SLEAZE WE WANT, SLEAZE WE GET

Maybe I can save us all a little time. Here's a questionnaire for future
presidential aspirants:

Are you now or have you ever been a user of recreational drugs?

Are you now or have you ever been involved in an adulterous relationship?

Are you now or have you ever been a cigarette smoker? Tax cheat? Bed wetter?

Any candidate who answers yes to one of the above questions would be
remanded to the custody of federal marshals.

In case you haven't figured out yet where I'm going with this, here it is in
words of one syllable: Cut George some slack. George W. Bush, I mean. Seems
like lately, ol' Gee Dubya can hardly poke his head out from behind his
money pile without somebody asking him if he's ever used cocaine.

After first steadfastly refusing to respond to the question, the
front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination has begun dribbling out
bits and pieces of an answer. No drug use in the last seven years, he said.
And then: none in the last 25. The D.C. press corps and the political foes
of George W. Bush are smelling blood.

Both statements, of course, fall far short of full denial.

So naturally, the Washington press corps and Bush's political rivals are
smelling blood. Meantime, party poobahs are begging him to come clean. And
me, I'm just sitting here shaking my head at the silliness of it all.

I'll grant you, it's difficult to feel a lot of sympathy for Bush. Indeed,
at one level, it's possible to argue that the question of drugs is a fair
one, given that the candidate himself has, for political purposes, trotted
out information on both his marital fidelity and his past heavy drinking.
Having declaimed so freely on those intimate topics, Bush seems disingenuous
at best in piously insisting that an inquiry about drug use is out of
bounds. His silence leads to the unavoidable impression that he's a guy with
something -- a coke pipe, perhaps? -- to hide. The lack of answers only
fuels the demand for them.

I buy that argument as far as it goes. Problem is, it doesn't go far enough
- -- not nearly -- to erase a nagging sense that this line of inquiry
ultimately says less about Bush than it does about the news media. In other
words, the folks who first posed the question and now keep it in the headlines.

To date, there's no hard evidence -- none -- to suggest that our George used
coke during his long-ago youthful revelries. And even if there were, I'm at
a loss to understand what this would say about the sort of president he
might make someday or even the sort of man he is right now. I can't see
where the public interest is served here. Heck, as near as I can tell, the
public has no interest. I mean, nobody's talking about it in the checkout
line at my market. How about yours?

And if the inquiry has no bearing on anything of substance, if the public
has no burning desire or need to hear an answer, then the question begs a
question: Why? Why are we asking this?

The answers, unfortunately, are myriad. We're asking because Richard Nixon
lied and connived and stole from us the ability to unquestioningly trust.
We're asking because Gary Hart's brazen sexual hypocrisy opened the door for
public investigation of private lives. And yes, we're asking because Bill
Clinton's behavior killed the last taboos, made it seem as if there was no
longer any question too probing, too private, too lowdown, nasty and rude,
to ask.

So we're asking. But in the asking, I think, we become part of the problem
we purport to abhor. Meaning the rising tide of sleaze in American culture.
That tide has fed the creeping tabloidization of news media so that
trivialities and titillation now fill pages and broadcast space we once
reserved for news.

It should be our mission to arrest -- not advance -- that trend.

And if this is sometimes impossible, so be it. If news -- real news --
occasionally requires digging through trash then fine, dig we must.

The problem is not that we sometimes get dragged through sewage by the news.
The problem is that too often it gets dragged there by us.

Leonard Pitts Jr.'s column runs in Living & Arts every Thursday and
Saturday. To call Pitts, dial 1-800-457-3881. Please dial 1-800 even if you
live in South Florida.