So That's What He's Been Doing In Crawford All This Time!

That bastion of journalistic integrity, The National Enquirer, has reported that President Bush has been hitting the bottle as a result of the stress on his presidency after the disaster of Katrina.

Here's what they say:

"Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe. Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster... Bush is under the worst pressure of his two terms in office and his popularity is near an all-time low. The handling of the Katrina crisis and troop losses in Iraq have fueled public discontent and pushed Bush back to drink."

Is it true? Or is it just tabloid fodder along the lines of: "Hitler Still Alive at 116 -- Directing Saddam's Armies"?

My first inclination is not to believe that the president could be so stupid as to fall off the wagon in the middle of a national emergency. But then, I didn't think that Bill Clinton could be so stupid as to fool around with a barely legal intern who notoriously couldn't keep her mouth shut. Could Jim Beam be George Bush's Monica Lewinsky? And could an alcoholic president hitting the bottle be grounds for impeachment?

Let me say that, although I have no idea whether the "Bush hits the bottle" story is true or not, and am inclined at first to disbelieve it, what I do believe at the moment is that there's a very strong chance that George Bush will be impeached by 2008. If the Democrats, as now seems likely, stage a comeback in 2006 and take back both houses of Congress, I think there's going to be a lot of pressure on them to impeach the president over the way he lied this country into a war that has now cost almost 2,000 American lives.

Wow -- facing impeachment and a real possibility of being the first president to be removed from office. That's enough to drive a president to drink.

Tom Moran

Ann Coulter Strikes Again

Some people are so pathetic that all you have to do to discredit them is just quote them.

After holding off for two weeks from commenting on the Bush Administration's woeful performance in dealing with the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina (because she was too busy bashing Ted Kennedy over Chappaquidick, which happened 36 years ago), this is what Ms. Coulter had to say about the disaster in her latest column:

"Democrats are so excited about Hurricane Katrina, they're thinking of moving "Camp Casey" to an area outside the National Weather Service. What they haven't figured out yet is how Richard Perle and the "neocons" cooked up a hurricane that targeted only black people. Meanwhile, rescuers in New Orleans have discovered a lower-than-expected 424 dead bodies or, as they're known to liberals, "registered Democratic voters."

In liberals' defense, they've got a better shot at convincing Americans that Bush is responsible for a hurricane than convincing them that John Kerry was fit to be commander in chief. Compared to Kerry, Katrina is a blowhard they can work with. Liberals think Hurricane Katrina means they get to pick the next Supreme Court justice. And as of today the smart money is on Cindy Sheehan — something about her moral authority being absolute."

Could this woman be more loathsome if she tried? Keep in mind that even President Bush -- the man who never admits mistakes-- has admitted that his administration fucked up. The man who has made a habit of rewarding incompetence has even accepted the resignation of FEMA director Michael Brown -- the one whom he had said was doing a "heck of a job" while the elderly drowned in their nursing homes waiting for help that never came.

Coulter's attempt to minimize the tragedy and make fun of people who didn't have the financial resources to avoid disaster, many of whom died as a result, is just disgusting -- especially considering that Coulter herself bugged her bony ass out of New York City for fear of being assassinated by one of her many stalkers. What a hypocrite.

Like I said, all you have to do to discredit some people is just quote them.

Tom Moran

They Just Don't Get It

Are the Bushes a family of sociopaths?

I'm not sure how seriously to pose that question, but you really have to wonder after the comments some of them have made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which the mayor of what used to be New Orleans has claimed could end up claiming as many as ten thousand lives -- more than three times as many as died at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

When President Bush got to the scene (a little late), what was his comment? He promised to rebuild -- the house of his fellow Republican, Senator Trent Lott. "I look forward to sitting on his porch," Bush said smugly while the home-bound elderly trapped in flood ravaged New Orleans drowned for lack of assistance from the federal government.

As if that wasn't bad enough, his mother, Barbara Bush, was even more despicable on a recent radio interview, saying of the evacuees that ''What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.''

Do you believe this insensitive clod? Does she really have an ounce of compassion in her overstuffed body for poor people who have lost everything they had?

Of course not, she's a member of the Bush family. Stupid question.

You know it's bad when even such conservative stalwarts as MSNBC's Joe Scarborough start criticizing the president over this debacle. "The president's suggestion that the size of this storm caught all by surprise just doesn't get it," Scarborough writes. "His administration was 48 hours late sending in the National Guard and poor Americans got raped and killed because of those mistakes."

It's nice to know that conservatives can tell the truth on occasion.

Rush Limbaugh isn't nearly as honest, but his observations are, in an odd way, illuminating. "What we've seen in New Orleans," Limbaugh said on the air, "is first and foremost the utter failure of generation after generation after generation of the entitlement mentality. Flood victims had been doubly victimized by the perception that government would somehow save them from nature's rage. They had no idea what to do because they've been told somebody else was going to fix it."

Typical of Limbaugh to blame the poor for their response to a natural disaster. The problem, however, isn't with the poor thinking that government would help them -- the problem is with a theory of government that the Republicans have had since Reagan, that government is the problem, not the solution. Do you think if Katrina had hit the Gulf Coast ten years ago that the response of the Clinton Administration would have been as callous and inept as that of the Bush Administration? Of course not. And you know why? Because liberals believe that government has an obligation to help the poor and the needy in times of distress. Conservatives don't. They think that it's a Darwinian, dog-eat-dog world, and if the weak don't survive, that's just too damn bad.

What we've been seeing in New Orleans over the past two weeks has been the conservative philosophy in action -- and it has not been a pretty sight.

Tom Moran

Bring it On!

As Mark Shields put it, a little sarcastically, not long ago on The Newshour, God must really love the Republicans. The first thing I heard this morning was that Chief Justice William Rehenquist had died at the age of 80. Now George W. Bush has two nominations to the Supreme Court.

So what is to be done? John Roberts will have his confirmation hearings start next week, and that will give the administration of what it's going to be like to get a new Chief Justice through the Senate. These two nominations could shift the balance of the court and, conceivably (no pun intended), overturn Roe v. Wade, so they're going to get a lot of scrutiny.

My guess is that the ideologues around Bush, and possibly Bush himself, would like to name Associate Justice Scalia to be Rehnquist's replacement. But does he have the cojones to do so in the face of what would no doubt be fight-to-the-death Democratic opposition? The nomination of Roberts indicates that Bush is not really in the mood for an ideological fight, since Roberts is the stealth candidate par excellence (although Ann Coulter pointed out, quite rightly for once, that so-called stealth candidates have a tendency to blow up in the Republicans' face). But maybe he wanted an easy win before going to the matresses over the Chief Justice nomination.

My guess is that he's not going to get it. Roberts might get in, but I don't think it's going to be a walk in the park -- not after the recess appointment of John Bolton to the U.N. That was a real insult to the Senate, and I suspect that Roberts might get a much more difficult time getting confirmed because of it.

And if Bush was stupid enough or arrogant enough to nominate Scalia for Chief Justice? Then it would most likely be clobberin' time on Capitol Hill -- it would make the Bork hearings look ike lunch at the Plaza by comparison.

This could be just what progressives need -- a great big target to organize around, the way Gingrich was in the 90s. Something to help spur the vote that will bring the Democrats back into the majority in 2006, and help them take back the White House in 2008.

So I say -- bring it on.

Tom Moran

All is Well!

Did you see President Bush on TV today "comforting" the victims of Hurricane Katrina? Did he look as forced and as awkward to you as he did to me? It was pathetic -- up until now all Bush has been worried about is the effect of the hurricane on the price of gasoline, and now he's showing faux-concern for the victims of this disaster because his media people have finally figured out that the lack of response to the scope of the disaster has made the United States look impotent to the entire world. One foreign journalist has even suggested that, regardless of where Osama bin Laden might be at the moment, he's probably killing himself laughing at the United States. Sadly, that might well be true.

Nobody -- not even the reddest of red state voters -- believes anything this administration says about relief efforts, since the sight of people up on roofs holding up signs saying "Help Us" tends to show that this administration just doesn't know what they're talking about. Bush reminds me a little of Kevin Bacon at the end of "Animal House": frantically waving his arms as if to forstall anarchy and chaos, all the time yelling, "Remain calm! All is well!" before he gets run over by an unruly mob.

And one of the saddest parts of all this is that the hurricane happened to hit a part of the country that went overwhelmingly for Bush in 2000 and 2004, and he's failed them miserably. I just hope that voters in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi keep this in mind in 2006 and 2008.

You get who you vote for.

Tom Moran

Connecting the Dots

Have you noticed the Hurricane Katrina story changing lately? At first it was the kind of thing that most news stations do on auto-pilot -- a big storm is coming, let's show the radar image over and over and tell everyone how bad it's going to be. Get shots of people buying milk and boarding up their windows.

Then we had the obligatory images of reporters standing in the wind and the rain and shouting into the microphone to be heard over the sounds of the storm. Nothing new there. We've all seen this stuff before.

But then the storm hit, putting much of New Orleans under water, and the story changed. Dramatically.

The story became the ineptness of the Bush Administration's response to the disaster. The horrifying images coming out of New Orleans showed how badly this administration has dealt with this storm, just as it has with everything it has dealt with in the last five years. The fact is that people knew what would happen if a Category 5 storm ever hit New Orleans, and yet the Bush Administration cut funding, for example, to shore up the levees to help keep the water out of the city. They ignored the warning signs on this disaster the way they ignored the warning signs of 9/11. And when disaster struck, they were totally unprepared.

In the meantime the images coming out of New Orleans get more and more grim and horrifying as the corpses pile up in the streets, the rapes and the looting continue, and anarchy prevails in what was once a beautiful and civilized city. And the National Guard isn't there in sufficient numbers to restore order because they're all on a fool's errand in Iraq.

Are people going to finally start connecting the dots between the disaster, the inadequate response and the administration responsible for it?

You tell me.

Tom Moran

Catching on to Ann Coulter

Are people finally catching on to Ann Coulter? It's far too soon to tell, but there are signs that something may be happening.

Consider the following two events:

1) Harding University, a conservative school that promotes Christian values, has uninvited Coulter to speak there. Why? Because of complaints from students that her views were "un-Christian." Which, of course, they are.

2) The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson has dropped Coulter's syndicated column. Editor and Publisher David Stoeffler wrote that "Many readers find her shrill, bombastic, and mean-spirited. And those are the words used by readers who identified themselves as conservatives."

The most cursory glance at Coulter's column would prove instantly that Stoeffler's appraisal is correct. Ann Coulter is a vicious, mean-spirited bitch, and many conservatives are actively embarrassed by her -- when they're not disgusted, that is.

She's also a hypocrite. This is the woman who claimed in her column that if New York were to be invaded by terrorists they would "immediately surrender," a charge she reiterated on Fox's "Hannity and Colmes." The fill-in host, Ellis Henican, deftly punctured Coulter's pomposity by saying that "I know it's a tough town. Not everybody can handle living here." I wonder how many people in the Fox viewing audience realized that this was a subtle and very effective put-down of Coulter, who, as has been reported in the press, left New York and moved to Florida because she was terrified of being killed by a stalker? So she's a coward as well as a hypocrite. Not that I mind, mind you -- New York is a cleaner city without Ann Coulter living in it.

It's way too soon to say that Ann Coulter's fifteen minutes of fame are up. But the signs are looking good.

Tom Moran