Hurricane Party(er)

Sure, it's the National Enquirer, so use your own judgement (though Simbaud, who also posts about this, notes they never hired Judith Miller)...according to the supermarket tabloid, Dubya could just as easily be nicknamed Nipper:

Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again, The National Enquirer can reveal.

Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe...

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.

A Washington source said: "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.

"The war in Iraq, the loss of American lives, has deeply affected him. He takes every soldier's life personally. It has left him emotionally drained.

The result is he's taking drinks here and there, likely in private, to cope. "And now with the worst domestic crisis in his administration over Katrina, you pray his drinking doesn't go out of control."

Another source said: "I'm only surprised to hear that he hadn't taken a shot sooner. Before Katrina, he was at his wit's end. I've known him for years. He's been a good ol' Texas boy forever. George had a drinking problem for years that most professionals would say needed therapy. He doesn't believe in it [therapy], he never got it. He drank his way through his youth, through college and well into his thirties. Everyone's drinking around him."

Another source said: "A family member told me they fear George is 'falling apart.' The First Lady has been assigned the job of gatekeeper." Bush's history of drinking dates back to his youth. Speaking of his time as a young man in the National Guard, he has said: "One thing I remember, and I'm most proud of, is my drinking and partying. Those were the days my friends. Those were the good old days!"

This isn't the first rumor I've heard of George with a frontal lobotomy a bottle in front of him. If I remember right, sometime in the last year Needlenose ran a photo showing George sitting with a glass of suds--then there's the pretzel accident, which always struck me as odd--besides what goes with pretzels? That's right: beer.

And not that drinking bothers me: hell, I've been known to have a drink or six. But as I told the person who sent me the link, it's not the drinking, it's the hypocrisy--the whole "tough guy, nose candy salt of the earth, don't need no therapy, gimme a steak" crap.

The guy's a wuss. And, if this story's right, he's a drunken wuss.