service shrinks daily, but does not disappear. (For clinching details in the case, please see Byron York's piece, page 33.) While Democrats have had to back off Terry McAuliffe's assertion that Bush was AWOL, or Michael Moore's that he was a "deserter," they expect the press to parse every living Guardsman's recollection of the twentysomething lieutenant's presence, or absence. The controversy obscures the larger comparison between the wartime service of Lts. Bush and Kerry. Kerry's is of course more impressive. John Kerry went to Vietnam; George W. Bush went flying. Yet this contrast itself obscures the largest question, which is the convictions and judgment of the two men. Battlefield experience is not the only military experience. John Kerry polluted his record by accusing his comrades, and his country, of non-existent crimes; as an officeholder, he has been for or against war as liberalism and expediency direct. George W. Bush pulled a somewhat aimless life together; became president; then found himself in the midst of a new kind of world war, which he has fought with determination and skill. Americans in uniform and out should be able to tell which is preferable.