Bush off the wagon?

The National Enquirer has reported that Katrina sent Bush back to the bottle. While the folks over at Democratic Underground are debating whether the report is true (personally, I think he started boozing it up well before this summer; his debate performances indicated as much), most of the commentators have missed the important point.

Why the hell did the National Enquirer report this story? Never mind whether the report is accurate. Why did it appear there?

The tabs are all owned by American Media (AMI) -- a very right-wing firm. Those of a paranoid turn of mind tend to consider it a spooked-up firm.

The tabs almost always promote Republicans and fundamentalism -- and they love to slam Democrats and Hollywood.

Take the case of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, we now know, had an extramarital dalliance with a woman named Gigi Goyette. If he were a Democrat, the tabs would have emblazoned this private sin across their headlines continually. But since he is a Republican -- and since Arnold has strong ties to AMI's fitness publications -- the Enquirer paid Goyette for exclusive rights to her story, for a book that was never written. In other words: Hush money.

It gets worse. AMI also paid a couple of grand to suppress a semi-salacious Playboy video of the Governator.

There's a long, long history of this kind of conservative bias -- a history which can be traced back to the founder of the Enquirer, Generoso Pope, who had strong and undeniable ties to both the CIA and the mob.

So why is the Enquirer publishing a negative story about Bush?

If the Volkischer Beobachter had ever published a story slamming Hitler, you would know that something very weird was afoot...