GQ shortchanges freeloaders on Bush 'expose'

Readers of Gentleman's Quarterly this month were treated to a surprising account of President George W. Bush's whereabouts during the Vietnam War. Rather than playing hooky from the Alabama National Guard, as some have alleged, Bush was actually an agent in an elite, top-secret U.S. cabal of "gentleman spies" next to whom James Bond would seem a draft-dodging chicken hawk.

"They were masters of disguise, capable of passing themselves off as immigrants, women, even large animals," GQ reported in "Bush: The Missing Years" after an eight-month investigation. "They learned how to build explosive devices using ordinary household items like dental floss and MoonPies and knew how to sleep while suspended upside down."

A number of pictures accompanied the exposé, depicting the young scion cavorting shirtless in Vietnamese flesh-pots, chilling with Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, and being hauled out of bed, Jack Daniels in hand, by his ear at the hands of his mother Barbara.

If you read the story online, however, you didn't get any pictures--only text.

Missing links appreciates text as much as the next graphics-challenged, two-inch column. But we nonetheless felt slighted by the absence of photos in the online story--even if they are all staged with look-alikes.

Was this a marketing scheme to inspire us Web-surfing freeloaders to shell out for paper copy of the magazine? Or was it a matter of editorial concern that the phony photos would wind up being distributed online out of the satirical context of the magazine story?

GQ shot down both theories.

"We have a limited amount of Web site space, and this piece was pretty lengthy," said magazine representative Nora Haynes, insisting that the decision was made by editorial rather than marketing minds. "We go through the stories we have and for this particular piece we just went with the text."

Who would have guessed that such a popular men's magazine had such a small hard drive?