George Bush, Alcoholic - Part 5

Posted on Jun 30, 2006

Yahoo! health columnist Patrick Moore wraps up his five-part series on George Bush’s untreated alcoholism with a zinger: “President Bush cannot be of service to his country until he looks inward and surrenders to the fact that he is an alcoholic, with all the challenges the disease of alcoholism carries with it.”

Patrick Moore at Yahoo!:

I love George Bush.  That may seem a strange statement from someone who has spent so much time talking about the president’s failings.  But there is a reason I can see those failings - I have had them myself, as have countless other alcoholics and drug addicts.  To us, the president’s behavior is no mystery.  In George Bush’s present, we see our past.  We remember the smoking ruins that were once our lives and would never wish them upon another human being. 

We know that recovery from alcoholism has nothing to do with the time span in between drinks.  George Bush may not have taken a drink in decades but he is still an alcoholic.  Booze and drugs are the medicines that allow alcoholics to live in the world.  Deprived of that medicine, alcoholics who refuse self-examination and spiritual growth become the sorriest of creatures: the dry drunk, living without a buffer to face the grandiose lies and selfish arrogance that define their character.  That state is truly torture.

I love George Bush as only one alcoholic can love another.  Alcoholics share a special language.  In our language, confrontation is love.  In our language, pain becomes laughter.  In the language of alcoholics, brutal truth telling is being of service.
Service is the way that alcoholics remain sober, rather than just dry, and the way that alcoholics can best be of service to one another is often with a good kick in the ass. 
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