Bush on Drugs?
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| Tue, 08-24-2004 - 3:58am |
By TERESA HAMPTON
Editor, Capitol Hill Blue
Jul 28, 2004, 08:09
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 mother******* 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 wandered 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 Capitol Hill Blue

You know, there is an story Harry Truman liked to tell. Seems he got his first job as a "store boy" for a drug store. He was to start on Monday. On Sunday, he was in church and the sermon was on the evils of demon rum. All the church elders stood up and denounced the evils of this awful brew.
Next morning, when Harry arrived at the store before it opened, to begin his first day of work, he saw all of the elders lined up out back for their morning drink, administered by the drug store owner. "I learned a lot that first day," Harry always like to say, with a twinkle in his eye.
We now know that most of the opinions of "Rush" (Ahhhh!) Limbaugh were concocted while in a drug addled state. One wonders how much of the Iraq intelligence was viewed by a president who was also in such a state. Or perhaps a few judicially administered drugs might have kept the Crawford Cowboy from going Rambo.
Well, what can we expect from someone who drove his car through the garage wall when his wife criticized one of his speeches.
It gets worse, the author of the book has never seen the President, and is making all sorts of conclusions of fact without a single fact. I go to the barnes & noble website to look at reviews and find the following...
There Are Better Ways To Defeat Bush This Year
I am a committed liberal, a registered Democrat, and a practicing psychologist (Psy.D). To write that Dr. Frank's book is misguided in the extreme is an understatement indeed. It is another example of a highly intelligent person (such as David Ray Griffin of Claremont) setting aside her or his professional training and intellectual honesty and engaging in data manipulation (at best) and outright fraud (at worst) in order to promote a partisan political point of view. We can hardly call the extreme right-wing to account for their unseemly willingness to engage in such practices on a number of important issues if we on the left are willing to lower ourselves to this level. There is an overwhelming case to be made against Bush's reelection as president; we do not need to include the arguments contained in this book among it.
Based on assumptions
As a graduate student in psychology I read this book with interest. However I found the conclusions reached were not supported by facts and the author only used TV statements to reach a diagnosis! Real psychologists can only diagnosis a condition upon interviewing the patient. Don't bother with this one.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0060736704&itm=1
< Well, what can we expect from someone who drove his car through the garage wall when his wife criticized one of his speeches. >
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C
Here's another one that's basically along the same lines, and I do remember seeing the one originally posted and I read it on Capitol Hill Blue's site.
I read these to get a good laugh every now and then, but for newsworthyness, I stick to the regular channels and outlets.
Sucks though. I had been telling my husband that I suspected something was wrong with Bush before this came out. In his rare appearances early this year, he just seemed off. I don't mean his usual screw up of the English language, I mean body language, actions kind of thing. Then the Capitol Blue articles came out and I stopped saying it - didn't want to spread something from a too biased source. He seems better now, not what I thought I saw then, but even during the Larry King interview it was odd - maybe just a tense interview, I don't know. Anyway, when I see him now I think of the JibJab thing ("You're a Right wing nut job") when I see him. :-)
That is pretty funny, along with the Massuhchewsits thing, and Kerry looking like Herman Munster.