Pubdate: Tue, 05 Jun 2001
Source: Salon (US Web)
Copyright: 2001 Salon
Contact:  http://www.salon.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/381
Author:  Joe Conason

BUSH'S DOUBLE STANDARD

The president demands severe punishment for drug and alcohol offenders -- 
unless they're members of the Bush clan.

Knocking the wind out of a self-righteous windbag is always healthy fun, 
especially when the windbag happens to be an authority figure like the 
president of the United States. Sometimes, however, the impulse to deflate 
also injures innocent bystanders such as Jenna and Barbara Bush -- whose 
moralizing pappy must be mortified by their recent booze busts.

Unfortunately for the Bushes, their fellow citizens have a right to know 
that the first family will be held to the same rules imposed on the rest of 
us. The necessity for a single standard is greater still when those rules 
were imposed by the president himself.

Yet conservative commentators, in a sudden display of tender concern for 
victims of tabloid journalism, are urging reporters to stop picking on the 
Bush twins. They point out that almost all American kids start drinking 
before they reach legal age, that underage guzzling is usually a private 
problem for families to resolve, and that neither of the girls has harmed 
anyone else.

The pleas for mercy sound perfectly reasonable, even though several of the 
same pundits couldn't resist attacking Chelsea Clinton in the most cruel 
and boorish way. But except for a few lonely civil libertarians, almost 
nobody made those permissive arguments when George W. Bush (and a 
bipartisan majority of the Texas Legislature) enacted the "three strikes" 
penalties that could lead to Jenna Bush's imprisonment if she is arrested 
with alcohol once more.

In the situational ethics that now define conservatism, cracking down on 
kids who drink was a great national imperative, until that policy meant 
political trouble for a Republican in the White House.

No doubt the public humiliation of Jenna and Barbara Bush has been 
inevitable since 1997, when their father approved a set of Draconian 
revisions to the Texas laws governing consumption of alcohol by minors. 
Like most teenagers, they eventually were bound to run afoul of those 
statutes, which he had trumpeted as symbols of his own rectitude and his 
determination to crush youthful vice and criminality. Due to their high 
visibility, they were likely to be caught, too.

In fact, as reported in the Houston Chronicle, Jenna Bush's first alcohol 
offense occurred within six months after the then-governor signed the harsh 
new standards into law. (Were it not for a loophole that excludes her first 
offense because she was only 16 at the time, she would now be facing up to 
six months in jail as well as a $2,000 fine.) By the time he approved that 
bill, Bush had already fashioned a political career out of his propensity 
for cracking down, for "tough love" and for treating juvenile offenders 
with "zero tolerance."

Those were the principal themes of his first campaign for governor, when 
much more was said about his opponent's history of substance abuse than 
about his own excessive drunkenness. During that 1994 race, he went so far 
as to cite his daughters as evidence of his fitness to punish other kids. 
"I've raised two children that respect discipline," he said proudly (and 
somewhat optimistically).

Within weeks after he signed the laws that now haunt his family, Bush 
triumphantly addressed a Midwestern GOP conference. "One of my main 
responsibilities as governor -- and I believe one of the responsibilities 
as Republicans -- is to set the tone for change," he remarked. "Whether 
that change involves schools, or the juvenile justice system, or whether 
that change involves solving the No. 1 problem facing America -- the 
culture of our time -- a culture that says if it feels good, do it, and if 
you have a problem, blame somebody else."

When he embarked on his campaign for the presidency, Bush continued to 
emphasize the nation's supposed moral decline while proclaiming a "new era 
of personal responsibility." As the long-concealed facts about his own past 
finally emerged, however, it became difficult not to wonder whether he 
assumed that his preachments are for ordinary citizens only, not members of 
the Bush clan. With his insistent avoidance of honest discussion about his 
own indulgences and indiscretions, including his drunk-driving arrest, he 
made that contradiction all too obvious.

Lying behind Bush's personal double standard are issues not only of abusive 
authority but of class and race. The imagery he exploited in his crusade 
against juvenile offenders always focused on black, Latino and white 
working-class youth, not the sons and daughters of the fancy Dallas and 
Houston suburbs. That nasty habit hasn't changed with his elevation to the 
White House. The latest penalty to be imposed on young people arrested for 
possession of marijuana -- permanent ineligibility for federal student 
loans -- is heavily class-biased. Young scholars with backgrounds similar 
to that of Bush girls, each of whom is the beneficiary of a 
half-million-dollar trust fund, don't need federal loans.

So for many Americans, the Bush booze bust represents a question of 
elementary fairness as well as an opportunity for a few laughs. It isn't 
that the president's daughters deserve to be mocked or humiliated. They 
don't. It is simply that they must be accorded the same tough treatment 
mandated by him toward other young people, whose chances and privileges are 
otherwise far smaller than theirs. The only insurance of such equal justice 
(or injustice) is appropriate media coverage of their illegal conduct and 
its consequences.

In short, on Father's Day they will have only one man to blame for their 
present predicament.

And speaking of Daddy Dubya, perhaps his daughters' distress will encourage 
him to reconsider his punitive attitude toward those who make the same 
mistakes he once did. Had he been subjected to such a strict and 
unforgiving code, after all, this paragon of sobriety would be in no 
position to inflict his hypocrisies on the rest of us today.

About the writer Joe Conason writes about political issues for Salon News 
and other publications. 
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom