The Bush family is this nasty, Jacob's-Ladder-grotesquerie of drugs, drink, and women pushing wimpy men around. The Guardian's got it:

In one of the creepier passages of the book, a family gathering from hell at Kennebunkport, Maine, Barbara is shown mercilessly baiting her dry-drunk son, then governor of Texas, as a teetotalling 'Chosen One', while he keeps pleading to skip the cocktails and put on the feed bag, and his elderly father "drools over [TV newswoman] Paula Zahn's legs".

Oh dear.

One of the major themes in Kelley's book is the family's weakness for liquor and drugs. Alcoholism, she writes, runs deeply in the family and among its victims, according to one Bush family friend, was Prescott, a "major-league alcoholic", who was in the habit of checking himself into his men's club and country club to go on benders. And Kelley writes that George W Bush is not the only one in the first family who enjoyed illegal substances. While a student at Southern Methodist University in the 1960s, first lady Laura Bush was known "as a go-to girl for dime bags of marijuana".

Say it ain't so! Even little Laura? America's sweetheart?

I'm shocked!

[Why aren't anti-Bush protestors showing up proffering liquor bottles? Martini glasses? Bags of white powder! First lady speaking? BIG FAKE SPLIFFS!

LET'S GET INTO THE MUD, PEOPLE!]