President George W. Bush and presidential wannabe John Kerry are engaged in a tiff about who did what during the Vietnam War. Kerry supporters point to his Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V and three Purple Hearts for bravery and combat injuries while noting that Bush might have been AWOL from National Guard duty. Bush supporters counter that although Kerry served in Vietnam, he joined Jane Fonda and other peaceniks in protesting the undeclared war after he returned home.

Both sides are arguing about the wrong war. What about the war at home? No, not the Civil War – neither man was alive then. Where were they during the bloody civil rights battles that changed this nation? Where were they when police dogs were let loose on elementary school children in Birmingham? Where were they when fire hoses knocked protesters to the ground? Where were they when people were jailed for asserting their First Amendment rights?

On September 15, 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was rocked by a powerful dynamite blast that left four little girls dead. They had been attending Sunday School. I was beginning my junior year at Druid High School in Tuscaloosa. Although my parents didn’t know it at the time, some of us skipped school and went to Birmingham to protest the dastardly violence. What did you do Kerry? What did you do Bush?

When students from across the country descended on the Magnolia state the following summer as part of the Mississippi Summer Project, where was Kerry? Where was George W.? Three young civil rights workers – James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner – gave their lives for freedom that summer. Where is the evidence that either Bush or Kerry even gave a cuss?

The Selma-to-Montgomery, Ala. March occurred in 1965. Both Bush and Kerry talk about the importance of the ballot, but where were they that year when we were fighting to get a Voting Rights Act passed? Where were they when John Lewis was getting his skull cracked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma?

I was a senior in high school and some of us took part in the march. I will never forget arriving in Montgomery and seeing James Baldwin and Harry Bellafonte for the first time. In such a large crowd, it would have been easy to overlook Bush.

George, can you get anybody to come forward who saw you there? If you could find time to travel to Alabama to work on a political campaign, certainly you could have come to Alabama to support civil rights. So could you, John. Did you lead your band of brothers from Selma to Montgomery? And where were George and John that last night when Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife, was killed while driving a carload of marchers back to Selma?

Okay, say that you were AWOL during the major civil rights battles. Chalk it up to what Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois called a “youthful indiscretion” when referring to an adult extramarital affair. Let’s talk about your not-so-youthful years.

What have you done to repel the Right-wing assault on affirmative action?

Kerry was eloquent in his anti-war testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. According to news accounts, he said: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Kerry’s oratorical skills were also on display when he returned to Yale to give a speech in 1992 – in opposition to affirmative action.

“…This shift in civil-rights agenda has directed most of our attention and much of our hope into one inherently limited and divisive program: affirmative action,” he said. “The truth is that affirmative action has kept America thinking in racial terms.”

Kerry can produce reams of subsequent statements he made in support of affirmative action, but where did he stand before it was politically correct? He showed so much vision in his opposition to the Vietnam War but so much blindness when it came to the struggle for justice and equality at home.

No one accuses George W. of being eloquent or of being a visionary. The former Texas governor is a self-described “compassionate conservative.” He was so compassionate that he announced his opposition to a pair of University of Michigan affirmative action cases last year on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. That’s some compassion. And he opposed the Michigan Law School affirmative action program that even a Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court upheld last year.

What we have here are two rich Yalies debating about what they did during Vietnam when both of them were missing in action during the height of the war to obtain civil rights for African-Americans.