I haven't had any time to read blogs or news - I'm getting almost all my news from TV (Keith Olbermann is doing a great job of it) and a couple of friends are sending emails.
Thanks to Doug for a link to this great article about Bush's rehearsed "discussion" with the troops in Iraq.
Keith Olbermann interviewed Dana Millbanks and they talked about Bush's "body language". Apparently the swagger is gone and Millbanks said Bush is "twitchy". I can't remember which one, but Keith or Dana also mentioned the jerking jaw.
But wait, there's more. My good friend Dada located an article explaining why the chimperor's jaw is dancing around. It's the drugs.
Capitol Hill Blue:
President George W. Bush is taking 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 PresidentÂ’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.”
BushÂ’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 PresidentÂ’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. FrankÂ’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.
The exact drugs Bush takes to control his depression and behavior are not known. While Col. Tubb regularly releases a synopsis of the PresidentÂ’s annual physical, details of the PresidentÂ’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 BushÂ’s health, either physical or mental, is similar to Ronald ReaganÂ’s second term when aides managed to conceal the PresidentÂ’s increasing memory lapses that signaled the onslaught of AlzheimerÂ’s Disease.
It also brings back memories of Richard NixonÂ’s final days when the soon-to-resign President wandered the halls and talked to portraits of former Presidents. The stories didnÂ’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."
