July 29, 2004 - For more than a month there has been an undercurrent of concern beneath the surface of White House confidence. Loyal staffers are talking about their worries. They describe a President who is increasingly isolated; who acts as though he is under siege’ and violently lashes out at both staff and outsiders with increasing frequency. They increasing see a disturbing level of less than rationale behavior. Any suggestion of an alternative to a suggested course of action is met with accusations of disloyalty coupled with an obscenity laced tongue lashing. Presidential decisions are announced to staff with the comment, “It is God’s will.”

Occasionally confirming details slip out in public as last week when the President told a group of Amish farmers in Lancaster, PA, “God speaks through me.” Another example was when a visibly angry President stalked out of White House news conference when asked about his relationship with newly indicted Kenneth Lay, the former CEO of Enron. The latest staffer leak describes what happened next. The President is said to have confronted a press aide shouting,” “Keep those [compound expletive deleted] away from me. If you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.” Concerns about the President’s erratic and unpredictable behavior have grown to the point that White House physician Col. Richard J. Tubb has supposedly prescribed powerful psychoactive drugs to control the President’s erratic and increasingly paranoid behavior. When Capitol Hill Blue, a muckraking website written in Washington that has been following the story of the President’s alleged mental deteriation since June 4th, asked for the President’s recent medical records so that the story could be either supported or knocked down the White House refused.

The story has it that the President’s inner circle has shrunk to Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft. Staffers allegedly refer to the President and Ashcroft as “The Blues Brothers” because, “They think that they are on a mission from God.” One veteran Republican insider who was in the White House during the last days of the Nixon administration has said that the siege atmosphere has not been worse since August 1974.

None of Capitol Hill Blue’s sources have spoken on the record and the accounts of powerful drugs have not been confirmed but neither have they been denied by the White House press office. We could dismiss this all as merely rumor, but as the nation learned when Drudge broke the Monica rumor often when there is smoke there is truly fire. If that is the case here the fire may well be nuclear and ignited because the man with the nuclear football thinks he is on a mission from God.