DAD SLINKS OFF INTO SILENCE ON ALCOHOL

What if First Daughters Jenna and Barbara Bush had been caught
lighting up a joint? Would the respectable media play down that story
the way they have the Bush children's illegal purchases of alcohol?

Hardly, because marijuana is an officially proscribed demon drug
while alcohol is a mainstay of the culture, promoted incessantly as
an essential ingredient of the good life.

Marijuana use, the drug war zealots insist, despite considerable
evidence to the contrary, leads inevitably to the harder stuff.
That's why the U.S. Supreme Court won't risk the health of dying
cancer patients with a few tokes of physician prescribed pot. But
those margaritas that the Bush girls grew up to prefer, heck that's
just child's play, something all college students do and soon grow
out of.

Not so their father, unless you think abusing alcohol until the age
of 40 is still child's play. Had he hit someone on that night when he
was arrested for DUI, it might have undermined George W.'s charmed
ascension to the presidency.

Sorry, but I'm with the tabloids on this one. It is big news that the
commander in chief of the drug war has not been able to control his
own daughters' illegal behavior.

Obviously, Bush has not followed his own advice, offered while
announcing the revving up of the drug war, that parents take more
responsibility for their children's conduct.

Should the Bush children have gone to church more often to be exposed
to those faith-based anti-drug and alcohol programs that the
president embraced? Did the Bush parents always know where their
children were? Perhaps the Bush twins were permitted to watch too
many Hollywood movies.

Imagine the vituperation that would have been visited upon the
Clinton family if Chelsea, like Jenna, had used the Secret Service to
pick up an underage boyfriend, accused of public intoxication, from
jail. But when it comes to family values, Republicans' messed-up
personal lives are chuckled off as just another American-as-apple-pie
growing up experience.

Did not the president's mother elicit howls of laughter from her
Junior League audience when she made passing reference to her son's
alcohol addiction on the very day that her granddaughters were
charged with breaking the law? "He is getting back some of his own,"
Grandma Bush said, with more than a trace of wonderment that her son
George W., the underachiever and, by his own admission, often
inebriated prankster, is now the president of us all.

But alcoholism wasn't really funny for George W. or he wouldn't have
had to go cold turkey and work white-knuckle hard these past 15 years
at staying sober. Alcoholism is one of the nation's leading problems
and when then-Gov. Bush signed a "zero tolerance" law in 1997 on
underage drinking, the reason offered was that Texas led the U.S. in
alcohol-related fatalities.

More than 100,000 people die each year from alcohol, so controlling
its use is of public importance. This guy as governor and president
has responded to problems of substance abuse by acting to throw even
more people into jail although that course has already given us the
largest per-capita prison population in the world. Yet, when his own
daughter now stands but one more arrest away from a possible six
months in the slammer because of the law then-Gov. Bush signed, the
president is speechless.

"The president views this as a family matter, a private matter, and
he will treat it as such," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer huffed.

Not so fast.

Alcoholism is the social problem that this president best
understands, and instead of slinking off into silence, he should
provide a public example of what he has claimed parenting is all
about.

This is the time to talk honestly to his daughters and the nation
about the lessons of substance abuse, and particularly, whether the
tough law and order approach is just dumb. Unless, of course, he
really believes that his daughter would benefit from six months
behind bars for ordering yet another margarita.

Maybe the drinking age should be dropped to 18 years old, as most of
the Bush daughters' classmates seem to feel. Why make criminals of
the young, most of whom are quite responsible in making their own
decisions about when and what to drink? But isn't that even truer of
an adult cancer patient who uses marijuana to ward off nausea?