The Place of Dead Roads

From National Enquirer, :

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

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.

His worried wife yelled at him: "Stop, George."...

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 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...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."

Another source said: "A family member told me they fear George is 'falling apart.'" 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!"

Dr. Justin Frank, a Washington D.C. psychiatrist and author of Bush On The Couch: Inside The Mind Of The President, told The National Enquirer: "I think it's a concern that Bush disappears during times of stress. He spends so much time on his ranch. It's very frightening."

I'm sorry, but I can not resist rumor-mongering on this one. It is like the two posts from Capital Hill Blue. Just fun to see the rumors start flying...

[Update] John Aravosis links to I Believe the National Enquirer, Why don't you? over at Slate which discusses the true reliability of said journal. Turns out, the National Enquirer, along with People, have "a human army of fact-checkers and editors labor[ing] over it every week, making it as accurate as the phone book." A bit of history from Slate:

Almost three decades ago, the National Enquirer abandoned the traditional supermarket tabloid formula of UFOs, bizarre sex, séances, gross-outs, Loch Ness-ish monsters, cooked-up stories, and celebrity gossip for a new formula mostly devoted to celebrities. Striving for the kind of journalistic accuracy that repels libel suits, the tabloid paid many of its sources and scrupulously reported and fact-checked its pieces about Cher, Liz and Dick, Jackie O., Liza, Henry Kissinger, Burt and Loni, and the original Charlie's Angels.

By the time of the 1994 Nicole Brown Simpson-Ron Goldman murders, the Enquirer truth machine had become so good that reporter David Margolick was toasting it in the New York Times for scooping the competition—and applauding it for spiking many of the false stories that appeared in mainstream media.