Chaos Magnet

Is Bush losing it?

A long time ago, life got me really, really down, to the point where I asked my doctor for antidepressants. Within months, my wife was complaining that I just wasn't myself. "Sure," I thought, "myself is depressed, angry and miserable." But I got off the meds anyway. A couple of months later, I went to get a haircut and the guy who cuts my hair, who is normally quite friendly, told me he was on Prozac. By the time he started cutting my hair, I understood what my wife meant; he just wasn't himself. It was as though he was just a shell of his former self. Sure, he wasn't being compulsive-obsessive anymore, but was the alternative really that much better?

So what does that have to do with George W. Bush? According to Capital Hill Blue -- the accuracy and/or veracity of which I cannot verify, by the way -- he was prescribed powerful anti-depressants after a July 8 incident in which he stormed offstage after refusing to answer questions about his relationship with Enron CEO Ken Lay:

"Keep those m*therf*ckers away from me," he screamed at an aide backstage. "If you can't, I'll find someone who can."

So are things better now that he's on the drugs? Well, apparently he's, well, just not himself.

"[T]here are concerns," a top Republican political advisor admitted privately Wednesday. "The George W. Bush we see today is not the same, gregarious, back-slapping President of old. He’s moody, distrustful and withdrawn."

Unfortunately, there's a big difference here. When my hairdresser isn't himself, I don't enjoy my haircut. When the President isn't himself, it's a whole other story.

White House aides say Bush has retreated into a tightly-controlled environment where only top political advisors like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes are allowed. Even White House chief of staff Andrew Card complains he has less and less access to the President.

(In an interesting side-note, the same article claims that Donald Rumsfeld has fallen out of favor, and that the "real political power" in Washington is not Dick Cheney, but still-in-good-with-Dubya John Ashcroft, who, along with Bush, is referred to as the "Blues Brothers" because they both think they're on a mission from G-d.)

This kind of thing has the ability to make me strangely sympathetic; I know what it's like to get to the point where you just can't take it anymore -- but you have to. On the other hand, one of the most common observations about Saddam Hussein was that he was insulated from everyone and that's how he developed the way he did. And Washingtonians are starting to refer to Ashcroft as "Bush's Himmler". (If you don't understand that reference, you desperately need to look it up.)

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Technorati tags: bush | paranoia | hitler | himmler | cheney | ashcroft | depression | drugs | alcoholism | rove |

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