Here’s a fun one – rumors are aswirl that Michael Brown was the source of the National Enquirer story that President Bush has started drinking again. He certainly has the motive but now we know he’s still on the payroll so it seems unlikely.
– Digby
Also, I missed it last week but apparently President Bush turned up with another scrape on his face. As Digby said, “Falling on your face all the time is simply not normal. ”
At the end of Digby’s post, this caught my eye:
On the other hand, he’s flexing his jaw like crazy in a strange repetitive way. Too much coffee this morning, perhaps.
Coincidentally, we recently heard rumblings from inside D.C. journalism circles that President Bush is doing cocaine again.
Certainly begs the question: If the President wanted to score some blow, where would he get it? Does he call somebody discreet but connected? Or does he just have an eightball sent over from the DEA evidence lockers?
We did some digging around, and found this examination of the theory at Sadly, No!
Honestly, no tinfoil hats: What would be the signs if the old boy were, instead of drinking, flagrantly doing coke again like a big, fat huffing Snuffleupagus? Telltale sweating, funny jaw movements, odd scrapes on the face (he has another one today)… Just watch the guy in his recent TV clips. Is that spooky? You’ve seen that look before, right?
The record is a bit fuzzy about when Bush last did cocaine. His ex-sister-in-law Sharon Bush told Kitty Kelly that during his father’s administration, Bush did cocaine at Camp David more than once. Means it could have been any time up to January 1992.
In the 2000 campaign, candidate Bush’s past drug use became an issue for about 10 minutes – before Team Bush tamped it down with one of their patented moves: stay on message until the media gets bored and moves on.
As close as the media came to nailing him down on it is described here in this story the NewsHour:
Later in the day Wednesday, [a reporter for the Dallas Morning News] reframed the question, asking if the Texas governor could respond to a query routinely posed by the FBI during background investigations for a federal security clearance. Surprisingly, the candidate broke his self-imposed silence and volunteered a response”As I understand it, the current form asks the question, did somebody use drugs within the last seven years? … [And] I will be glad to answer that. And the answer is no.” That response prompted further probing of Bush yesterday in Roanoke, Virginia. This time, he took the issue one step further:
GEORGE W. BUSH: Not only could I have passed the background check — the standards applied in today’s White House, I could have passed the background check of standards applied on the most stringent conditions when my dad was President of the United States, a 15-year period.
TERENCE SMITH: The Bush campaign later clarified that the governor meant that he had been drug-free since 1974, when he was 28 years old. Possibly sensing that he had opened the door too wide to this line of inquiry, the Texas Governor once again tried to shut it down during a second campaign stop yesterday in Ohio.
What are the chances President Bush has fallen off the blow wagon? Not great – but better than, say, the rumor the Clintons had Vince Foster killed (How many millions were spent tracking that down, over and over?) Or that John Kerry didn’t really earn his Purple Heart.
