Pathetic: WaPo Covers for Biden By Publishing Story Saying Cocaine in WH Goes All the Way Back to FDR
FDR: Accidental cokehead?
No, of course not, but that’s not what The Washington Post’s writers would want those who merely scanned a Thursday piece on the baggie of Bolivian marching powder found in the West Wing would want you to think. No, coke inside the halls of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is no big deal. Provided the president is Democrat, of course. And has a cokehead (or formerly cokeheaded, to be perfectly fair) son.
According to NBC News, the bag of the illicit drug was found during a routine patrol on Sunday. On Wednesday, lab results positively identified the substance; White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre subsequently informed the media that it was found in an area heavily trafficked (pun unintended) by visitors.
“What I wanted to be very clear is that this is a heavily, heavily trafficked, heavily traveled, to be more accurate, area of the campus of the White House,” she said Wednesday. “It is where visitors to the West Wing come through.”
NBC News reported Thursday that it was found in a cubby sources said was “transited by VIPs, visitors, tourists, staff members, military officials and facilities operations employees.” It was not, as previously reported, found in the West Wing lobby, which makes it more likely this wasn’t just a tourist.
I know what you’re thinking, and let’s dismiss it right off the bat: The Bidens were at Camp David when the cocaine was found, although it’s unclear whether Hunter was with them. Whatever the case, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer announced an investigation into the incident in a Friday letter to Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, calling the matter an “unacceptable and a shameful moment in the White House’s history.”
Or, as The Washington Post tried to frame it, just part of the rich history of illicit substances at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!
In a piece titled “Willie Nelson got high on the roof — and other White House drug stories,” Post writer Gillian Brockell traced drug use at the White House from the country music legend and another famous musical weed aficionado back to, very speciously, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
First, yes, “Willie Nelson smoked a marijuana joint on the roof of the White House during a visit to then-President Jimmy Carter in 1980, according to Nelson himself, who has told the story over and over and over. He even puff-puff-passed it to a White House ‘servant,’ Nelson claimed. In 2020, Carter confirmed the ‘servant’ was actually his son James Earl ‘Chip’ Carter III.”
Well, these were indeed just after the ’70s and during the Carter administration, neither fantastic periods in our country’s history. Plus, name me a day of the week Willie Nelson isn’t smoking marijuana and I’ll credit you with discovering a day of the week which doesn’t end in Y.
Same goes for rapper Snoop Dogg, who boasted of getting high off the sticky icky icky in the White House bathroom in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel.
Mr. Dogg alleges he asked someone to use the bathroom. “The CIA. Or the FBI. The alphabet boys. So I said, ‘Look, when I do the No. 2, I usually, you know, have a cigarette or I light something to get the aroma right.’ They said, ‘You know what? You can light a piece of napkin.’ I said, ‘I’ll do that.’ And the napkin was this,” he said, taking a drag off of a marijuana blunt.
The Post then goes on to note that infamous (but unconfirmed) anecdotes have John F. Kennedy smoking pot in bed with a mistress and getting amphetamine injections from an infamous physician nicknamed “Dr. Feelgood.” (The last one actually has a bit of factual basis to it.)
But the low of lows is dragging FDR into it.
“Historian Steven M. Gillon made quite a claim in 2012 while researching a book about President Franklin D. Roosevelt,” the Post noted.
“White House records for Dec. 7, 1941 — the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor — show Roosevelt, who was suffering from one of his chronic sinus infection at the time, spent more than an hour that evening with White House physician Ross McIntire.
“In a time with no antibiotics, small doses of cocaine were a standard medical treatment for sinus infections, Gillon found. It is not clear whether Roosevelt would have become intoxicated with the doses, or whether McIntire would have even told Roosevelt what he was using for treatment. Whatever the doctor was doing, Roosevelt liked it: McIntire visited the White House frequently and even traveled with the president.”
Nor was the Post the only paper echoing this story; over in Merrie England, the U.K. Guardian was also rehashing Gillon’s claims.
“Roosevelt’s official physician was a respected ear, nose and throat doctor named Ross McIntire, who would use cotton swabs to clear the president’s sinuses, a process witnessed by the attorney general Francis Biddle, who described in his notes McIntire ‘swabbing out FDR’s nose,'” the Guardian reported.
“Gillon consulted medical journals and spoke to top ENT doctors familiar with the profession’s history who agreed: ‘Cocaine was the drug of choice’ for the procedure back then, making it likely that Roosevelt had received it. ‘It was nothing unusual, it was common practice, and it wasn’t illegal,’ Gillon says. (Even today, cocaine is a controlled substance that doctors can legally use in situations like sinus surgery.)”
We’ll never know because Roosevelt’s medical records mysteriously “went missing” after his death in 1945. (As the Guardian notes, this is likely due their deliberate destruction; White House doctors likely didn’t want America or historians to know they were aware of just how sick FDR was when he ran for a fourth term in 1944.)
“Even if he was receiving it, there’s a good chance Roosevelt wouldn’t have known about it,” the Guardian reports. “According to the prevailing medical literature of the day, doctors were advised not to tell patients that they were receiving cocaine (‘The habit-forming properties of this drug are well known and must be ever guarded against,’ read one textbook). “Unless Roosevelt had asked, he would not have been told,’ Gillon says.”
But who knows? Perhaps Bolivian marching powder was what was responsible for easily the most preposterous scene in Michael Bay’s thoroughly preposterous movie “Pearl Harbor” (accurately trashed by critic Roger Ebert as “a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle”) where the president … well, take a look for yourself, because no mere words can do this “Mystery Science Theater 3000“-level garbage justice:
An exact cinematic historical depiction of events — brought to you courtesy of the stimulating properties of the coca leaf, a sinus infection, and the wasted acting talents of Jon Voight as he struggles his way out of a wheelchair to symbolize the American spirit, or something.
But let’s face it, this has nothing to do with America having an interest in the history of drugs — and especially cocaine — inside the White House. Instead, both the Post and the Guardian are well-known left-wing outlets also very aware that this unpleasant discovery comes not long after, um, another discovery:
UK 🇬🇧 Daily Mail headline
How reckless Hunter Biden photographed himself driving at 172mph while behind the wheel of his Porsche en-route to a days-long Vegas bender with prostitutes – and pictured himself smoking CRACK while behind the wheel pic.twitter.com/fhcJXmtGkF
— MiniTrue Archive (@MiniTrueArchive) July 2, 2023
Robert Hunter Biden’s cocaine use — combined with a plea deal on tax and gun charges that were more than tangentially related to that cocaine use — are one of many threats the president faces in his 2024 re-election bid, and it doesn’t help when the drug is found inside the West Wing, even if Hunter isn’t the man responsible. It’s like wearing a blue dress to a Clinton Foundation benefit and not realizing there’s a prominent stain on it until your photo op with Bill: It’s not the former president’s fault, but let’s face it, it doesn’t bring back happy memories for anyone involved.
So, the coupling of cocaine and the presidential mansion has to be made to look as normal as blueberry pie. Even FDR might have done it! I mean, not really and only for medical procedures, but play along here. We’re talking about anything that has to do with drugs and the presidency but doesn’t remind us about Hunter Biden.
Let’s speculate about JFK! Snoop Dogg! Willie Nelson in the Jimmy Carter White House! Heck, one of Carter’s close journalist friends, a notable drug user himself, had this to say about the president: “He’d put me in jail in an instant if he saw me snorting coke in front of him. He would not, however, follow me into the bathroom and try to catch me snorting it.”
What was that guy’s name again? Uh, let’s see. Rolling Stone journalist, did a bunch of campaign trail reportage in the 1970s, used the words “fear” and “loathing” frequently. Oh — that’s right! Hunter S. Thompso…
You know what? Let’s go back to talking about FDR. That cokehead, Roosevelt! Wasn’t he a scream?
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