Boozer Bush (Salt Lake City Weekly)

[chat_noir]

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.)

snip

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.”

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

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Fun read!

[highplainsdem]

2. Great column! Thanks for the link! Recommended.

[stevedeshazer]

3. HAHAHA!! Nice

[wellstone_democrat]

4. Bourbon marinade

absolutely hilarious column. I still maintain as I always have that he's a drunk

[dretceterini]

5. I love it!

By the way, there is a public town hall meeting at the main library at 7PM on October 12th about Rocky Anderson (our mayor) and the war for anyone who is, or will be in the area...

[MADem]

6. I HAD to save that illustration from that article!!!

Have ANOTHER drink, ya putz!!!

On edit, my FAVORITE paragraph of that gem:
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).

[Window]

9. Hysterical!!!

.

Peace

[enid602]

7. lit

How do we know that the bumbling, slurring and accident-prone preznit we've seen as of late is not a drunk one, but rather a SOBER one. Maybe he was lit when he was still in his groove, so to speak.

[cassiepriam]

8. Hard to tell, would need to know how advanced his alcoholism is...nt

[atommom]

10. I needed a good laugh!

"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."

[despairing optimist]

11. "Harriet is a shtrickt conshtructionisht."

Boy, was he slurring his words during Tuesday's press conference. I hope there are signs in the White House: No Open Flames in the West Wing. Alcohol in Use.

[jillan]

12. Watching his meeting yesterday at the Rose Garden with the press

I was amazed. He could talk. He actually put several sentences together at a time, and made sense. He used humor, and answered questions. And only one time did I see him make that scared look, when a reporter brought up the Plame memo. hahahaha!

And all I could think was "Wow, George is buzzed today".
It was a total turnaround behavior from him. Something was up.

[zonkra]

20. That's not the booze...

... that's the cocaine on top of the booze, just the way he likes it.

[PinkyisBlue]

13. Jim Bean

I think you're all giving Jim Bean too much credit. "W" did this all on his own. The choking incidents, bike accidents, facial grimaces, speech impediments and dead stares were all without the help of Jim. Half of his brain cells are already dead from previous binges, and what you see now is who he is, no assistance required!!

[swimboy]

14. Syntactical insurgencies!

In their final throes, I hope.

[zalinda]

15. Is this a red paper? n/t

[dretceterini]

25. The Salt Lake City Weekly

Is like the Free Press in Los Angeles, or any city's "counter culture" nespaper.

[npincus]

16. B*sh's syntactical insurgencies"- BRILLIANT!

[Javaman]

17. About 2 1/2 years ago, I stated on here...

that I had a friend that worked at a local club for the rich here in Austin. He stated that Moron*, while governor would frequently come in for a drink.

I got nothing but crap from y'all. Well now I'm here to say, I told you so. so there...I feel better. LOL

colossal racist drunk ass failure*.

[Javaman]

18. Had a "friend" years ago that was "born again"...

I worked with this guy in the film industry. Seemed relatively normal until one day he started spouting off on a religious jag. He would bristle at my off color humor and decided then and there to give me a lesson on morality. After his long-ass lecture. I looked him in the eye and burst out laughing. After all this guy had been an entertainer on a cruise ship and screwed everything on two legs from sun up to sun down.
Oddly, it was during this wild time in his life that he had met his then current wife, she was a bigtime fundie. She was attracted to him, oddly, because of his out going general all around good nature and manly ways of talking women out of their panties.
But what she saw, was a man who was in need of being saved. She hooked into him like a meat hook into a side of beef and never let go. That was her first mistake.
He, overnight, became god-man. She quite her 6 figure job and lived on his very low 5 figure job as a production assistant. They promptly shot out 4 kids. Brilliant. He all the while keeping a frozen smile on his face and spouting the virtues of fatherhood. He was also a member of the Promise Keepers. However, that smile began to fade when the last of his little minion was announced as "on the way". Things changed.
My friend, like most misogynists, was feeling, shall we say, confined in this holy roller daddio role.
And as much as his wife tried to believe that he was a devoted husband, her second mistake, he proved her wrong.
Calling one day, he begins to tell me a tale of how, one day, he left for work, everything was hunky dory, yet when he returned that night from a long day slaving away on the set of some sort of religious programming, which incidentally, he stated paid him way to much money but he still took the dough (how christian of him), found that his wife had packed up every last thing in their house (carpet included), and left. Apparently, she didn't care for his extra curricular activities.
But the way he told it, like many people of his ilk like to, he was the victim. He was going on and on about how hard she had been, how difficult life had been, how tight the money was, etc, all ignoring the fact that he cheated on her. I hadn't known until this point that he had in fact cheated on her. I only found out when he quite offhandedly tossed that little tidbit into the conversation. He tried to go on, but I stopped him. I said, "you cheated on her?" Again, not taking true responsibility, he said yes, and once again tried to move beyond the point.
It was then that I brought up all his virtuous religious pomposity and slammed him in the face with it.
Needless to say, he never called me again.
The one thing I have observed about the holy-then-thou types is a simple thing. They care about no one else but themselves. It was displayed in his wife, who was out on a mission to relieve him of his evil ways, only to suit her definition of how people should live and as a result got the short end of the stick because her self-righteous ways.
And my ex-friend who, also out to be something he certainly was not, screwed around and tried to pass off his marital faux pas as something trivial. Needless to say, I find this ironic because they usually spout on and on about the whole marriage being sacred bullshit. And mostly, for not taking responsibility for his own actions.
This example is symptomatic of the whole ultra-religious right-wing we are witnessing at the moment. They honestly believe that if they don't take responsibility for their actions, the problems will simply go away. We all know the reality of that, we normally learn that as children. It eventually,comes back to bite you in the ass.
So as we watch morons* drinking and abject stupidity being confronted and a whole section of the society living in a self delusional sense of reality, I only have one thing to say to you, "you better have a huge ass, because the bite you are going to receive will be a big one"

[PurpleChez]

28. That "delusional sense of reality" it what's scary

I live in a very red state, and I was thinking just the other day that -- despite the common image -- many of *'s True Believers who I've known are NOT hardcore fundies and thumpers. Sure, they go to church, and there's a very good chance that they go to a BAPTIST church, but they don't want to ban Harry Potter, they don't have a particular beef with Darwin, their greatest fear is not that queer folk will marry, and so on. And yet, they are as adamant as their fire-baptized bretheren that * is not only infallible but is also The Wisest Ruler EVER. Imagine the cognitive dissonance involved in convincing oneself that this man, whose shortcomings and outright failures are seemingly endless, is one of the greatest leaders that ten thousand years of human society has yet produced. What really freaks me out is that this is more that they gave to their beloved Reagan. Repugs actually disagreed with Reagan now and then, but * could say that the sky was ploka-dotted and one third of the country would be wandering around muttering "yes...it IS polka-dotted..." like some brain-dead cultist waiting for his turn at the Kool-Aid trough.

[ClintonTyree]

19. Nail, meet hammer....

I've often said that there's no way a person can exhibit behavior like bush's and NOT be tanked. Everything this article says hits the nail on the head, from his apparent clumsiness to his mangling of the English language. The guy has never cleaned up, jesus is a prop for him to get the fundie vote and he hasn't forsaken his rude, crude, drunken behavior one iota. Not only is bush a liar, he's a drunken liar and our country is being thrown away like one of his empties in the process.

[zonkra]

21. He's like a dangerous combination

of Kate Moss and Lindsay Lohan. Self-hating latents are often like that. He should come out and just say, "Brownie, I'd like to give you a heckuva job!" I mean, his best friend, Karl Rove, and his party chief, Ken Mehlman, are flaming like they just got off the ferry from Fire Island!

[VaYallaDawg]

22. And today we get Islamobofascism

or whatever his mangling of the word was. Tsk tsk tsk.

[Kurovski]

23. A fun read

despite the real horror of having a very sick man haunting our White house.

His continuing drunkenness would also explain why as governor of Texas he was somewhat coherent, with that coherence--or rather, what coherence there was--slipping away before our eyes on a monthly basis for five years.

In such cases sympathy is often extended to the wife, in this case there is also pity to be shared for an entire nation. Indeed, for the world.

Oh dear.

[PurpleChez]

30. No sympathy for the wife. Sorry.

At every turn Laura has helped push fascist policies and illegal wars. I'm not a recovery person and I try not to use their jargon, but she is an enabler -- and is thus complicit in the deaths of 10's of 1000's of human beings and in the erosion of human and civil rights here and abroad. Screw her.

[kat21]

24. And in SLC of all places!

[amandabeech]

26. He may be self-medicating.

Today's reports have him getting marching orders from God. He may be mixing booze with anti-psychotics of some sort, or he may be substituting booze for his regular meds.

He simply should not be in office.

[paineinthearse]

27. This article comes from SALT LAKE?

I spent a working weekend there once, was only let out of the meeting to walk the grounds of the temple.

Great piece.

[0007]

29. Salt Lake City weekly? This is great medicine for the mormons.