PRETZELGATE: WAS IT DRINK, DRUGS OR JUST SALTY SNACKS?

President George Bush is back on the booze and fell drunkenly off the sofa
on to the White House shagpile last Sunday. This, he would be horrified to
know, is one of the more prosaic of the theses now circulating on the Net
as the whirring minds of the world's conspiracy theorists seek the "real"
story behind what they are now calling Pretzelgate.

Others are not sure. The idea of Dubya drinking himself into a stupor with
only his two dogs for company is not nearly exotic enough for them. They
favour a domestic dispute, where wife Laura, perhaps enraged by her
husband's hogging of the pretzel bowl, hits him; the official story of
choking on a pretzel, fainting and then falling on the floor being a
hastily concocted cover-up.

Meanwhile, a sceptic with medical pretensions has been studying pictures of
Bush post-Pretzel, paying particular attention to his face and its
abrasions. Noting the "flush across the bridge of his nose" and the "glazed
expression" on his face, Cheryl Seal concluded, "the man is on a strong
anti-anxiety drug - and a hefty dose at that".

The diligent press, having earlier got Bush's physician on record saying
that the President tested negative for alcohol, has also cleared up the
other great unanswered question: where was Laura when the snack attack
occurred? The final White House words on the subject were: "On the phone,
in the solarium", which, unfortunately, are sufficiently redolent of
"Cluedo" to set the conspiracists off all over again.

But, Watergate, this is not. Apart from the absence of any trace of illegal
payments through Mexican bank accounts, or a shadowy body called the
Committee to Re-Erect The President, the affair lacks a Deep Throat. Come
to that, so, apparently, does Bush. So it will be left to the wilder shores
of the internet to speculate. How long before someone posts the first "14
Coincidences Between Bush and Lincoln"?