Is George Bush going mad? Really, be honest. Is he?

Has the alcohol finally caught up with George? I'm asking this question not as a political snipe, but as something that ought to concern us all.

Watch this video.

Is George Bush losing it?


We have nearly two and half more years of George W. Bush's leadership to go, yet watching him recently makes me wonder not if he's going to make it through those days without collapsing from the mental stress of it all, but when will the collapse come?

Read this next article and think about what some of the 'rules' would indicate about a person's mental state.

2) Never fail, absent any other pertinent information, to note how "big" a foreign country is. "Wow! Brazil is big," Bush exclaimed in Brasilia on Nov. 2, 2005, a line of thought reprised at the St. Petersburg summit with his genial intuition: "Russia's a big country and you're a big country."

The last part of that sentence, a poetic personification of the bigness idea, was apparently addressed to President Hu Jintao of China. In short, big is better, with the exception of a few small countries like Israel and Britain whose conduct makes them honorary members of the big club.

3) Never miss an opportunity to hammer the United Nations, a cease-fire-pushing, mealy-mouthed, wasteful, puny, suspiciously Gallic and conspicuously un-Texan organization with a taste for temporizing with terrorists.

4) Always push freedom and democracy, especially in the Middle East, and even when the newest democracies are being bombed by your ally. As Bush said on May 24, 2005, "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

And, as he also noted on March 16, 2005, in defending Middle Eastern democracy: "There's a positive effect when you run for office. Maybe some will run for office and say, I look forward to blowing up America. I don't know, I don't know if that will be their platform or not. But it's - I don't think so. I think people who generally run for office say, vote for me, I'm looking forward to fixing your potholes."

5) When forced to travel, head home as fast as possible. It's weird out there in the world. A lot of people don't drink Diet Coke.

6) The best way to come across as a regular West Texan guy and not the blue-blooded scion of a wealthy dynasty is to keep the vernacular flowing: "Yo" and "Yeah" and "Yeah, yeah" and - woah! - you win elections time after time. Real men talk simple and talk with their mouths full.

7) Never express skepticism, doubt, nuance, ambivalence or uncertainty. None of these concessions to the complexity of the world wins elections. Winning is about remembering it's us against them. Politics is war by other means. Or rather: politics is war, at times by other means.

8) Deciders don't waste words. Nor do they shy away from an instant shoulder rub for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, when she turns her back. German newspapers may misconstrue this instinctive gesture as a "love attack"; they just don't get direct communication. Deciders make up what few words they use on the spot, without the preparation favored by East Coast eggheads, Europeans, liberals and the like for their tedious public comments.

9) Reward fealty, punish insubordination, remember terrorists are totalitarians.

10) A politician whose intelligence is underestimated is more effective, and more dangerous, than a politician whose intelligence is respected.

11) Never stray from the war on terror as paradigm. Once you've piled them all into a single sack - Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, much of the Iraqi insurgency, Chechen insurrectionists and the like - and stuck a "terrorists" label on it, you've simplified the world. Once you have war without end, you've solved the problem of the end of the Cold War, which left America without an enemy.

Sure, a price is paid, but as Bush said last year: "Well, we've made the decision to defeat the terrorists abroad so we don't have to face them here at home. And you engage terrorists abroad, it causes activity and action."

12) Action will mask a host of errors, at least for a while. Keep moving.

13) Always shore up the conservative base. An embryo sitting in a laboratory is not a spare part for stem cell research; it's a "a unique human life with inherent dignity." God speaks through such convictions, which is comforting.

14) Keep people on their toes with bamboozling statements like this one last year on the Iraqi response to America's presence: "I think we are welcomed. But it was not a peaceful welcome." Or, when sitting in Russia with world leaders: "Got something to do tonight. Go to the airport, get on the airplane and go home."

15) Swagger trumps curiosity, which only invites doubt.

16) Be nice to Tony Blair, even if he uses expressions like "thingy" and "as it were." The Great Britons have quirks.

17) Israel is always right, or about right, or near enough right, or at least more right than its enemies.

18) West Texas is a flat, hot, good place to grow up and get values.

19) Darwin is dubious.

20) Deciders are decisive, and may history - which goes on for a very long time, and long after any of us are around anyway, by which point this particular decider won't be in a position to care - be the judge.

Some of the above is pure editorial musing, but as I watched the video this morning I remembered where I had seen such signs of decline and that 'all or nothing, my way or the highway, with me or against me' approach towards life--- the patients at the alcohol treatment center around the corner from my work show the same signs of decline and act out the same way.

It always appears to me that they are carefully balancing their way, bicyclists of life, continually surprised that they are still upright, always moving, always trying to find the simplest solution to the most complex problems.

Has the alcohol finally caught up with George? I'm asking this question not as a political snipe, but as something that ought to concern us all.

In his final days in office Ronald Reagan's mind began to fail him and the likes of Poindexter and Oliver North took advantage of his less then sharpened state to get him to approve allowing terrorists to trade weapons for hostages. In his later testimony, Reagan said he didn't recall much of the circumstances and seemed surprised when confronted with his signed Presidential Findings.

The world, if anything, is an even more dangerous and complex place than it was then and we have leading us a man who seemingly every day does something or says something that indicates mental decline. What does that mean for the USA and the world?

Joe Nation