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Both the President and the Vice President have a history of serious alcohol abuse, so serious that their respective wives threatened to leave them and that has been attested to in interviews. Neither one received professional help for this problem nor submitted themselves to the most rigorous rehab available, AA. They just stopped drinking. So they never had the "overhaul" required to jump start a conscience, a thought process, a way of life, from which to start over. Turning to religion is a good support, but, it is not tough enough to change the process. Consequently, we had "dry drunks" running our country, arrested in psychosocial development at the age and level of development at which they "cured themselves". Risk taking, lack of personal accountability, paranoia, stubborness, close mindedness, denial, secrecy, arrogance, compulsive lying, all behaviors and much more, that accompany the disease remain.
It can be argued that one does not need to be an alcoholic to posess those personality aspects. True. But, they remain exaggerated and the primary defense mechanisms of a substance abuser who has not received appropriate intervention and followed a rigorous and monitored recovery. Reading the Bible and becoming a religious ideologue does not cut it. It may make the individual "feel better", feel superior and feel forgiven, but it does not truly heal.
In Rumsfield, we had a Secretary of Defense who always seemed to me to be looking for the next cocktail session. An unfair perception, perhaps, but that was my perception, given his behaviors and his pleased self concept and his remarkable comments.
The last thing any of us should have wanted in a President, especially this one, was a guy we would like to have a beer with.
I agree with many posts that the American people ultimately bear the responsibility for having "elected" this guy and his cronies TWICE! And the MSM bears as much responsibility for its' shallow endorsements and gushing endorsements of him TWICE! Yet, look at the journalists who suffered for reporting truth: Dan Rather and the woman from the NYTs, to name a few.
We are all paying the price and what a price!