Mitt Romney was so desperate to serve his country in the late 1960s that rather than go to Vietnam (as he so very much wanted to) he was compelled to spend years in France as a Mormon missionary. But what about Rudy Giuliani? Glenn Greenwald has a useful reminder:
Romney’s draft-avoidance isn’t quite as shameful as Super Tough Guy Rudy Giuliani’s, whose deferment request was denied in 1969, thus placing him at imminent risk of being drafted, when he somehow convinced the federal judge for whom he was clerking “to write to the draft board, asking them to grant him a fresh deferment and reclassification as an ‘essential’ civilian employee.” The very idea that a first-year judicial clerk, just out law school, is “essential” for anything is absurd on its face. Yet the swaggering tough guy Rudy Giuliani used that blatant lie to ensure that someone other than himself was sent to fight in Vietnam.
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