Howard Dean could do the doctor thing and bring up the issue!
Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic BehaviorBy TERESA HAMPTON
Editor, Capitol Hill Blue
Jul 28, 2004, 08:09
President George W. Bush is taking powerful anti-depressant
drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia,
Capitol Hill Blue has learned.
The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard J. Tubb,
the White House physician, can impair the President’s mental
faculties and decrease both his physical capabilities and his ability
to respond to a crisis, administration aides admit privately.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” says one aide. “We can’t have him flying off the handle at the slightest provocation but we also need a President who is alert mentally.”
Angry Bush walked away from reporter's questions.Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a clearly-upset Bush
stormed off stage on July 8, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron
executive Kenneth J. Lay.
“Keep those motherfu*#&ers away from me,” he screamed at an aide backstage. “If you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”
Bush’s mental stability has become the topic of Washington whispers in recent months. Capitol Hill Blue first
reported on June 4 about increasing concern among White House aides over the President’s wide mood swings
and obscene outbursts.
A l t h o u g h GOP loyalists dismissed the reports an anti-Bush propaganda, the reports were later confirmed by prominent
George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a “paranoid meglomaniac” and “untreated alcoholic” whose “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad” showcase Bush’s instabilities.
“I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote and watching
him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed,” Dr. Frank said. “He fits the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but not treated.”
Dr. Frank’s conclusions have been praised by other prominent psychiatrists, including Dr. James Grotstein,
Professor at UCLA Medical Center, and Dr. Irvin Yalom, MD, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University Medical
S c h o o l .
The doctors also worry about the wisdom of giving powerful anti-depressant drugs to a person with a history of
chemical dependency. Bush is an admitted alcoholic, although he never sought treatment in a formal program, and
stories about his cocaine use as a younger man haunted his campaigns for Texas governor and his first campaign
for President.
“President Bush is an untreated alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies,” Dr. Frank adds.
The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment on this article.
Although the exact drugs Bush takes to control his depression and behavior are not known, White House sources
say they are “powerful medications” designed to bring his erratic actions under control. While Col. Tubb regularly
releases a synopsis of the President’s annual physical, details of the President’s health and any drugs or treatment
he may receive are not public record and are guarded zealously by the secretive cadre of aides that surround
the President.
Veteran White House watchers say the ability to control information about Bush’s health, either physical or mental,
is similar to Ronald Reagan’s second term when aides managed to conceal the President’s increasing memory
lapses that signaled the onslaught of Alzheimer’s Disease.
It also brings back memories of Richard Nixon’s final days when the soon-to-resign President wandered the halls
and talked to portraits of former Presidents. The stories didn’t emerge until after Nixon left office.
One long-time GOP political consultant who – for obvious reasons – asked not to be identified said he is advising
his Republican Congressional candidates to keep their distance from Bush.
“We have to face the very real possibility that the President of the United States is loony tunes,” he says sadly. “That’s not good for my candidates, it’s not good for the party and it’s certainly not good for the country.”
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4704.shtml
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