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