Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [21]
Why won’t you use the word alcoholic? That is, after all, the First Step to recovery. What support system have you set up to make sure you don’t fall off the wagon? Being President is perhaps the most stressful job in the world. What have you done to ensure you can handle the pressure and the anxiety associated with being the most powerful man on earth?
How do we know you won’t turn to the bottle when faced with a serious crisis? You’ve never had a job like this. For twenty years, from what I can tell, you had no job at all. When you stopped “drifting,” your dad set you up in the oil business with some ventures that failed, and then he helped you get a major league baseball team, which required you to sit in a box seat and watch a lot of long, slow baseball games.
As governor of Texas, you couldn’t have had much stress; there just isn’t enough to do. Being governor of Texas is a relatively ceremonial job. How will you deal with some unexpected new threat to world security? Do you have a sponsor you can call? Is there a meeting you can attend? You don’t have to tell me the answers to these questions; you just have to promise me you’ve thought them out for yourself.
I know this is very personal, but the public has a right to know. For those who say, “Well, c’mon, it’s his personal life that was twenty-four years ago,” I have this to say: I was hit by a drunk driver twenty-eight years ago, and to this day I cannot completely extend my right arm. I’m sorry, George, but when you go out on a public highway drunk, it’s no longer just your PERSONAL life we’re talking about. It’s my life, and the lives of my family.
Your campaign people—the enablers—tried to ‘cover for you, lying to the press about the nature of your arrest for driving under the influence. They said the cop pulled you over because you were “driving too slowly.” But the arresting officer said it was because you had swerved off on the shoulder of the road.
You yourself joined in the denial when asked about the evening you spent in jail.
“I didn’t spend time in jail,” you insisted. The officer told the local reporter that in fact you were handcuffed, taken to the station, and held in custody for at least an hour and a half. Could it be that you truly don’t remember?
This is not just some simple traffic ticket. I can’t believe your enablers actually implied your drunk driving conviction wasn’t as offensive as Clinton’s transgressions. Lying about consensual sex you had with another adult while you are married is wrong, but it is NOT the same as getting behind the wheel of a car when you are drunk and endangering the lives of others (including, George, the life of your own sister, who was with you in the car that night).
It is also NOT the same, despite what your defenders said before the election, as Al Gore volunteering that he smoked pot in his youth. Unless he was driving while stoned, his actions endangered no life but his own—and he wasn’t trying to cover it up.
You’ve tried to dismiss the incident by saying “it was back in my youth.” But you were NOT a “youth“; you were in your thirties.
The night your conviction was finally revealed to the nation, just days before the election, it was painful to watch you swagger as you tried to chalk up your “irresponsible” action as the mere “youthful indiscretion” of having a few beers with the boys (smirk, smirk). I really felt for the families of the half a million people who have been killed by drunks like yourself in the twenty-four years since your “little adventure.” Thank God you kept drinking for only another several years after you “learned your lesson.” I think, too, of what you must have put your wife, Laura, through. She knew all too well how dangerous it is when any of us get behind the wheel. At seventeen she killed a high school friend of hers