from a letter in today’s Times
“Sir, Alcoholics, like other addicts, are dishonest, manipulative and scheming. Are these not the exact qualities required to be a successful party leader these days?”
[edit]and
“Sir, Leading the Liberal Democrats as a reforming alcoholic should be no problem. After all, we have a reformed one running the world’s only superpower.”
Only if you consider clueless fuckwittery to be “a point”.
One reason that Bush is so fucked up, is that he is not in any real sense “reformed”. He is an alcoholic who has stopped drinking, but that is all.
He’s dry but not sober, white knuckling his way through life having dispensed with the one thing that made it tolerable for him. He has not addressed any of the issues that caused him to start drinking in the first place.
It’s addressing those issues, not the cessation of consumption, that defines someone in the process of “recovering” rather than continuing to suffer.
To a first approximation the emotional development of addicts ceases when they start to use. So in Bush’s case you have someone with the emotional development of a 14-year-old with his finger on the nuclear trigger.
Now personally I would consider that an issue worth taking seriously, but that view doesn’t seem to be shared by too many…
having dispensed with the one thing that made it tolerable for him.
He hasn’t so much “dispensed” with it, more substituted a simplistic Christianity for it, lifted straight from Redneck Sunday School.
I’m not sure which is worse 8-(
thing is, Bush was only able to get away with it because he had the special Get Out Of Jail Jeezus Card to play. That won’t play here because the majority of us, quite rightly, regard vehment espousal of a very simplistic form of christianity as a coded admission of mental illness, and we have no equivalent card for him to play. The LibDems cannot afford to go into the electorate with a damaged-goods leader, no matter how right or noble the doing such would be.