fair questions raised here?

[clover]

Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior
By TERESA HAMPTON
Editor, Capitol Hill Blue
Jul 28, 2004, 08:09
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President George W. Bush is taking powerful anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned.
The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician, can impair the President’s mental faculties and decrease both his physical capabilities and his ability to respond to a crisis, administration aides admit privately.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” says one aide. “We can’t have him flying off the handle at the slightest provocation but we also need a President who is alert mentally.”

Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a clearly-upset Bush stormed off stage on July 8, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay.
“Keep those motherfuckers away from me,” he screamed at an aide backstage. “If you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”
Bush’s mental stability has become the topic of Washington whispers in recent months. Capitol Hill Blue first reported on June 4 about increasing concern among White House aides over the President’s wide mood swings and obscene outbursts.
Although GOP loyalists dismissed the reports an anti-Bush propaganda, the reports were later confirmed by prominent George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a “paranoid meglomaniac” and “untreated alcoholic” whose “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad” showcase Bush’s instabilities.
“I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote and watching him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed,” Dr. Frank said. “He fits the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but not treated.”
Dr. Frank’s conclusions have been praised by other prominent psychiatrists, including Dr. James Grotstein, Professor at UCLA Medical Center, and Dr. Irvin Yalom, MD, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University Medical School.
The doctors also worry about the wisdom of giving powerful anti-depressant drugs to a person with a history of chemical dependency. Bush is an admitted alcoholic, although he never sought treatment in a formal program, and stories about his cocaine use as a younger man haunted his campaigns for Texas governor and his first campaign for President.
“President Bush is an untreated alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies,” Dr. Frank adds.

The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment on this article.
Although the exact drugs Bush takes to control his depression and behavior are not known, White House sources say they are “powerful medications” designed to bring his erratic actions under control. While Col. Tubb regularly releases a synopsis of the President’s annual physical, details of the President’s health and any drugs or treatment he may receive are not public record and are guarded zealously by the secretive cadre of aides that surround the President.
Veteran White House watchers say the ability to control information about Bush’s health, either physical or mental, is similar to Ronald Reagan’s second term when aides managed to conceal the President’s increasing memory lapses that signaled the onslaught of Alzheimer’s Disease.
It also brings back memories of Richard Nixon’s final days when the soon-to-resign President wondered the halls and talked to portraits of former Presidents. The stories didn’t emerge until after Nixon left office.
One long-time GOP political consultant who – for obvious reasons – asked not to be identified said he is advising his Republican Congressional candidates to keep their distance from Bush.
“We have to face the very real possibility that the President of the United States is loony tunes,” he says sadly. “That’s not good for my candidates, it’s not good for the party and it’s certainly not good for the country.”

© Copyright 2004 by Capitol Hill Blue

[librechik]

1. CHB gossip is so delicious

I wish they were a credible website.

Not that I don't believe every word. I do.

[helnwhls]

2. it ain't a-workin'...

...whatever he is taking.

[LibertyorDeath]

3. "megalomaniac tendencies"

tendencies No he is a Full Fleged megalomaniac

[LiberalAndProud]

4. There ought to be a law

If our president is on any prescribed medication, particularly psychoactive drugs, shouldn't it be a matter of public record? Aren't medical records of the president available for public scrutiny?

[clover]

5. remember the facial grimaces? jaw movements? restlessness?

Tardive Dyskinesia - A syndrome of potentially irreversible, involuntary, dyskinetic movements may develop in patients treated with Zyprexa. The risk of developing tardive dyskinesia and the likelihood that it will become irreversible are believed to increase as the duration of treatment and the total cumulative dose of Zyprexa increases.

There are no known treatments for tardive dyskinesia. 

Orthostatic Hypotension (Lowered blood pressure when a person changes from a setting to an erect position) - Zyprexa may induce orthostatic hypotension associated with dizziness, tachycardia, and in some patients, syncope, especially during the initial dose-titration period. Zyprexa should be used with particular caution in patients with known cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, and conditions which would predispose patients to hypotension. 

Seizures - Seizures during premarketing test showed 22 of 2500 people developed seizures. 

[ogradda]

6. he used firecrackers to blow up frogs?

i never heard that did he really do that?

[clover]

7. freaked-out kids

often torture animals like that: firecrackers on ant hills sprinkled with sugar, firecrackers in a cat's anus: it's all over the literature on pediatric psychopathology.

[GreenPoet64]

8. Split personality or Somethin' . . .

Actually I don't think he has a split personality, but damn the difference in his ability to articulate between the first debate and the second really has me worried about four more years. I think he's mentally ill. Mental illness only gets worse with time. I feel sick when I think about having this guy in office after the 2nd!
:eyes:

[Leilani]

9. On Russerts CNBC show today

he had a writer from The Weekly Standard & James Fallows? editor of Atlantic Monthly.

Fallows was commenting on the change in Shrub speech patterns from his debate against Ann Richards to 2000 to today. He said he used to talk in complete sentences & sounded like Jeb with a little Texas accent.

Nobody seemed to want to touch the topic. It was so important, yet it was avoided.

I think something is suspicious...the speech changes, no physical, always looking bruised, refusual to hold press conferences, something on his back during debates, & he doesn t run anymore...they say he has a bad knee, & the lack of seeming ability to control his temper.

[clover]

10. think of the media's culpability

if what many fear, that bush is ill, turns out true, and it has been an open secret among the ruling elite, withheld from the rest of us.