National Enquirer is right: Bush is drinking again!

[KellyM]

@F. U. Shakespeare

I agree with you, Mr. Moto – I personally am very critical of the viewpoint that alcohol use/abuse is an ‘all or nothing’ thing.

I know several people who simply cannot handle one drink without drinking more than they’d wanted to.

I know plenty of people who’ve never had more than one or two drinks in their life, and never wanted any more. When such a person decides to swear it off, it’s not a major, life-changing event.

And I know people in that vast middle ground, who enjoy it, are not dependent on it, but have to watch and moderate their intake lest they develop a dependency. The probability they’ll develop a problem is a tradeoff between their fondness for alcohol and their personal discipline. (I consider myself in this category). If they develop a problem and have to quit, it is a decision of major importance.

So I’m just taking the president’s early fondness for drink (coupled with his decision to quit completely, and his frequent references to how influential this decision was on his life) as an indication that he may be in the first category. (His honesty in admitting his history of alcohol abuse was in fact one of the things that led me to vote for him in 2000).

I went through a period in my life where I grossly abused alcohol. Following that i swore off alcohol entirely on the suspicion that I might be an alcoholic. However, what I discovered is that I wasn’t an alcoholic; I was just morbidly depressed, and drank as a coping mechanism. Having resolved the depression issue, I now, on a regular basis, have a single drink in the evening (and occasionally two or three on weekends), enough to get only slightly drunk.

I enjoy the taste of many different spirits and liquors, so the evening libation is more of an exploration of the bounty of the distiller’s art (and the mixologist’s) than it is an attempt to get drunk. We’ve also taken to using more alcohol in cooking; I have a wonderful recipe that calls for Jaegermeister, for example.

[Mr.Moto]

There you go.

Lots of people harped on Bush for not admitting that he was an alcoholic. I find it very possible that he may not consider himself one.

Of course, he might not want to state that for political reasons. But I think it could easily be the case that he regarded it as a lesser case of problem drinking, and left it at that.