President Xanax?
Tom Shales, The Washington Post TV critic, was so underwhelmed by President Bush's press conference last night that Shales wonders if the CinC was on drugs:
Maybe Bush thought he was, indeed, coming across as cool and temperate instead of bored and enervated, and this was simply a rhetorical miscalculation. On the other hand, it hardly seems out of order to speculate that, given the particularly heavy burden of being president in this new age of terrorism—a time in which America has, as Bush said, become a "battlefield"—the president may have been ever so slightly medicated.
In fairness to Bush he'd have to tap-dance on a flag pole while curing cancer to earn a passing mark from a smushy lib like Shales. But Shales is dead-on about Bush seeming to move at two-thirds speed last night.
I have to agree with Reason readers that the intention was for Bush to seem full of regret about the prospect of war. Instead Bush came off as depressed and possibly tranked up.