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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gordon A. Langston who wrote (151118)	6/5/2001 6:55:53 PM
From: ColtonGang	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Bush's double standard The president demands severe punishment for drug and alcohol offenders -- unless they're members of the Bush clan. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Joe Conason June 5, 2001 \| 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."