Is Bush hitting the bottle again?

Oh my. Air America and the liberal blogosphere are all a-twitter today with the National Enquirer's scoop that President Bushmill is once again hitting the bottle. Of course, other than a minor reference to this story in Froomkin's White House Briefing, the Main Stream Media (MSM) is taking a pass on this one.

This should not come as much of a surprise -- neither the drinking nor the refusal of the press to look into the allegations.

Let's quickly review some of the evidence for Bush's drinking. Not psychological studies of recidivism in addicts; or research that points out how difficult it is for addicts to stay clean without participating in a formal support program; or the fact that part of overcoming addiction, one of the 12 classic steps, is to take responsibility for your actions and apologize to those you have hurt as a result of your addiction (and we all know how willing Bush is to take responsibility for anything or admit his mistakes) -- this type of discussion is well represented in the blogosphere right now. Instead, let's look at some Page A-26 circumstantial-type evidence.

First, clearly, clearly, Bush has an addictive personality. He has acknowledged being a hardcore lush up until the morning after his 40th birthday. There are also numerous allegations of habitual cocaine use during this drinking period. After he quit drinking, Bush became addicted to Jesus, plunging mindlessly into religion. Then, after being elected Governor of Texas, Bush became addicted to power, eventually scoring the presidency and using the position to try to extend his power to every corner of the globe. In the last couple of years, Bush has become addicted to mountain biking to the extent that the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service have standing orders not to interrupt his bike rides for any reason, including national emergencies.

Behavioralists and geneticists may disagree over whether Bush's behavioral patterns represent a genetic predisposition to addiction or are simply a result of his pea-brain trying to seize onto anything that will give structure and purpose to his life, but the evidence is there for all to see (and the Bush people have even trumpeted this as one of his best attributes): when Bush gets something in his head, he becomes obsessed with it to the exclusion of everything else. Whether it's social security reform, the war in Iraq, or mountain biking, total, mindless obsession equates to addiction.



Then we have suspicious incidents such as the infamous pretzel choke in 2002. In this article, CNN generously describes it as a fainting episode. Note the spin and misdirection. There is detailed discussion of how the White House physician thinks that the pretzel somehow stimulated the Vagus nerve, lowering his pulse and precipitating the blackout. But just for good measure, as any good defense attorney with an obviously guilty client will do, the Administration makes sure that there are several other possible scenarios laid out, just in case some busy-body physician reading the article should take umbrage with the Vagus nerve cover story. Other possible causes floated in the article include "a mild illness" and an unusually low pulse rate attributed to his regular exercise regimen.

Seems pretty flimsy from here, especially considering that he was apparently alone for the entire blackout incident (is the President ever alone?), and minutes later, all physical tests were allegedly normal (including pulse rate).

So what happened with the pretzel? Try to the fill in the blank here: Football game, TV, pretzels, and ___________. What's missing? Uh, beer.

Not convinced. Sure, no problem. Let's go to exhibit number three: Bush drinking beer in public. As noted by those press elite lucky enough to be invited to the special press party at Bush's ranch on August 26, Bush served beer to guests at the party and drank a non-alcoholic Buckler beer.

Isn't it really bad practice for recovering alcoholics to hang out in environments that include alcohol? And wouldn't most therapists, physicians, and psychologists strongly recommend against any kind of alcohol-related libations? But there was Bush, doling out the suds for his buds and sucking down a few "fake" beers. Did anybody check the President's beer or did they just take his word for it that it was near beer? Non-alcoholic beer sure makes a great cover for the real thing -- looks the same, smells the same, tastes the same -- how would anybody know the difference? How indeed.

And one of the reasons why it's not a good idea for recovering alcoholics to sublimate their addictive impulses with near beer is that even non-alcoholic beer has alcohol in it!



OK, so he's drinking alcohol at a party, but because it's near beer, you're going to give him a pass. Fine. On to exhibit number four. The champagne toasts. It seems that there are endless opportunities for Bush to lead champagne toasts (finally, an applicable venue for his unique leadership skills). The latest was his champagne toast at the UN summit on September 14. Check out the end of the video, was that apple juice that Bush was celebrating with?

Now couple this circumstantial evidence with some of Bush's unfathomable statements and actions, and the case strengthens.

But where is the press on this one? It took them about four years to finally pretend to look into the National Guard story. And the Downing Street memo languished for a month after the British press disclosed it before the American press gave it a lukewarm "so what?" Oh yeah, and where's Jeff Gannon now? And how is that investigation of the Valerie Plame leak coming along? And what was the deal with the Cheney Energy Council?

But let's not blame this one entirely on the press, at least not in the present. Sure, they've had five years to ask some questions, do some digging, and refuse to take Administration talking points and PR at face value, but that's all cerveza under the bridge. Now that there are some cracks in the once impenetrable Bush facade, well, the MSM is slightly more emboldened, so somebody might actually stumble into this story, right?

Which brings us to yesterday's National Enquirer story. How does Page A-26 know that there's something to the Bush drinking whispers -- because of the National Enquirer story.

It's not what's in the story that's important, it's the fact that it was reported by the Enquirer. Think about it -- if you were the Administration and you knew that your boy was drinking again and that sooner or later this information might find its way to a legitimate journalist, how would you go about putting the clamps on this story before it got loose in the MSM? Well, you'd "leak" to a publication so maligned, so disreputable, so debunked that its very association with the story instantly delegitimizes it.



It's brilliant, really. Leak the story to the Enquirer as a way of making the story untouchable. Because the Enquirer was the first publication to run a significant story about Bush's drinking, all the Administration drones and right-wing parrots out there can immediately equate the story to alien autopsies and Liz Taylor's 17-year old transsexual Afghan love child. Anyone who touches this story now is immediately tainted by association. Who can take this story seriously now that its been broken by the Enquirer? This has Turd Blossom's fat, sweaty paw prints all over it.

If I was an editor at an MSM organization, I would immediately assign some reporters to follow up on this story. My very first question would be: who leaked the info to the Enquirer? Come on MSM, reverse engineer for truth god damnit! Who were the unnamed sources for the story and what were their motivations? Start with these questions and follow the lies.

Is Bush drinking again? Or should the question be, did he ever really stop? It's impossible for those on the outside to know, so we have to rely on the MSM to ask these questions for us. Unfortunately, while there is more than enough circumstantial evidence to at least generate some curiosity among the press, it appears that nobody in the MSM has the cajones to actually take a bite. I give this story about another day and a half before it drops off the table until about the year 2009 when some tell-all New York Times bestseller by a former Bush Administration official (and probably ghost-written by Judith Miller) will reveal that Bush was a falling-down drunk for his entire presidency and that everybody in the White House and the press corps knew all about it.

Oh well, wink-wink, chuckle-chuckle, and look the other way. Hey, at least he's not getting a blow job and lying about it. Or is he? How would we ever know?