What's Bush drinking?

A Brian Flemming's Weblog investigation

As with the Zapruder film or that supposed photo of the Loch Ness Monster, people seem capable of widely varied interpretations of the 1992 George W. Bush video I borrowed for my Bush vs. Dean confrontation. (You need to see the potentially incriminating video to understand the rest of this post.)

The first comment at that page says, "Get real - it looks like he's drinking bottled water." A later commenter is even more specific: "Bush is clearly drinking Dasani," a brand of water.

Over at, ahem, www.skinheads.net ("one of the largest NON-Racist and NON-Political skinheads sites on the internet"), they took a break from posting pictures of their pit bulls to discuss the Bush vs. Dean video. While DesperationRevolution said, "I can't download that shit, what's the gist of it?", other skinheads were able to download that shit, and virtually all of them seem to agree that Bush is holding a glass (nobody even brings up the notion of a water bottle). They only argue about whether it is a "whiskey glass" or some other kind.

This detail, which I enlarged from a screenshot by skinhead tw13ve, should put the water-bottle issue to rest, though:

Sorry, one doesn't hold a water bottle that way, and if that's a water bottle, it apparently has no top (a sawn-off water bottle?). And, speaking as a sometime cinematographer, the bottom of that plastic "water bottle" sure is throwing off a lot of light for something that isn't glass.

It is clearly a glass. But what kind of glass is it? Let's go to the line-up:

The glass Bush is holding looks pretty much like suspect #2 to me--a glass consistent with George W. Bush's drink of choice, whiskey. ("It's me or Jack Daniels," Laura Bush was reported to have told her husband, who had become an embarrassing drunk by 1986.)

However, in settings such as a wedding, in my experience it is common for the bartenders to serve every drink (whether Coke or Jack & Coke or just Jack) in a glass like that one. And from the manner in which Bush drinks from it, it is fairly clear the glass is almost empty, so there is no way to judge what liquid is in it (that I can see).

My fair and balanced conclusion: The glass is consistent both with an alcoholic and a non-alcoholic drink. Also, for good measure, Dubya's slurring of his words is consistent both with Dubya being drunk and with Dubya being Dubya. I don't think there's any way to know for sure if he is drinking and/or drunk in the video.

However, I encourage everyone to speculate, and to play this video over and over and over, all the way to next November.