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."
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.