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.