He's an American boy

Today we finally got to the US Embassy to register the birth of an American child. Our child, Buddy. After the calamity of trying to find our marriage papers which we needed (apparently) and requesting a last minute copy of my high school transcripts to prove I'd been in the US for a period of time, we were pretty convinced that we'd be missing something essential. Or that somehow the US Embassy records would be linked the University of Tennessee's traffic citation section and that Buddy couldn't get his passport until I'd paid off my brother's campus parking tickets. And that was before we left the house.

We were only a little bit late leaving the house, but we didn't reckon on the fact that we'd have to queue up in the rain (stupid really) or that all the sidewalks and the road in front of the embassy were completely torn up as part of a "beautification" effort. The US Embassy is one of if not the ugliest buildings in that area of London, and it takes more than a new forecourt and little bit of window cleaning to beautify that thing. If I weren't afraid that it might be construed as a terrorist threat, I'd say that only a stick of dynamite could beautify that building. But anyway, why lie? They're not beautifying - they're bolstering the security cordon, which does need doing.

Another couple nipped ahead of us in the queue, so we were a couple of minutes late for our appointment, otherwise we'd have been there on the stroke of eleven.

Now, when I say appointment, I assume that means we'll meet up at the appointed time (or slightly later since I'm punctuality challenged) and we'll discuss stuff and then we'll part having accomplished something.

When the Federal Gummint says appointment, they mean that's the earliest that you should show up to wait in their well appointed waiting room.

I digress:
A few words on the waiting room. It's oddly transatlantic. The snack machine is stocked with oreos and Hershey bars and pretzels and Reese's Cups (American snacks not usually found in British vending machines and Scottish shortbread and flapjacks (oaty bars).

The signs say "Please place your rubbish in the bins" and "Please place your trash in the bin".

There were a few toys in the corner and posters suggesting that we register to vote and a lot of families with small babies who looked they'd already been waiting a very long time. A very, very long time. And if I thought that long waits for officialdom were bad when I had sudoku and a novel to keep me occupied - well, with a little baby they're that much worse.

We also waited a long time and I had rehearsed my explanation of why I didn't have the exact dates of my various entries and exits from the US. Like my one evening trip over the border to Ciudad Juarez. I can't recall the exact date, but the buckets of Corona were mas barato.

Anyway, I don't know exactly what checks they do - but they didn't want my high school transcripts (though it was interesting to see how my memories of high school matched up with my permanent record) Nor did they want the sordid tale of the one night in Mexico and the buckets of Corona and goodness knows what else. But they took the papers away and deemed that I qualified as sufficiently American to pass my rights along to Buddy. We swore or affirmed some stuff and paid a lot of money - almost $200 for the paperwork including first passport and £15 for the new passport and social security card to be sent to Master Buddy Vol-in-Law. And then they told us that Buddy was indeed American - and with this finding he had, in fact, been American all along.

We were warned - strongly - by the Consular official not to lose this very important piece of paper. And we tried, very hard, to give him a look like "Who us? Do we look like the kind of people who would lose such a thing?"

And one day, son you could be President

Or maybe not. I had heard that if you got this retroactive citizenship certificate, that meant that your child wouldn't be denied the opportunity to sit behind the desk at the Oval Office just because that American was foolish enough to be born on foreign soil. On our explanatory paperwork that accompanies the certificate of a Consular Report of a Birth Abroad that proves that Buddy was always American is this nifty little paragraph:

Running for President or for Congress
Legal scholars disagree whether someone born overseas to a US parent or parents is considered a "natural born Citizen" one of the Constitutional requirements to become President of the United States. The courts have never made any definitive ruling on this section of the Constitution. One US Senator introduced a bill in October 2004, however, to clarify what this term actually means. If this bill becomes law, your child would definitively be considered a "natural born Citizen" of the US and therefore could run for the White House. At ay rate, as an American citizen your child can indeed run for Congress, even though born overseas,....

and then the kicker

...but he/she would still have to meet the Constitutional residency and age requirements to run for the House or Senate.

So no matter how well your little tot can press the flesh and work the room and raise money and no matter how bright you think their political future ought to be they still have to wait til they're way past kindergarten.

But I guess the point is, it's never actually been tested by the courts. Anyway, I wouldn't want Buddy to be President. I wouldn't want those pesky reporters looking into Mommy's colorful past. And besides, who would want to vote for a guy who said:

My fellow Americans, I end tonight where it all began for me- I still believe in a place called Tooting.


Buddy's first passport pictures

London remembers the fallen of War

Today I went up to Westminster Abbey to see the Field of Remembrance.


Today is Remembrance Sunday, and the area around Westminster was very busy with people paying their respects.

The entrance to the Field of Remembrance.


The field is divided into plots, each dedicated to a different Regiment. One section is dedicated to the fallen of the US Armed Services.

The American section


A few years ago when I visited the Field of Remembrance in the middle of a weekday I came across two older English gentlemen standing in front of American section. One of them holding a wreath asked me if I were American, and I replied I was. He told me he was a young boy during the war and a number of soldiers from Arkansas were stationed near where he lived. He said that they were very good to him, generous with their time and their food. When they were shipped to Europe they took heavy casualties and he leaves a wreath in their honor every year. (For this, Bill Clinton thanked him when he was Governor of Arkansas). He said he never lays the wreath himself, but always asks an American to do it for him and there's always one there when he arrives. He asked me if I would lay the wreath, and I told him I would be honored to do so. The wreath in this photo is dedicated to the fallen soldiers of Arkansas.

The other man who was standing there was the 'owner' of the plot. Each plot is paid for (money to charity) and if you don't pay for your plot you don't get a plot. Someone else in the waiting list for plots gets it instead and it will be years if ever before you get another one. He has been paying for the US Armed Services plot for years and for around the same length of time, he has been trying to get the US Embassy to pay for the plot. But there's a problem. Under US law, there can be no war memorials to American soldiers unless it's on land owned by the US government. Of course, this monument is transitory, it's only up for about two weeks a year, and then it comes down again. If something happens to this man (whose name, I have sadly lost) that means no more plot for the fallen of America at Westminster Abbey. I'd like to see an exception to this law.

Here are the crosses I left in the American section.

One for an old war and the men who died while serving with my grandfather. And one for a current war and the fallen of the 278th.

Then I walked down to the Cenotaph - the tomb of the unknown soldier - which the center of Remembrance Sunday ceremonies.


I decided not to get back on the Tube at Westminster, but walked down Victoria Embankment by the River Thames. I'm glad I did. There's a new monument there to the Battle of Britain. "Never in human history have so many owed so much to so few" W. Churchill. It's kind of an unusual monument, full of detail, depicting civilians, air raid wardens, pilots, soldiers, munitions factory workers. It's a stark reminder of what it must have been like in London during the blitz.

An air raid warden shocked by what he sees:


Another detail: Civilians scanning the sky for terror.


Now when we look for terror we scan the faces of our fellow passengers.

Finally, here's a picture of a Women's Auxilliary veteran leaving her poppy on the Battle of Britain memorial.

One good thing about a McCain presidency

There would be one good thing about a McCain presidency. It would, once and for all, establish the right of my son to seek and hold the highest office in the land (the American land, that is). From an article in Washington Post:

The Senate has unanimously declared John McCain a natural-born citizen, eligible to be president of the United States.

That is the good news for the presumptive Republican nominee, who was born nearly 72 years ago in a military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, then under U.S. jurisdiction. The bad news is that the nonbinding Senate resolution passed Wednesday night is simply an opinion that has little bearing on an arcane constitutional debate that has preoccupied legal scholars for many weeks.

Article II of the Constitution states that "no person except a natural born citizen . . . shall be eligible to the office of president."

Of course, Buddy didn't need a Congressional order to be declared a natural born citizen. We've got a piece of paper from the US Embassy to prove that he's an American boy. But the founders never specified what a natural born citizen really is and it's never come up, so it's never been tested by the courts.

But it will be soon, apparently there are three pending law suits disputing McCain's eligibility.

But Sarah H. Duggin, an associate law professor at Catholic University who has studied the "natural born" issue in detail, said the question is "not so simple." While she said McCain would probably prevail in a determined legal challenge to his eligibility to be president, she added that the matter can be fully resolved only by a constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court decision.

"The Constitution is ambiguous," Duggin said. "The McCain side has some really good arguments, but ultimately there has never been any real resolution of this issue. Congress cannot legislatively change the meaning of the Constitution.

And apparently, McCain's situation is further complicated because his birth isn't recorded in the consular records (as it should have been).

As I've stated before, I'd rather eat a razor blade than vote for McCain, but I really hope he's eligible to run.




As American as apple pie or baseball

_______
Hat tip: Kleinheider from Post Politics

Granddad blogging: Under fire

Last week my grandfather sees his first Germans at the front, and then just as he got there pulled back to a relief area. This week they train hard for a river-crossing that takes a Tennessee boy by surprise and come under fire.

They’d carried us on back to a rest area then issued dry clothes and dry shoes and put us through a chow line and fed us and put us in barns in a French village and in these barns we got up in the hayloft and went to sleep. We slept that night and the next morning we fell out to breakfast. And they said “Alright, we’re gonna have a little exercize.”

So after all that mess they started us doing close order drill, just like we’d done in England and like we’d done in Camp Blandon, Florida. And we were sorta unhappy about that. But that didn’t last for long, til they told us we were gonna have to go across a river and attack the Germans. Well a river was a great big body of water to me, I didn’t know what it was. But they carried us out to a little old lake and they had some pontoon boats on it and we would run down and get in those pontoon boats and row across the “river” – the lake and then run up the hill on the other side and then come back and do it over and over. And I don’t know how many times we crossed that little old body of water, and then one morning they said “We’re gonna cross that river tomorrow and attack the Germans.”

Well, here we go. ‘Bout midnight they get us up and load us on the trucks. And about two o’clock we get on to this river. And there are the pontoon boats piled up over there, but we look at the little old river – what they called a river looked like a creek to me. And there was a log out across it, and we never did use the pontoon boats we just walked across these logs.

We got over across in this bottom on the other side and I never knew whether it was German artillery or American artillery or whether it was landmines or what, but the whole world – it seemed to me like – exploded everywhere. And they said run, run, run, run, run, run forward.

We didn’t know what else to do, so that’s what we did and we ran up to pine woods, great big old pine trees and then the shells started falling on the pine woods and they were using proximity shells that didn’t explode until they got so close to the ground or so close to an object. And they were gettin’ so close the top of these pine trees and exploding. So there were splinters and wood and stuff just falling all over us from everywhere. A few people got a few splinters in them.

And I heard them calling on the radio to stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. We had gone further and faster than we were supposed to, because we didn’t have any opposition. And we had run under our own artillery. Well, they finally got that stopped. And I guess it must have been about 10 o’clock in the morning, and I look around and the next thing I saw everybody was breaking their old K rations out and eating. I later found out that when you were under attack or you were in combat that one of the things that you did for some reason it made you want to eat. And that’s what we did.

[What's a K Ration?]

A K ration is a thing that in a box about the size of a cracker jack box. And it has enough food packed in it to feed one person three meals. It has a little canned ham, a little cheese, a few crackers a little hard candy package or two of cigarettes, some lemonade some coffee, and just a bunch of junk like that. And it’s very concentrated food and it doesn’t have any taste, but it has a lot of nutritional value and when you’re going in combat they issue that stuff. When they issue it to you, you can bet your bottom dollar that you’re fixin’ to go in combat.

Well, the next thing we get somewhere – I don’t know where we are – and they say we’ve got to run these Germans fast, we can’t let ‘em stop. Take off down the road, and we took a little Mexican sergeant and another old boy that came in about the same time that I did – the only thing I remember about him was that one of his hands was in bad shape and I wondered why in the world they took him in and on top of that they gave him a B A R to carry and they had this little Mexican sergeant and this boy and myself – we were the point – out in front of everybody and everything.

We sauntered down the road not knowing what was up ahead or what wasn’t up ahead. There was a thicket out in front of us and when we got to that thicket all of a sudden that thicket wasn’t there anymore. It was a camoflaged false front and it fell over and fell down and there was a great big old German 88 gun that they were shootin’ just like a rifle at us.

And they started on the back end of our line and were comin’ up towards the front and they finally got to us and the shell that came in – I don’t know how close it was to us but this boy with the B A R – it killed him and this little Mexican who was experienced – he knew what was gonna happen – he had crawled in a culvert and got his head up in it just as far as he could and it just tore his back all to pieces. I presumed he was killed, but he wasn’t ‘cause I saw him later. It didn’t touch me.

And then shortly after our mortar section began dropping mortars on this 88 up there and they blew it up and took off ‘cause it was just a holding action that they had to slow us down to keep us from getting somewhere – I don’t know where. And then they ran us again, run, run, run, catch, catch, catch.

And we went down through a valley and there were dead Germans laying all down this road and Germans laying there crying for help and crying for water and this that and the other. And we didn’t dare touch ‘em, offer to help ‘em, or give ‘em water or anything else because we’d been told over and over that there were people that were booby trapped and if we tried to help ‘em or do anything for them we’d probably get blowed up ourselves. So we just had to look at ‘em and move on.

And then we got somewhere, way across the valley, we could see a bunch of Germans and we started shooting at them with our rifles and they started running and I don’t know where they went. And I don’t know finally where we stopped, but we stopped somewhere and we keep going. Run, run, run, run, run, stop, stop, stop. And try to catch up with the Germans. And I guess that was the thing to do, I don’t know.

________
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Warm life

A couple of weeks ago our refrigerator seemed not to be cooling so well. And by the following morning, it was clear it wasn't working. The light was on, but no one was home. Disappointing, given that it wasn't that old - but old enough to be out of warranty. It certainly lived up to its brand name. Hotpoint.

Since we'd ordered that fridge, the cooling market has moved on. You can either buy really short 'under the counter' fridges or tall 'American' style fridges. But nothing that fit into the space we had. Or not much. Only a premium brand German fridge - Liebherr - a company which seems to have entered the domestic market only recently from the industrial market and a scarily cheap one.

We decided to go for the German one, but were told that we'd have to wait for while as it had to be special ordered from the manufacturer. Disappointing. I could have probably lived without a refrigeration as I can happily live without milk, but the husband and the boy need their milk. So we bought a tiny little student fridge and waited patiently.

We bought our fridge from the Co-op and they said they had it in much quicker than we expected and we'd be informed of our delivery slot on Friday evening for a Saturday delivery. Normally, I'd expect to pay extra for a weekend delivery, but it was free. On Friday evening, the Vol-in-Law received a text that the fridge would arrive between 9:45 and 11:45, but that was 'just a guess'. I thought this was an interesting way of managing customer expectations. But there was a knock on the door a few minutes before 10. The old fridge was gone and the new one in place by 10 past.

The boy was excited by the new fridge, especially after a trip to the grocery store.

Can I get some service?

There are some issues that I have to admit I don't care about anymore. Issues that I felt quite strongly about at one point, but which have now - like the sands through the hour glass - passed me by.

For example:

Pre-18 voting. It burned me up that I turned 18 in a general election year (May), but was unable to vote in the primary. I really wanted to vote for Al Gore. But I didn't get my chance, since that other fellow - who was it? - some guy from Massachusetts got the nomination instead. Boy, did that turn out good.

Policy prescription: Those eligible to vote in the November general election shall be able to vote in their respective state's primary.

How much do I care about this policy now? Not at all.

I kinda got over my disappointment about getting to cast my ballot for Al in 1988. After all, I got another shot in 2000. Sadly, and to my eternal shame, I actually didn't bother to return my expat ballot that year. I thought Al would be a sure thing in our mutual home state of Tennessee. Nope. And without Tennessee, Florida really mattered. Boy, did that turn out good.

But there was one age based policy that took me years to get over. The drinking age. Just about the time that I could start to imagine turning 18*, states were one by one succumbing to the threat of removal of Federal Highways Matching funds and raising their drinking age. But I thank those legislators. For without their meddling, I might have been a law abiding citizen instead of the scofflaw you know today. 'Cause - get real - I wasn't not gonna drink at 18. Thank you for freeing me from any sense of obligation to obeying your petty, arbitrary rules and poorly enforced misdemeanor laws.

Policy prescription: Drinking age of 18 or 19. If you're worried about deaths on the highways, throw in tougher penalties for drunk driving, including revocation of driving license until 21 for anyone registering any blood alcohol content while in charge of a moving vehicle.

How much do I care about this policy now? Well, the threat of prosecution still stings, and I do think it's a bit silly to wait 'til 21 - but really I don't care that much. And I have to admit to a certain kind of schadenfreude - if I had to suffer, so should you.

But I still thought it was interesting when Bob Krumm, Tennessee blogger and political aspirant, suggested lowering the drinking age.

One of the things, that we used to say in our salad days was "Over in Europe, you can drink at 18. Over in Europe, they let children drink a little and then it's not that big of a deal when you get older and people don't get so drunk."

Well, I'm over in Europe now (sadly having moved here well after I turned 21). And that all seems to be true. Well, once you get onto the Continent anyway. The legal age in the UK is 18. And for many years, British people liked to have a go at me for stupid, puritanical American drinking laws (talk about blaming the victim), usually in drunken conversations down the pub.

But kids are certainly able to obtain alcohol from a much younger age (though there has been more emphasis on proof of age lately). And sadly, alcohol is probably not handled well in the Anglo-Saxon family. These kids get stupid drunk and cause problems. They get stupid drunk at 18, too. In fact, the British are pretty well known for maintaining their ability to get stupid drunk well into their majority.

But, now - and rather ironically - folks in the UK are starting to think about raising the drinking age to 21. Well known, think tanks are suggesting a review of the minimum drinking age.


And what do I think about raising the drinking age? Well, I've been there done that and I don't think it makes much difference.

David Poley, chief executive of the Portman Group, said: "What we really need to do is change the drinking culture through education rather than making drinking a social taboo by raising the legal drinking age."

Sensible talk from the Portman Group (an alcohol manufacturers' lobby - BTW), but the real tough thing is finding the policy prescription that achieves that aim.

_______
* bless the City of New Orleans, which kept their 18 limit at the time I was 18. Maybe I shoulda gone to Tulane.

Happy Run-up-to-Christmas Day

By 4pm yesterday, I had bought no Halloween candy. Last year, we got no trick or treaters and I had to bring the candy in to my work (and eat a fair bit of it myself). But in a last minute glow of Horror Holiday nostalgia I rushed to the local grocery store to find the shelves picked nearly bare. I managed to find some Werther's originals and some kind of strange candy stick thing in boxes, probably the politically correct offspring of candy cigarettes.

I also checked the "seasonal aisle" to see if I could find anything to top up Cletus's outfit. Nope. Where accessories had been reasonably well stocked only days before, there were only a few vials of fake blood and some tatty witches hats. An Arabic speaking father and daughter where tearing through the remnants in search of costuming for a little boy and they sought my help. I pointed to some novelty skull spectacles in a child's size and he seemed happy enough with that, but the distressed daughter was pointing to the spot where £1.50 ($3) capes used to sit.

On the way home I noticed two jack-o-lanterns on my street. Two more than I had ever spotted before. And it warmed the cockles of my halloween heart.

We had two sets of trick-or-treaters - though I did have to go out for a while during peak trick-or-treating time, so we might have had more. At any rate, I did give away some candy - although we do have an awful lot of Werther's original.

Anyway, despite much sneering for many years by the English about this "American" holiday, they finally seem to be taking to it. I've always wondered why folks haven't taken to it more - I mean c'mon, dressing up and free candy. What's not to like? Who doesn't have room on their calendar for an extra fun holiday?

-0-

And as we all know, Halloween is no longer All Saint's Eve, but the Run-up-to-Christmas eve. And in recent years it marks the beginning of the "War on Christmas", too. And here's the first story in the gruesome advent calendar. Because this story appears in The Daily Mail - it's hard to tell exactly what the truth is. They distort everything to make it "political correctness gone mad" - I know this because this happened to a project I worked on.

But it appears that a favorite Labour think-tank, the IPPR is about to issue a report calling on us to "downgrade" Christmas. Leaked recommendations include:

"If we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas - and it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life even if we wanted to - then public organisations should mark other religious festivals too. We can no longer define ourselves as a Christian nation, nor an especially religious one in any sense.

Britain may no longer be particularly religious, but this country is still ethnically and culturally Christian to a large degree. And folks still love their Christmas.

I'm all for celebrating other holidays - as long as they're about fun and feasting and not scourging and fasting. But I don't see why we need to downgrade any existing holidays to do so.

-0-

Slight digression:

Another finding of the IPPR report was that the state should make a bigger deal of the birth registration.

The system in which parents are required to register a new baby at a register office is dismissed as "purely bureaucratic". The occasion should be transformed into a "public rite", using citizenship ceremonies for immigrants as a model, the report says. "Parents, their friends and family and the state [would] agree to work in partnership to support and bring up their child."

Hell, NO! I'm not working in partnership with the state to bring up my child.

And anyway, this shows a leaning toward a particular ethno-religious tradition - infant baptism. I guess there are parallels with some other religions, too - the Bris for Jewish boys and I think there's some kind of thanksgiving sacrifice traditional made for Muslim children (two lambs for a boy, one for a girl, if I recall correctly). But in my religious tradition - hard core Protestantism - we don't hold with such things.

And besides, the report authors (two men) have clearly never had a c-section. You have to register the birth within six weeks - but at that point I couldn't even get myself down to the town hall never mind organise some stupid statist ceremony.

Dead man's corner

On our tour of Normandy, if yesterday was "Saving Private Ryan" today is "Band of Brothers". Our first stop was the Dead Man's Corner museum in St Come du Mont. It's in a house that was once German para headquarters then became US para headquarters, a good place because it's positioned overlooking a cross-roads. The museum itself was nothing much, but it did feature Easy Company memoribilia (as well as a gift shop full of both genuine and replica militaria). The town itself is featured in a PC game "Brothers in Arms" - and the Vol-in-Law was finally able to crouch in person behind walls that previously he had only quaked beneath virtually. We met a fellow who appeared to be at least a bit eccentric - though it's hrd to tell when you can only understand 1 in 10 of the words he was saying. His only English was the opening lines of the Star Spangled Banner. He asked us our nationality - and couldn't have cared less about the ViL's "Anglais", but was genuinely enthusiastic about my "Americaine". It's been a while since that has happened to me in Europe. Apparently the town had received the genrosity of an American woman whose son had fought there (and lived - as far as I understand). It was she who taught him the words of the American national anthem when he was a small boy.
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Granddad blogging: Into Germany

This week in granddad blogging, they make the push into Germany, he witnesses looting and they hole up.

Finally, we got in to Strausberg. Got through there then we start for Colmar and we didn’t know anything about where Colmar was or where it wasn’t or anything else.

And by the way we crossed from France into Germany at Zweibrucken that was in the industrial part of Germany and the thing I remember about that was when we got there in daylight it was the first time any of the American troops in this particular outfit had ever been in Germany and they went crazy. They tore up, they smashed up, they did everything. They went up in the second and third story of the apartments and threw furniture out the windows and knocked clocks and vases and anything that there was left in the house down and destroyed and just absolutely went wild. And that went on for a while til finally the higher-ups came in with enough MPs to make 'em quit and move out and stop that crazy destruction.

Then sometime during the fighting they moved us toward Colmar and this was the place that we were going to hold out and we didn’t know what we were going to hold for. But that’s where we were anyway and it was sort of a rough place to be, ‘cause we were laying up on a hill and looking down into Colmar and if you stuck your head out of your hole in the daytime the Germans would drop shells on you. So you had to lay in those holes all day long til it got dark, and then at night you had get out and bring water up and stretch barbed wire and dig your hole a little deeper and cover it over with stuff the keep the shells going in if they came.

[What time of year was this? January?]

Yeah, January. It’s cold. The snow was several feet deep. But it is cold. And we stayed there thirty-some days and I never took my clothes off. I never shaved. I never had a bath. You just stayed in those holes that’s all there was to it. And you patrolled at night.

And it was dangerous patrolling because the Americans had listening posts down in front of us. Those boys were awful nervous. When they’d hear a racket, if you didn’t identify yourself awful quickly you’d get shot. And then the Germans they were lookin’ to shoot you also. It was mean runnin’ patrols down through there.

People would get killed, Germans in particular. We’d see an old German soldier layin’ there face up when you go out on a patrol one night. The next night you’d go out and he’d be layin’ face down. Somebody’d rolled him over and searched the pockets and everything to see what they could find. And then they’d roll him back the other way. Roll him out, roll him over. I never would touch one of ‘em. But a lot of ‘em did. They were looking for anything and everything at the time.

___

Not recorded in these tapes, but something my grandfather told me was that at one point in the war he was holed up with somebody from - I believe - New Jersey, whom he did not care for at all. I believe it must have been during this time that he describes above. He told me that they had very little to eat and none of it hot food. But the Germans were announcing through loud speakers that they had hot soup, and all the Americans need do for it was surrender. The boy from New Jersey wanted some hot soup and my grandfather wanted him out of the hole, but didn't think that fellow from New Jersey any good and didn't think it would do him or the rest of the Americans any good to have that boy down there telling about their position.
___

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Cats in cages: a little local history

Yesterday we took another little stroll in the cemetery near our house. The Vol-in-Law wanted to check out a memorial that we hadn't looked at before. It was a memorial to WWII dead. There are several such memorials in the cemetery including a rather large one to civilian dead from the area.

The one we looked at was for military and home guard personnel the majority of whom appeared to have been killed locally. There was a little park bench near the memorial and an older man was sitting on it in what appeared to be a reflective mood.

He started talking to us and he was a font of local knowledge. He had been a young boy during the War and his parents and grandparents had been from Tooting. He told us where all the foreign troops (Polish, free French and American) had been stationed and where they had kept the German and Italian prisoners of war. He told us where various large rockets had struck within the borough killing people sheltering in the Underground or watching films.

He told us about the Granada in Tooting, now a bingo hall but then a cinema and variety hall frequented by locals and American servicemen and how even Lord Haw-Haw had talked about the Granada on his famous pro-Nazi propaganda broadcasts. (Lord Haw-Haw was the last person convicted of treason in the UK).

None of this was surprising to me, I'd heard stories like this before - though it was good to hear about them in a local context. But he did tell us something that neither I nor the Vol-in-Law had heard of before: the mass slaughter of pets.

He told us that many of the cats and dogs had gone mad from the constant bombing (no surprise he said as it had driven many people round the bend, too). The Borough of Wandsworth was peppered with bombs and rockets and apparently it caused many people's pets to go crazy and attack people. He remembers being warned by his mother not to touch any of the stray animals, for fear that they would hurt him. The UK has been declared rabies free for a long time, but I'm not sure if there were any cases of rabies during that time.

He didn't say so, but I imagine that many of these pets were abandoned because their owners were dead, wounded, drafted or evacuated. The cats and dogs were hungry, crazy and scared. When looking around the Internet this morning, I found a children’s resource pack called Dogs in War which said that some people argued for all pets to be put down, because food was scare for humans. This man told us the animals were rounded up and put down. He said that on one of the local commons, officials erected a giant cage that they filled with cats waiting to be put down. I have quite an image of the cage filled with cats, like a kitty concentration camp.

But on the upside – here’s a story about two London cats, Faith and Panda, who survived a direct hit on their home in a church and were declared local heroes.

t-8: Free birth!

Technically, I missed a countdown post yesterday, but since I'm up at 5am and it's not fully light yet, we'll just count this as yesterday.

Regular readers will know that I've been scanning in old photos. Here's one of my previous cat.



She died about two and a half years ago, when she was roughly six years old. She had mouth cancer. Probably too much Redman. I kept telling her to cut back.

Anyway, we got this cat because we thought she was a boy. We wanted a boy cat. This kitty had the cutest little fluffy kitten testicles - so neither we nor the crazy German cat shelter woman who gave us this cat suspected that she was anything other than male.

We'd neutered our previous cat a bit too young and stunted his growth, so we held off giving this cat the snip until he started displaying signs of sexual maturity. This didn't happen and it didn't happen. We were quite poor and the cat was quite healthy, so we never took her to the vet.

Then "he" came on heat at about 18 months. We felt pretty stupid. Kitty was pregnant. We pretended it was planned.

-0-

Just like in human pregnancies, people like to offer advice during cat pregnancies, too. Everyone kept telling me that the cat would sneak off and have her kittens and I wouldn't know about it until I noticed she was missing. And then that I should leave the kittens alone and that she wouldn't want me around.

I knew this was the conventional wisdom.

But one night, I was playing Tetris while the Vol-in-Law was off doing his weekend warrior stuff (he was in the Territorial Army at the time) and she kept pestering me. Well, I was pretty annoyed with her pestering because I was doing really, really well at the Tetris. I was on a roll. I was set to break my old record by a mile. All the little pieces were falling into place. I was in the zone.

But the cat wouldn't stop. And I looked up from the screen to find that there was a kitten head emerging from her rear. I paused the Tetris. I didn't really know what to do. But as a smoker, I was sure that my next step involved a cigarette. So, I went downstairs to grab a smoke (I didn't smoke in the house)

She followed me.

Turns out she wanted a birth attendant. So I sat with her and reassured her and helped her break the amniotic sack and encouraged her to lick her first little kitten into breathing. (She was hopeless as a kitty mother.) And then I sat with her for the next one and the Vol-in-Law came home and we both were with her for the third kitten. And she let us watch the whole thing and help her.

And then, it was after midnight, and it seemed to be over. I called VolMom - as it was her birthday - to wish her happy returns of the day and to inform her that she had predicted correctly and the kittens were born on her birthday and then we went to bed. There was another kitten, unbeknownst to me, but he was dead when I found him in the morning.

We kept one of the kittens - here's Other Cat on her 7th birthday:



-0-

Although my cat did not choose an unassisted delivery, I mention all this because I've just been reading about the Free Birth movement in The Guardian. Women who choose to labor and give birth completely alone (see the Unassisted Childbirth website). Some of the people who give birth on their own do so because they're afraid of being pushed into interventions they don't want. Some do so because they're probably just freaky.

To me, giving birth is as personal as having sex," says Sarah, 24, from Essex. "You don't want someone else sitting there watching you." Sarah chose to "freebirth" her first child, now two, at home.

Helloooo, you didn't pregnant all on your own did you? There probably was somebody else in the room, I reckon.

I'm pretty private and I don't really like other people touching me. I've never enjoyed back rubs from friends, for example. And there may well be times during labor that I want some private time and I need to make sure I ask for it. I also am very clear that I don't want midwives yelling at me telling me what to do (I'm quite contrarian - so screaming Push! at me might just slow things down). But birthing alone sounds unnecessarily dangerous - and I'm not sure whether to blame slightly addled headed free-birthers or the medical establishment who can't deal with women who need a bit more space. Apparently some of this is a reaction to the obstetrical insistence on doing things their way...

Although it is never going to be a majority movement, the issue of the over-medicalisation of birth is pushing freebirth on to the mainstream agenda in the US. A slogan war has broken out, with natural birth websites selling T-shirts which read "Pizza boys deliver. Women birth", while the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists gave out bumper stickers at a meeting last year, bearing the opposite message: "Home delivery is for pizza" (From The Guardian)

Well, we're planning a home birth - and depending on length and how hungry folks are - we may opt for home delivery, too.

8 days til baby Cletus and a large veggie and prosciutto pizza

UPDATE: A friend of mine posts on Alabama caving to the medical lobby and disallowing midwifery- it's stuff like this that pushes women of a certain disposition into unassisted childbirth.

Death of a president

Now, I realise that you all won't be able to watch Death of a President in your American movie theaters. Knoxville-based Regal Cinemas, for one, has decided it won't be showing the film in its cinemas.

OK, CE Petro of Thoughts of an Average Woman, decries this move, but says...

While I personally don't go to movie theaters (I can't sit still that long), I will buy the DVD when it comes out. Perhaps Newmarket should seriously consider distributing to Independent cinema's since the big boy (Regal) doesn't want to play.

I say, save your money.

When I first heard about this film I thought it was pretty effin' cheeky to be making a film about assasinating a sitting president and using his real image. You know, I don't like this president, but he is still the president of the US. Killing an elected leader is insulting all of us and robbing us of our democratic rights (even if I think that Republican machine politics already did that, but that's another story).

I wasn't alone in my negative reaction - and I can well imagine how others - such as those who actually like President Bush - may have felt. The British press was like "What's wrong with you Americans? Can't you take a joke. It's just fiction."

Ha. Ha. Ha. No, actually it's not funny, it's not big and it's not clever.

But anyway, the film was much hyped here and was shown on cable television last night. (And frankly, cable tv is exactly where this kind of thing belongs). This was the front cover of the free evening paper I picked up on my way home yesterday:


Personally, I can't imagine why anyone ever thought of showing this in a cinema in the first place.

Yes, the real images of Bush and the images of the actors for the film were seamlessly and effectively intertwined (mostly). But I didn't get the feeling that the writers really understood Bush and what makes him tick as they had his speechwriter and protection officer describing intimate moments with the president. For example his speechwriter said "when he shook your hand you felt you were the only person in the world". I'm sure that shaking hands with the president of the US is a pretty electrifying experience, but I don't think anyone's ever described shaking hands with Bush that way. Clinton, yes. Bush, no.

There was quite a long lead up to the assasination itself, lots of protesting on the streets of Chicago. Lots of heavy-handed foreshadowing which was completely uneccessary - since you knew what was going to happen. Then Bush was shot, died in surgery and the manhunt was on.

The film is meant to be about how killing the president would result in a rush to judgement, in the further trampling of civil liberties and some bad consequences for some completely innocent Muslims and Middle Eastern countries. Well, maybe. And how Dick Cheney uses this incident to further his already-cooking nefarious plan against the Syrians. I have to admit I wouldn't put it past him. But c'mon.

I'd love to tell you how it ended, but I'm afraid I fell asleep just after the "Patriot Act 3" was passed by Congress in an Emergency session. The Vol-in-Law stayed awake, and when I opened my eyes and asked him what happened he just said "Stupid shaggy dog story."

So I don't know who did it, but it wasn't the Syrian guy. The Syrian guy who accidentally and totally innocently ended up in an al Qaeda training camp - which contributed to the jury thinking that he had done it. I'm sure we've all booked into holidays that didn't quite live up to our expectations, but when you sign up to go to a training camp in Afghanistan - and your travel plans include sneaking over the border from Pakistan - you have to think "this isn't going to be some kind of self-esteem and leadership course I'm going on."

Anyway, my verdict has gotta be a big thumbs down - maybe the Vol-in-Law who saw the whole thing will add his opinion.

_______

And here are the opinions of others who've seen it

if all the constantly outraged christian righteous wingnuts totally don’t dig Death of a President, why don’t they make a film about the assassination of Tony Blair? watch it before y’all judge it, assholes. and yes we know — Michael Moore is fat.

-Dateline: Bristol

Event television, that's how they describe stuff like Death of a President. And even if "they" don't in this particular case, I would.
-snip-
What is key, though, is how scary are the prospects of what would happen in such a situation. The erosion of personal liberties in the post-9/11 world fully informs this film, and it takes but the smallest of leaps in imagination to guess what type of shit would be acceptable after the assassination of a president in the third millennium.

Stirring stuff, this. I give it 68 out of 100.

- A blog about nowt

Last night I joined the millions of other pommies in watching the much hyped Channel 4 documentry entitled “Death of a President“.
-snip-

I’m not a big fan of Mr. Bush, but I do sympathise with him a bit. There are a lot of people out there that hate his guts and blame him for a lot of things which make this assassination quite foreseeable.

Imagine a documentry made about the, God forbid, assassination of Nelson Mandela. Would that be broadcasted in South Africa? I think not.

-Mark's Digital Farm

And here's the last one, I'll quote - and the one that I'd agree with most

From the start it licks along at a good pace, using cleverly edited archive footage to show the Presidential convoy coming under an abortive attack, then Bush's speech at the Sheraton hotel in Chicago, then his assassination on leaving.

Alas, after the shooting it slowly degenerates into the sort of second-rate American made-for-TV movie you'll find gracing the BBC in the early hours. As wooden talking heads try to sound spontaneous the film becomes bogged down in mealy-mouthed soul-searching dialogue. Prior to that this had been a film you could imagine being made in the aftermath of an assassination. But when was the last time you saw the assassin's lawyer give a lengthy interview to one of these things?

The moment the hand-wringing starts, this production becomes tedious, but that doesn't devalue the thundering opening. After watching this I can see how the President might come to be assassinated, and can picture the events as they might happen. I am entirely unconvinced, however, that - were I an assassin myself - this would be the final piece in the jigsaw for me to now go and bump off the Leader of the Free World.

-Dayorama

Passport to Pimlico

Cletus - the little South Londoner - made his first ever trip North of the River. I took him up to the RHS Flower Show yesterday in his little carrier. Our own Sweet William was the hit of the show.

I don't know if American readers know about Alan Titchmarsh - perhaps one of his gardening makeover show appears on BBC America or Home and Garden. If you're not familiar with Mr Titchmarsh, let's just say he runs a gardening empire. He appears on numerous gardening shows, he is one of the prime time television presenters for the Chelsea Flower Show (yes, there's a week of television coverage for the show), he's written loads on gardening and he's behind a web based nursery Crocus. No doubt he has his very green fingers in other mud pies, too.

At any rate, several people stopped me while at the show to complement me on charming Cletus and to predict that he'd be the next Alan Titchmarsh. I was also advised, by more than one person, that I should drill the boy in the Latin names of the plants. (I'd have to brush up on my own Latin first.) VolMom's old next door neighbors, who were extension agents or worked for the TWRA or some such, used to drill their daughters in the latin names of the flora particularly wildflowers some of them so wild they were weeds in my book. I was always impressed by this ability - so maybe Cletus will have a little Acer palmatum in his future.

-0-

Despite the fact that there is no more room in my garden, I love going to the shows to spot the next horticultural trends. Volunteer gardeners will be excited to learn that orange is in. There were some fabulous crocosmias and echinaceas in stunning bright, golden orange. If I had more room and more sun - I would have bought. I need to get a reliable pocket sized camera to take around with me, too. It's too hard managing baby and photos, sometimes. But those oranges were spectacular.

The Cowboy Knight

The Cowboy Knight, originally uploaded by London looks.

It's the nursery's Christmas party today, and they demanded that the children arrive in 'fancy dress' (American translation: costume). I knew I had two costumes I could pull together at short notice - cowboy and knight. I could have done pirate,too - but that would have taken ironing - so that was immediately ruled out.

I asked the boy "Do you want to be a cowboy or a knight?"

His response: A cowboy knight.

Well, of course.

Never mind that he looks a bit like he's headed to a costume ball of a white supremacy group raising money for 2nd Amendment rights protection, I'm sure it will be a lovely Christmas party.

talkin expat trash

This week I'd like to highlight the blog of a fellow American expat, Chris Della Vedova. His blog is pretty, it has music clips and interesting posts about science and politics and sports and stuff.

We have some other things in common besides our nationality. He has a brand new baby boy, too. He's also a recovering smoker. He thinks Steve Earle isn't quite so good since he got so politically bitter. I don't know for sure, but I bet he thinks the SEC is the toughest football conference in the nation. Anyway, that's where his heart is.

And that's where the similarities end. You see last week he combed the baby clothing aisles of Oxford (England, not Mississippi) for suitable team colors for his little Zach. But instead of choosing a beautiful golden orange, he chose red and black.

He's raising that kid to support Georgia. And to my mind, that's just bad parenting.

Hey Chris, I hope the sound of your bitter wailing come Saturday night when Tennessee woops your Dawgs doesn't wake up your baby.

UPDATE: I'm challenged, and I accept.

Ratcheting up

Goodness the rhetoric is strengthening in advance of the UT-Georgia game. This expat blogger declares a feud. Well, he might be from the swamps of North Florida, but he's rightly reckoned that folks from the hills can be dangerous, especially when challenged.

And the challenge is getting mean - strong talk from a team with a junkyard mutt as a mascot.

There were strange folk up in the hills, you see - moonshiners, hillbillies, people who didn’t understand the principles of genetics. If you looked at them wrong they would start a feud with you and never rest until your entire family was hunted down. Well, turns out you can take the Vol out of the hills but never the hills out of the Vol.

First off, there's nothing wrong with a little entrepreneurial distillation action, all the folks on Rocky Top get their corn from a jar and it tastes better by far that way.

And as someone who's worked in politically correct England for a while, Chris should know better than to throw around racial epithets like "hillbilly". I'm proud to have been born on a mountain top in Tennessee (technically the ridge running through Fort Sanders affording a beautiful view of the Knoxville campus) - and I prefer the term Appalachian-American, thank you very much. Under the Race Hate Act, you can actually be thrown into jail (gaol) for stirring up cultural hatred - and then who's gonna be wearing the prison orange? But don't worry, I won't be making a complaint - I know it all arises out of pure jealousy from the swamp dweller - for we all know what rolls down hill.

And as for the fighting Volunteer spirit, well hell yeah - bring it on. I don't care if you have raised the stakes. Now that we're calling our stadium Fort Neyland your dawgs will find this a much less hospitable locale.

My boy, myself and my dog will all don orange if by some bizarre act of the devil the Vols and their fat little coach manage to slip past the mighty Dawgs. By accepting this bet, you are succumbing to the inevitable fate of adorning young Cletus, yourself and your little cat in glorious red and black.

Dress my cat? That's just crazy talk. And in red and black? You know how the English feel about animal cruelty. But if by some chance, the puppies squeal through - we'll see what we can do about the cat.

Remembrance Sunday

Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday. In the UK, this equivalent of Veteran's Day (though focused almost exclusively on the war dead) is a big deal. A really big deal.

It started as a memorial to the Britain's many, many sons sent to slaughter in World War I. That was a really big deal, too. On the worst day of fighting at the Somme 60,000 British men and boys perished - many of their remains were never identified and they lay nameless in a corner of a foreign field that is forever England.

Commemoration of Remembrance Sunday (the Sunday closest to Remembrance Day 11 November) begins with the wearing of the poppy. Just about everyone wears them. It's just a simple paper poppy on a plastic stem to be pinned to your lapel. The poppies are available for a small donation and the money from the poppy appeal is used to support veterans in need.

The Remembrance Sunday ceremony is broadcast on radio and television. The Queen solemnly lays a wreath of poppies at the base of the Cenotaph for those who gave all. As does her husband, representatives of Commonwealth nations, Heads of the Services, chief clergy, and dignataries of all sorts. Veterans groups and the association of War Widows march past, leaving their memorials as they pass.

I have never gone to see the Remembrance service. To get a spot where you might be able to see anything, you'd have to arrive very early. It's very crowded and usually very cold and you have to stand very still for a very long time. But I do usually try to make a visit to the Field of Remembrance, on the lawn of Westminster Abbey - and I did so yesterday.

The Field of Remembrance is actually a fundraising exercise too. The field is divided into plots dedicated to different regiments, different campaigns or different countries. Crosses are available for a small donation. Far away organisations send in money and labels for their crosses. If you're in the area, you can go down to Westminster Abbey, buy a cross, write your memorial on it and hammer it in to the damp soil with a rubber mallet available to borrow.




There's a section for the American fallen, too.



The wreath is for the fallen soldiers of the state of Arkansas. A man who was a boy during WWII and was treated well by some Razor Back boys brings a wreath for them every year. I met him one time as he brought the wreath and he asked me to lay it for him.

The plaque from the US Department of Defense, which must have been engraved fairly recently, is already sadly out of date. This morning UK dead are 125 and US dead are 2,848.

-0-

Mostly people wear red poppies. There has been a movement to support wearing a white poppy for peace since 1933. This year a religious think-tank said that wearing the white poppy was more Christian, since the red poppy implied that redemption could be found through blood shed.

Yes, there's always a danger that pomp and circumstance can lead to glorification rather than reflection. But anyone who's watched an old veteran battle his own arthritic knees and bend to the ground to hammer in a cross for a fallen colleague, blink back tears and then struggle wearily to his feet will not have seen redemption through bloodshed in that act.

Mayor of London suspended

I had a little stop gap post on Ken Livingstone's suspension from his job as Mayor of London - which was basically a gloating poke at an adjudication panel's ruling that Ken Livingstone should be suspended from his job for a month. So I'm now republishing with a bit more detail.

What did Ken do to deserve this suspension? Basically he called someone a name. He compared a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard - and then did it again after the reporter said that he was Jewish and found it offensive.

What was the reporter doing? His job. Maybe the reporter Oliver Finegold was being a little pesky (who knows?), but that's what reporters do. He asked a public servant and a public figure a question on a public matter in a public place. You can hear the recording for yourself at the Evening Standard.

First Ken denied making those statements, but Mr Finegold being a reporter had a tape running. Then Ken claimed Mr Finegold was being rude, but from the tape, that doesn't appear to be the case.

What would a grown-up mayor have done? He would have apologised. He would have apologised to the reporter and to the people of London, and it would have been over. Instead he called the Daily Mail group (for which the Evening Standard reporter works) a bunch of Nazi sympathisers - who Ken grants have now turned from hating Jews to hating Muslims and asylum seekers.

Then Ken's co-workers (the Greater London Assembly - our big council) said "Ken, be a big boy and say you're sorry." But Ken refused to apologise. He didn't even apologise for any offense he might have caused (that old get-out) but did say it wasn't his intention to offend the Jewish community of London.

Now could his remarks have been construed as unacceptably anti-semitic? Maybe. (I sure wouldn't like to be compared to a Nazi concentration camp guard and as a Londoner I was offended by his remarks and I'm not Jewish.) Though when you compare what he said to Ken's cosy relationship with nasty, anti-semitic, homophobe, mysogynist Egyptian cleric al Qaradawi, his remarks hardly even seem noteworthy in the anti-semite stakes.

Ken you brought this on yourself, you stupid mf.

On the other hand, who the heck are these people on this Panel of Adjudication who can remove the properly elected Mayor after a meeting of a few hours? Ken says it undermines democratic principles and is an insult to the people of London. On that, Ken, you and I are in agreement.

Ken you've wasted taxpayer money again because of your stupid arrogance. I can't help but gloat at your misfortune, you stupid, reactionary, anti-American ass. But I'm sickened that London is shamed first by having a loud mouth mayor and then by having him removed.

But as this post from Harry's Place says:

That said, the only way to counter left-racism and the "Galloway-lite" religious communalist politics which Ken Livingstone, and his Socialist Action chums have been pioneering, is for us to organise, politically, against it.

An administrative or quasi judicial 'solution' is not only a mirage: it is also an affront to democracy.

ViL: Sympathy for the Doctor?

Andrew Sullivan writes:
"Should we feel sorry for Condi Rice? She wasn't exactly the architect of the torture policies of the current administration, but she sure hasn't stopped them."

Hm, I find this an interesting question. I find the question of Dr Rice's morality - or lack of it - strangely fascinating. It's easy to peg Rumsfeld and Cheney as gleefully* malevolent people who do bad just for the sheer joyful fun of it, and Bush as an arrogant, nasty little spoiled brat pretending to be a good old boy. Powell was an intelligent, over-cautious and naturally rather weak (for a soldier) man whose adherence to basic norms of decency brought him into frequent conflict with Cheney/Rumsfeld, Rice acting as something of a mediator between the two. But I find Rice harder to peg. She's smart enough to know that torturing people may be fun, but is poor politics. She has done a consistently competent job as Sec of State, though perhaps that's only noteworthy because everyone else in the administration seems to fall so far short of that standard - we're at a stage where "American meets foreign leaders, no diplomatic disaster" has itself become noteworthy news. It's hard to tell - I don't think Rice approves of Rumsfeld/Cheney's antics, but there' no sign she disapproves of them on moral grounds, either. Yet if she did disapprove, she might not show it - that would be "disloyalty", the only sin Bush recognises, and certainly Rice has always been 100% loyal. Because of this, she has been a better Sec of State than Powell, I think. I don't know if she is a good person. I don't think she's exactly a bad person, in the sense that Rumsfeld/Cheney are bad, but it may be that she is largely amoral. There are worse people to be running the country than amoral pragmatists IMO - misguided idealists can be a lot worse. I suspect that she might make rather a good President - certainly much better than Bush - but that she is unlikely to run, because as a candidate a black woman would lose some of the Republican base, and I don't think Condi Rice would attract many defectors from the Democrats, black or white. I might be tempted to vote for her, but I don't get a vote, and I think the Vol prefers Hillary Clinton. And maybe she's right.
I dunno.

*OK, maybe calling Cheney 'gleeful' isn't quite right... but you've got to have seen that smug grin on Rumsfeld's face as he discusses (eg) how there's just not enough cash in the kitty to get vehicular armour for the Tennessee National Guard.

Boozin' Bush??

George Bush has hit the bottle? W. has fallen off the wagon? This via Americablog who got it from the National Enquirer. (I picked it up via Nashville is Talking and Tennessee Guerilla Women, links on the left).

Well, it is the Enquirer, so I suppose we do need to be a bit cautious.

Personally, I'm not gonna pile in on George for this one. I thought he was generally incompetent when he was sober. And you know everybody's got their own problems, and I've been known to smoke or drink more coffee or overeat (my addictions) when I've been stressed out. And heck, although I'm usually quite cautious about drinking under strain, given the number of people with substance abuse in my family, I've done that, too.

So good luck, George. For all our sakes, I hope it's not true. We need you sober enough to keep Cheney in some kind of check and to think about your next crony appointments. (Me, pick me!)

So while I'm not piling in: here's the full text from the National Enquirer

BUSH'S BOOZE CRISISBy JENNIFER LUCE and DON GENTILE

Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again, The National Enquirer can reveal.Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe.

Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster.His worried wife yelled at him: "Stop, George."

Following the shocking incident, disclosed here for the first time, Laura privately warned her husband against "falling off the wagon" and vowed to travel with him more often so that she can keep an eye on Dubya, the sources add."When the levees broke in New Orleans, it apparently made him reach for a shot," said one insider. "He poured himself a Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey and tossed it back.

The First Lady was shocked and shouted: "Stop George!""Laura gave him an ultimatum before, 'It's Jim Beam or me.' She doesn't want to replay that nightmare — especially now when it's such tough going for her husband."Bush is under the worst pressure of his two terms in office and his popularity is near an all-time low. The handling of the Katrina crisis and troop losses in Iraq have fueled public discontent and pushed Bush back to drink.

A Washington source said: "The sad fact is that he has been sneaking drinks for weeks now. Laura may have only just caught him — but the word is his drinking has been going on for a while in the capital. He's been in a pressure cooker for months."The war in Iraq, the loss of American lives, has deeply affected him. He takes every soldier's life personally. It has left him emotionally drained.The result is he's taking drinks here and there, likely in private, to cope.

"And now with the worst domestic crisis in his administration over Katrina, you pray his drinking doesn't go out of control."Another source said: "I'm only surprised to hear that he hadn't taken a shot sooner. Before Katrina, he was at his wit's end. I've known him for years. He's been a good ol' Texas boy forever. George had a drinking problem for years that most professionals would say needed therapy. He doesn't believe in it [therapy], he never got it. He drank his way through his youth, through college and well into his thirties. Everyone's drinking around him."

Another source said: "A family member told me they fear George is 'falling apart.' The First Lady has been assigned the job of gatekeeper." Bush's history of drinking dates back to his youth. Speaking of his time as a young man in the National Guard, he has said: "One thing I remember, and I'm most proud of, is my drinking and partying. Those were the days my friends. Those were the good old days!"

Age 26 in 1972, he reportedly rounded off a night's boozing with his 16-year-old brother Marvin by challenging his father to a fight.
On November 1, 2000, on the eve of his first presidential election, Bush acknowledged that in 1976 he was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol near his parents' home in Maine. Age 30 at the time, Bush pleaded guilty and paid a $150 fine. His driving privileges were temporarily suspended in Maine."I'm not proud of that," he said. "I made some mistakes. I occasionally drank too much, and I did that night. I learned my lesson." In another interview around that time, he said: "Well, I don't think I had an addiction. You know it's hard for me to say. I've had friends who were, you know, very addicted... and they required hitting bottom (to start) going to AA. I don't think that was my case."

During his 2000 presidential campaign, there were also persistent questions about past cocaine use. Eventually Bush denied using cocaine after 1992, then quickly extended the cocaine-free period back to 1974, when he was 28.Dr. Justin Frank, a Washington D.C. psychiatrist and author of Bush On The Couch: Inside The Mind Of The President, told The National Enquirer: "I do think that Bush is drinking again. Alcoholics who are not in any program, like the President, have a hard time when stress gets to be great."I think it's a concern that Bush disappears during times of stress. He spends so much time on his ranch. It's very frightening."

Published on: 09/21/2005