[CTRL] Does Bush Have A Thyroid Condition?

[William Shannon]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4338817,00.html I can reveal the truth about Bush It wasn't the pretzel, or the drink, that put him on the floor Mark Lawson GuardianSaturday January 19, 2002 It's a fact of modern culture, encouraged by the internet, that any story on the news is soon challenged by a rival version on the streets. Libel laws usually prevent on-the-record discussion of such alternative scenarios, but there is one popular conspiracy theory we can consider, both because it is so manifestly unlikely and because it's hard for an American president to sue. In one of the strangest political tales ever known, the White House claims that, six days ago, George Bush became the first American president to be almost assassinated by a snack, his breathing briefly halted by a mis-swallowed pretzel which caused a fall, in which the commander-in-chief grazed his cheek and split his lip. Making a claim audacious even by the standards of political spin, the president's doctor insisted that the ease with which the leader of the free world lost consciousness was not a sign of frailty but of fitness: he fainted because his heart rate is unusually low through exercise. While the newspapers have dutifully run articles on the potentially lethal qualities of salted nibbles, I haven't yet heard a conversation in private in which anyone swallows the pretzel. The editor of the Today programme, Rod Liddle, made clear in his Guardian column that he chokes on this spin. To spit it out, what people are secretly saying and thinking is that Dubya - the first recovering alcoholic to reach the White House - is once again employing Jim Beam and Jack Daniel's as his personal aides and that the blood on his face was the maker's mark from a drunk's stumble. Is this likely? Support for conspiracy theorists is that President Bush is what reformed drinkers call a "white-knuckle drunk". They mean by this that he cured himself by going cold turkey after a hangover and remains sober by sheer willpower rather than by using the 12-step-programme which gives a system for sustaining abstinence. All ex-drinkers are most at risk of lapsing under stress and white-knuckle drunks more than most because there are no counsellors to stop them bottling it up. There are few things more stressful than being president during a war and after unprecedented attacks on your nation. Therefore - the theorists insist - the state of Kentucky's greatest export caused his downfall. The problem is that, if the rogue pretzel story is to be taken with this dusting of salt, a lot of people need to be lying. If the prez was sufficiently inebriated to fall over, the White House doctor would need to have ignored the drinker's stink on his supposedly teetotal patient's breath and then still publicly backed the snack story. Laura Bush would also need to be conniving, at some level, in a very serious lie to the electorate. White House valets would soon spy the amber-stained empties in the litter of a man who claims to run on mineral water. It's true that Clinton kept his White House sex-life quiet for five years until Monica, but it seems to me that fewer people would be prepared to treat as private a drunken finger on the nuclear button. Irritating as it may be to cynics, the pretzel story has more plausibility. For a start, history shows that God or Darwin has a sense of the ridiculous. To believers in the cock-up theory of world events, it's all too awfully plausible that, as a president sits behind the tightest security screen ever created for a leader, his life would be threatened by a scrap of hard-baked dough. There's even an odd political precedent. One of the current leader's heroes, Ronald Reagan, reportedly almost choked to death on a peanut while governor of California. His life was saved by an aide performing the emergency chest-punch Heimlich manoeuvre. Most significantly, weeks before Snackgate, President Bush was described as almost choking on a similar savoury during an interview with a newspaper on Air Force One. The White House doctor reports that Bush had experienced difficulty swallowing in the time before his faint. Although in no way medically trained, I am a qualified hypochondriac and, as a TV critic, have watched several hundred editions of Casualty, Holby City and Horizon. From this training, it seems strange to me that so little has been made of George Bush's family history. Various medical embarrassments during the administration of the first President Bush - physical restlessness, a fainting fit in Tokyo - were eventually traced to Graves' disease, a condition of the thyroid. The malfunctioning gland was destroyed with a dose of radioactive iodine and the presidency continued without medical mishap, although it soon met an electoral one. Among the symptoms of thyroid problems, which can be handed on in families, are difficulties in swallowing and a slow heart rate. President George W Bush has now been shown to have both of these and it's my non-medic's hunch that he will eventually prove to have a hyperactive thyroid. At least for the moment, those who claim he's on the bottle again can be diagnosed with hyperactive imaginations. American Republicans will raise their glasses to the hope that Dubya hasn't also inherited his dad's way with re-election races and tyrants who target America.