So Saturday
we learned that two summers ago in Estonia John McCain and Hillary Clinton competed in a vodka-drinking contest. McCain, it is said, emerged from the alcohol wallow charmed by the "unexpectedly engaging" Ms. Clinton. She's "one of the guys," he beamed. While it was Ms. Clinton who reportedly suggested this exercise in bipartisan inebriation, her people declined comment, observing only "what happens in Estonia stays in Estonia."
I realize that this bibulous incident has already been diaried, but my view on these twin tosspots is somewhat darker than that earlier expressed. To wit: do we really want as president a person who, though closer to senility than adolescence, still indulges in such a puerile pursuit as a drinking contest?
And vodka? The last head of state with a weakness for vodka shelled parliament. It is true that George II has been contemptuous of Congress, but he has not, as yet, attacked the place with tanks and artillery.
Boris the Bombed, by the way, says his days of becoming one with Stoli are over. Like a good Frenchman, he now imbibes only wine. He defends his presidential stack of empties, however, noting that he "resorted to vodka to relieve the stresses of office since his almost nine years as president were like a "40,000-kilometre marathon."
Yeltsin has also stated that he was aware ahead of time of GOP machinations to lure The Clenis into a forbidden orifice in order to bring down the Clinton I regime.
Mr Yeltsin claims he could have saved the US president a lot of grief by telling him about a bombshell that landed on his Kremlin desk in 1996 in a cable from the Washington embassy.
The Republicans were preparing a "honey-trap" seduction of President Clinton by a young woman. "Monica Lewinsky?" asked the German newspaper, Welt am Sonntag. "Yes," said Mr Yeltsin.
"I could have warned him, but didn't," Mr Yeltsin told Russian TV. "It seemed appalling, immoral. And I didn't want to believe it. Then I thought that Clinton could cope with it himself."
Yeltsin's predecessor, Josef Stalin, was also a man known to be fond of a drink or nine. Hunter S. Thompson, in his piece "The Boys In The Bag," relates one legend of the soused Stalin:
He had gone into one of his rages, according to the story as I heard it, and this one had something to do with a notion that seized him, after five days and nights in a brutal vodka orgy, that every Catholic in Moscow should be nailed up on a telephone pole by dawn on Easter Sunday. This announcement caused genuine fear in the Kremlin, because Stalin was known by his staff to be "capable of almost anything." When he calmed down a bit, one of his advisers suggested that a mass crucifixion of Russian Catholics--for no reason at all--would almost certainly raise hackles in the Vatican and no doubt anger the pope.
"Fuck the pope," Stalin mumbled. "How many divisions does he have?"
My former philosophy professor, Ivan Svitak, used to grouse that he had "lived under three tyrants: Hitler, Stalin, and Nixon."
Hitler wasn't big on the booze--he preferred methamphetamine--but Nixon, like Stalin, was known to reach for the vodka. What vodka did to Nixon, we have been told, was cause him to listen, transported and teary-eyed, to Mantovani; snarl at aides; place late-night crank phone calls; broodingly ponder the efficacy of attention-distracting wars; jabber at paintings; and drag a startled Jew to his knees, demanding the fellow join him in calling on the god of the Gentiles.
Is this the sort of thing we want in 2008? Hasn't the dry drunk currently in the White House, who has set nearly the entire world aflame, been enough? Please, people. Friends don't let friends vote for drunks.