National Enquirer?

Really?

Come on you guys.

I mean, when I read speculations about this sort of thing here I MIGHT raise my eyebrows a little - but really, the newspaper that Free Republic gleefully quoted in 1998 reporting that Chelsea Clinton's college dorm was being turned into a bomb-proof bunker?

Which is not to say that I am not convinced this story is absolutely true. As a recovering (by the grace of my Higher Power) drunk myself, I can see one of us ten miles away. But I'm going to wait for corroboration from a slightly more trustworthy source before I start to preach it from the rooftops as gospel.

And before you start in on me, I know you're probably kidding. I know, and I love you for it. But you're inches away from linking to a story in The Onion as if it were factual.

Not.

So, I wouldn't say we're "inches away," eh?

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of “our country’s destiny".

Well, that much is true, right? The Democrats have more-or-less admitted it...

...for the rest of us

Wherefore the National Inquirer? The newspaper referenced is the Dallas Morning News, correct?

Georgie Anne Geyer, although deeply skeptical of Bush from the time that he put up the Bush doctrine in 2002, is generally speaking a rather conservative commentator, and certainly a member in good standing of the foreign policy elite.

I wish Geyer had referenced where she got the info on the chest thumping and the determination to lock a new president into the old one's failed policies, but I don't doubt it.

As Atrios has been saying for what seems like forever, no way we (this country) is getting out of Iraq while Bush is president, except in a casket. Bush, that man of vision, won't be satisfied until the disaster he has created is sufficiently epic to preclude escaping from it.

Leah:

The main story is indeed from the Dallas Morning News.

I threw in the latest links on Bush's drinking, too. One of them is indeed from the Enquirer. Just in case WaPo and the Times were suppressing the story, only for our own good, you know.

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

check out this eerily prescient piece: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28784
Written as satire in January 2001, now in 2007 it reads like factual analysis of the past six years. Scary indeed...and another year and a half ahead of us to get even scarier.

Wherefore the National Inquirer? The newspaper referenced is the Dallas Morning News, correct?

oh, i'm not talking about the substance of the post. i'm talking about the drunky-poo part at the end.

as for the WaPo and the NYT - if i thought you guys were overconfident in THOSE sources, i wouldn't be here! :)

If Bushie isn't swilling liquor again, why didn't they sue the National Enq? They reported he was drinking again a couple of years ago.

in my mind anyway, is the fact that they were the first target of the anthrax attacks.

(Remember those? The Terrorist Attack That Dare Not Speak Its Name because it gives the lie to all the bullshit that "we haven't had a terrorist attack since 9/11 because We're Fighting Them Over There...blah blah blah.")

The Bushites are not going to sue the National Enquirer, first because of the paper's image (more or less deserved, okay) as flakes. They don't call it tabloid journalism for nothing. Secondly because it's almost impossible for a public official to sue anybody for defamation. Or Goddess knows Bill Clinton would be richer than Bill Gates today.

In fact it wouldn't surprise me at all if this story was deliberately and intentionally leaked to the Enquirer. It serves a useful immunization function--put a story out there and then every time anybody else (a more reputable publication for instance) asks about it you can sneer at them for "getting material out of the National Enquirer for godsakes" rather than answer the question on its merits.

And if that doesn't work then you put some white powder in envelopes and send them around, with a note reading "This time it's baking soda...don't you have something else more interesting to write about?" Perhaps with picture of the reporter's child on her way home from school if you really want to get the point across.

Dallas Morning News though is another matter. A shame that it was just Georgie Ann Geyer's column though. She used to be a medium-big name in such things but has faded as wingnut-welfare diaperwetters like Jonah Goldberg have been pawning their poop 'n' piddle into the pages of the press in recent times.

There's another theory about why the National Enquirer got that anthrax attack. Picture the scene, a cave in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda operatives are getting their assignments, and one is told, "Here, Walid. Take this anthrax powder and use it to attack the American media."

The name of the National Enquirer's parent company? American Media. Webpage is here: http://www.americanmediainc.com/