Boozer Bush

W. gets by with a little help from Jack and Jim.

It doesn’t explain everything, but it explains a lot: George Bush, our president, is hitting the bottle again. The drinking rumors have been making the rounds for months, and even before that people speculated that Bush’s “accidents”—choking on a pretzel, dropping his dog, crashing his bicycle—were “alcohol-related.” For someone who makes such a point of flaunting his physical prowess, his habitual clumsiness is somewhat suspicious. After all, Bushie (his wife Laura’s pet name for him, just as it’s his pet name for her, which is a bit creepy) first gained prominence as a high-kicking, back-flipping sis-boom-bah male cheerleader at Yale.

Of course, we are all familiar with Bush’s epic battle with the bottle: He boozes his way through college; he is persistently liquored up through his 20s (failing to show up for National Guard duty, but never missing booze-drenched weekend barbecues with his Texas buddies); into his 30s, he is so continuously sloshed that he screws up every sure-thing business venture his daddy sets up for him; at 40, so the story goes, his wife gives him the made-for-the-movies sound-bite ultimatum, “Bushie, it’s me or Jim Beam,” and the chastened former cheerleader renounces alcohol forever. (In a medium shot, we see Bushie mournfully pouring out the last of a fifth of bourbon onto the patio pavement, while Laura witnesses the act with a wifely look of affection, relief, and secret triumph.)

Bushie’s renunciation of booze has gained such mythic status that many people (Republican true believers) conveniently overlook the fact that his renunciation of adult beverages was hardly a redemptive turn of fortune. All that happened was that Bush the obnoxious drunk became Bush the obnoxious teetotaler, proclaiming that his life was now in the hands of Jesus Christ, not Jim Beam.

But the recent revelations about Bush slugging down Southern Comfort as Iraq goes down the tubes and New Orleans goes down the drain calls into question whether he actually gave up booze and gave his life to Jesus in the first place. That Bush continued to hit the sauce after taking the pledge explains a good deal of his weird behavior, one minute scared s—tless, the next, after a secret swig of Early Times, inflated with Texas swagger.

One minute Bush goes limp with fright when desperate aides inform him that planes have crashed in the World Trade Center; the next minute, stiff with bravado, he boasts of his resolve to get Osama “dead or alive.” One minute, when he hears Hurricane Katrina howling, he cringes like a scaredy-cat behind his Mama; after a few pops of Old Granddad, he’s full of phony bluster, telling his feckless FEMA chief, “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job.”

Other creepy traits of our commander-in-chief make sense when seen in the light of his unacknowledged alcoholism. There is his adolescent habit, for instance, of conferring nicknames on all who come within his ken. We all know drunks who, deep in the throes of inebriated bonhomie, bestow terms of affection on friend and foe alike.


One can almost feel Bush’s sticky breath and his humid embrace as he christens his confederates, immortalizing them with his own special brand of corny wit: Turd Blossom (Karl Rove), Lima Green Bean (Karen Hughes), Number One (Barbara Bush, who is no doubt relieved that Junior did not name her Number Two), Guru (Condoleezza Rice), Big Time (Dick Cheney), Balloon Foot (Colin Powell), Ali (Barbara Boxer), Big O (Olympia Snow, who may or may not wonder at the cheekiness of Little G’s presumption regarding the magnitude of her orgasms), and last but not least, Pootie Poot (Vladimir Putin, who in times past might have launched the Doomsday Machine upon receiving a moniker with connotations of the female genitalia).
Bush’s prolonged sousitude also explains his verbal miscues, his syntactical insurgencies, his grammatical catastrophes. It’s as if the bourbon marinade left deadly lacunae in his already diminutive brain, making it impossible for the most elementary thought to navigate its way through the decimated labyrinth of his frontal lobes.

Then there are the quirky smirks, the bug-eyed glares and goofy grimaces, his words and facial expressions so out of sync that you are reminded of a badly dubbed Japanese monster movie. Finally, what about all those lip gyrations when Bushie is under stress, the tiny mouth working this way and that as if it were engaged in attempting to remove the cap from a bottle? It must be the sauce.


http://www.slweekly.com/editorial/2005/deep_2005-10-06.cfm


Dissent is the highest form of patriotism

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.-Thomas Jefferson