9.22.2005
BUSH'S BOOZE CRISISby JENNIFER LUCE and DON GENTILE
Published on: 09/21/2005
Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again, The National Enquirer can reveal.
Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe.
Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster.
His worried wife yelled at him: "Stop, George."
Following the shocking incident, disclosed here for the first time, Laura privately warned her husband against "falling off the wagon" and vowed to travel with him more often so that she can keep an eye on Dubya, the sources add.
"When the levees broke in New Orleans, it apparently made him reach for a shot," said one insider. "He poured himself a Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey and tossed it back. The First Lady was shocked and shouted: "Stop George!"
"Laura gave him an ultimatum before, 'It's Jim Beam or me.' She doesn't want to replay that nightmare — especially now when it's such tough going for her husband."
Bush is under the worst pressure of his two terms in office and his popularity is near an all-time low. The handling of the Katrina crisis and troop losses in Iraq have fueled public discontent and pushed Bush back to drink.
A Washington source said: "The sad fact is that he has been sneaking drinks for weeks now. Laura may have only just caught him — but the word is his drinking has been going on for a while in the capital. He's been in a pressure cooker for months.
"The war in Iraq, the loss of American lives, has deeply affected him. He takes every soldier's life personally. It has left him emotionally drained.
The result is he's taking drinks here and there, likely in private, to cope. "And now with the worst domestic crisis in his administration over Katrina, you pray his drinking doesn't go out of control."
Another source said: "I'm only surprised to hear that he hadn't taken a shot sooner. Before Katrina, he was at his wit's end. I've known him for years. He's been a good ol' Texas boy forever. George had a drinking problem for years that most professionals would say needed therapy. He doesn't believe in it [therapy], he never got it. He drank his way through his youth, through college and well into his thirties. Everyone's drinking around him."
Another source said: "A family member told me they fear George is 'falling apart.' The First Lady has been assigned the job of gatekeeper." Bush's history of drinking dates back to his youth. Speaking of his time as a young man in the National Guard, he has said: "One thing I remember, and I'm most proud of, is my drinking and partying. Those were the days my friends. Those were the good old days!"
Age 26 in 1972, he reportedly rounded off a night's boozing with his 16-year-old brother Marvin by challenging his father to a fight.
On November 1, 2000, on the eve of his first presidential election, Bush acknowledged that in 1976 he was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol near his parents' home in Maine. Age 30 at the time, Bush pleaded guilty and paid a $150 fine. His driving privileges were temporarily suspended in Maine.
"I'm not proud of that," he said. "I made some mistakes. I occasionally drank too much, and I did that night. I learned my lesson." In another interview around that time, he said: "Well, I don't think I had an addiction. You know it's hard for me to say. I've had friends who were, you know, very addicted... and they required hitting bottom (to start) going to AA. I don't think that was my case."
During his 2000 presidential campaign, there were also persistent questions about past cocaine use. Eventually Bush denied using cocaine after 1992, then quickly extended the cocaine-free period back to 1974, when he was 28.
Dr. Justin Frank, a Washington D.C. psychiatrist and author of Bush On The Couch: Inside The Mind Of The President, told The National Enquirer: "I do think that Bush is drinking again. Alcoholics who are not in any program, like the President, have a hard time when stress gets to be great.
"I think it's a concern that Bush disappears during times of stress. He spends so much time on his ranch. It's very frightening."
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From: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/celebrity/63426
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New Orleans as a portrait of ourselves and our future
by John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
from: 9-7-05
The dog opened his mouth to get the other bone, and as he did,
the bone he already had fell into the water.
— Aesop
All our seeming wakings are but the debris of evening waters.
— Edward Dahlberg
Still water is like glass.
— Chuang Tzu
Welcome to Bantustan, Louisiana, where the first stage of creating a large, armed, New World Order fortress, complete with gated communities and an Israeli wall against the sea and the riffraff, has begun. It is the inevitable course of human history, playing like a bad rerun of humanity’s medieval nightmares.
In the meantime, the chief sephardic rabbi in Jerusalem declared that the hurricane that obliterated New Orleans was God’s punishment because President Bush supported the eviction of Israeli settlers from Gaza. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3138779,00.html
Take a taste, a gargantuan, thirst-quenching slug of that delicious elixir brewed by humanity's most successful citizens, that Cajun cabernet of pesticide-fouled Mississippi River water curdling in the backwater blender of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, spiced by fragrances from all across the periodic table of toxic elements and spiced with a disease-bearing melange of decomposing dead animals.
Savor the bouquet. See how it tinkles on your tongue and wafts into your hairy nostrils. Close your eyes and you can envision the perfect portrait of human civilization.
They say we are 89 percent water. The quality of the water within us is directly correlative to the ingredients of the potion in the cauldron of New Orleans.
Note the bloated black man, floating face down in the brew. Boats rush past, to and fro, hoping to pry decomposing remains from dank attics, and occasionally, with luck, find some terrified child shivering in the stinking darkness, while National Guardsmen play cards at a nearby truckstop.
If there is a legitimate vision of hell in this life, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is it (although this act has also been seen recently in Fallujah, Kigali, Port-au-Prince and many other locations as well).
Where your last breath, to last you for all eternity, is the fetid stench of humanity's caustic creations, what kind of hope could there be for anyone? Why did four people last week die suddenly simply by breathing the air? Must be a new government test.
The two major conspiracy angles on the New Orleans disaster are (1) the hurricane was directed toward the city by artificial means, and (2) the rescue efforts were deliberately inept to increase the death toll among indigent African-Americans.
Culling the herd. That would be the neocon phrase, slurred out as humor by people like Barbara Bush.
But when you observe who keeps getting it in the face, without even perusing the obvious evidence all across history, you realize there is and has always been a continuing war on blacks, on the dark-skinned peoples of the world, and New Orleans is — whether deliberately contrived or not — a genuine manifestation of this nasty and pointless insanity.
Because so many ordinary people have tried to help New Orleans storm victims and been thwarted by bureaucratic officialdom, one can only draw the conclusion that the government has severely limited its rescue efforts because there is no place in corporate society for these people, and they need to be eliminated.
I thought it was very cool that so many of those like DU activist Dennis Kyne and others who went to Texas to support antiwar mom Cindy Sheehan smoothly moved their operation to New Orleans to help out.
This small remaining segment of morally decent Americans knows — much more authentically that the government could ever pretend to know — that when people are dying you don’t argue about causes or rules. Perhaps that is the true test of being human.
9/11 taught us that our government will sacrifice 3,000 of its own best and brightest without blinking an eye. New Orleans is the message that the number eligible in this category, especially if they’re black, is much, much higher.
And it is a confession that a real population control program is moving into high gear.
Good numbers in Indonesia, good numbers in New Orleans. Could a West Coast quake be far behind? Heck, they have already caused several of those in Iran.
And it's way past time for the government, after many decades of trying, to develop a really effective biological agent — the new flu as an expression of love in the New World Order world — and you begin to get some sense of how twisted we have become as a species.
Which leads to an examination of how twisted we have always been. Kind of like ... on the bridge at twilight, a man with a flashlight falls off a bridge, and what you can remember was the rhythmic flailing of his arms as he fell. I dunno. Maybe I'm thinking about 9/11 again ......
Now the new images are of floating, inert, face down in poison after rummaging through spoiled and flooded supermarkets looking for clean water. I found it heartwrenching that a top choice of New Orleans looters was disposable diapers.
How far? How far distant is the realization in the minds of everyone that we have created a monster, and that monster is what we do to ourselves and the planet.
Did you ever notice how the Andaman Island indigenents were not harmed by the tsunami, or how animals are never killed in these storms? I don't mean to point out faults in those who were caught in the floodtide, but as regards our fitness to survive as a society.
In our sparkling delusions, our high-minded ideals and low-flying scams, we have abandoned the planet. Soon the planet, which has gone out of its way to help us for millions of years, will abandon us.
Where will your dreams be then? Floating on the bayou, baby, with all the other dead birds.
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John Kaminski is a writer who lives on a part of the Gulf Coast of Florida that for some reason Hurricane Katrina inexplicably swerved around on its way to New Orleans. He is the author of "The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn't Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001." http://www.johnkaminski.com/
