Bush & the Bottle

I’ve been seeing blog posts about the National Enquirer story that Bush — who stopped drinking after turning 40, but never entered treatment or admitted to having a drinking problem — has been hitting the bottle after Katrina happened and his ratings started seriously tanking. I haven’t posted anything about it, but this afternoon a reader sent me a link to a Salon.com article about the Enquirer story, its veracity, and what it means .

The National Enquirer is reporting that the president’s troubles have literally driven him to drink. “Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again,” the Enquirer says.

As you might expect, the sourcing for the story is a little vague. In an odd sort of grammatical construction, the Enquirer says that “family sources have told” — to whom, it doesn’t say — that the president was “caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze” in Crawford, Texas, when “he learned of the hurricane disaster.” “One insider” says that Bush “apparently” reached for a “Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey” when water flooded into New Orleans. Another “Washington source” says: “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.”

…There’s only one named source in the Enquirer piece, and it’s Justin Frank, the Washington psychiatrist who wrote “Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President.” The Enquirer quotes Frank as saying, “I do think Bush is drinking again.” But Frank has no firsthand knowledge of the matter, only supposition based on his own long-distance diagnosis and the same news the rest of us have seen. His conclusions lend a kind of “it makes sense to me” plausibility to the Bush-on-the-bottle story, but they’re nothing that you could call proof. “Alcoholics who are not in any program, like the president, have a hard time when stress gets to be great,” Frank says. “I think it’s a concern that Bush disappears during times of stress. He spends so much time on his ranch [sic]. It’s very frightening.”

First off, let me just say that I know first-hand that dealing with drug or alcohol addictions is not something to be taken lightly, or especially something to joke about as part of someone else’s life. I wouldn’t wish is on any individual or family, including Bush and his family.

That said, there are a few things worth noting. The Enquirer article doesn’t name any sources, which automatically makes it suspect. Yet the conventional wisdom, from what I’ve been reading, seems to be that the Enquirer usually gets the facts right, though it embroiders a bit on top of them. Apparently, that’s been the case ever since Carol Burnett sued them for libel back in 1976, and won.

There’s also this bit from the Enquirer piece.

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.”

Bush has been called a “dry drunk” a few times; a term used in recovery circles to refer to a person who has given up drink or drugs, but has not gone through a recovery program to sort through the problems of which the addiction might have been a symptom.

When a recovering alcoholic begins to engage in what AA calls “stinking thinking,” he or she begins to exhibit the old attitudes and pathologies of their drinking years. These include an increase in anxiety, mild tremors, mild depression, disturbed sleep patterns, inability to think clearly, craving for junk food, irritability, sudden bursts of anger and unpredictable mood swings.

Delving into those subject means plumbing some disturbing personal depths, which most people would probably rather not do, but is virtually required for one who seeks to recover from an addiction. Groups like Alcoholics Anonymous use the “Twelve Steps” as a guide to revisiting one’s personal inventory. Of course, the first step is a doozy.

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.

Or course, Bush never made that first step. That comes as no surprise now, as we know one of the chief characteristics of Bush as president — and, by extension, his administration — is an inability or unwillingness to admit any problems, mistakes, stumbles, errors or cheats. Even when asked directly during his last campaign, Bush couldn’t name a single mistake that he or his administration had made. Only when faced with the aftermath of Katrina did Bush come close to doing that, and even then not without some obvious discomfort and petulance. That he would stop drinking, but stop short of admitting a drinking problem, is pretty much true to form.

Denial is usually the best friend of the active or dry drunk. Like I’ve said before, the first rule of a dysfunctional family is “don’t tell.” Don’t tell about dad’s drinking problem. Don’t tell that dad smacks mom around. Don’t tell about mom’s pill-popping. Don’t tell about sister’s weight-loss. Don’t tell that brother has been raping sister. Don’t tell, don’t tell, don’t tell. It maintains appearances, and appearances are what matters, not substance. So what if it keeps the family dysfunctional? Nothing’s wrong. Everything is fine just as it is.

For drunks to function for any length of time in the world, they need enablers. Congress is filling that bill splendidly right now for Bush. As BuzzFlash put it about the recent corporate scandals, “For most of his adult life, those people around him enabled Bush’s alcoholism. Now the Democratic Senate is enabling the corporate corruption problem of his administration by not using their Constitutional powers to demand the truth.”

Not only the Congress but the nation seems to be watching this happen. No. They are encouraging it to happen. Who knows, maybe we are all in shock, just as we are when a member of our family does something appalling or outrageous under alcohol’s bidding. God knows, the crazy behavior by the administration is so wild and unprecedented, covering such frightening unknown territory up ahead that it may be easier to look away.

But we can’t look away. George W. Bush needs an intervention. Let’s be his interveners. Let’s raise our sober voices. Let’s ask questions, demand more than temper tantrums and pouting from the Commander in Chief. Let’s do this before it’s too late and a dry drunk’s dream of glory becomes our national nightmare.

For the last few months, I’ve been a regular viewer of a television show called Intervention. The show follows a basic pattern. It centers around various addicts — usually two in each episode — showing them in the throes of and addiction. The addicts are told they are being filmed for a documentary on addiction. Along the way we meet family members who have been affected by their loved-one’s addiction. At the end, the addict faces an intervention, and is presented the chance to enter treatment.

One constant theme throughout each show is the emotional, physical and often financial damage suffered by family and friends of the addict, as participants in the addiction, through their enabling of the addict, by supporting his/her denial about addiction as well as their own denial. I’m often shocked as just how much damage is done before friends and family decide they’ve had enough and decide it’s time for an intervention. But I guess I shouldn’t be.

Whether Bush is drinking or not, he resembles a classic case of “dry drunk”; in denial about his own behavior and its consequences for others, and in denial that there was or is a problem, even if everyone around him can see it. It’s a matter of simply changing habits without changing behavior. The problems that existed before the bottle was capped are still there. What’s happening now seems to be a sort of “electoral intervention.” Though we may be stuck with Bush as he rides out his term, there are many ways for Americans to say — as family and friends do in an intervention — “enough is enough.”

But the final decision still remains with the person who’s the focus of the intervention. Will there be an honest admission of a problem? Will there be a real effort to change? In Bush’s case, we can only guess. His Katrina admission, reluctantly given though it was, may hold some promise. But since he doesn’t have to get re-elected, it’s a question of what he wants his legacy to be, and what’s he’s willing to do to change the way it’s shaping up.

The truth is, his record of addressing his own problems doesn’t bode well for his dealing with the nation’s problems. But, of course, some of us knew that already. Bush may or may not have put the cork back in the bottle, but he doesn’t appear to have climbed out of it.