Political scandal

Apparently Gavin Newsom, Mayor of my home town, has recently admitted to having an affair with the amazingly named Ruby Rippey-Tourk and is now seeking counseling for alcohol abuse. The press is widely praising him for acknowledging that he has a problem and setting a good example by seeking treatment. Remember the good old days when 'setting a good example' meant not abusing drugs and alcohol in the first place? Neither do I, but I am getting sick of people blaming alcohol for all their poor decisions. I'm also sick of the media and people generally for accepting a world in which it's clear that alcohol causes people to make poor decisions, and that the treatment of alcohol addiction will also treat all your other problems. I don't accept this because there is one enormous confounding variable that makes this assumption inherently unprovable: abusing alcohol is an example of a poor decision. So is it that people make bad decisions because they abuse alcohol, or do they abuse alcohol because they make bad decisions. Honestly, it's probably a little bit of both, in which case treatment for alcohol addiction is only a superficial short term cure that fails to address real long-term issues. The reason that people are willing to accept this meretricious causal story is because of the attitude towards alcoholism hammered into our heads from middle school onward, that it's a disease. This purely semantic distinction allows us to believe that it is out of our control, something which is absolutely untrue. In fact, it is only through self-control that we can overcome our addictions, because to the best of my knowledge they haven't invented a drug that cures alcoholism yet, and while treatment programs can do a lot of good, it's still only within ourselves that battles against addiction are fought and won. This is one of the reasons I think AA is so dangerous, besides being, you know, a cult. The language that AA has introduced into our vernacular has facilitated this kind of dangerous misinformation. All I'm saying is, the interesting question isn't 'would Gavin Newsom have had an affair if he wasn't an alcoholic' but 'would Newsom have admitted to an alcohol problem if he hadn't been caught with his pants around his ankles.'