THE HIGH ON COKE

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz joins those trying to make a campaign
issue out of George Bush Jr.'s past cocaine use while maintaining the media
code of silence about W.J. Clinton's much deeper involvement in the coke
culture. Kurtz' spin continues the fiction that the only drug questions
about Clinton concerned his use of marijuana while a student.

Interestingly, Kurtz also writes: "Questions about the personal lives of
candidates have become far more common in the hyper-competitive media
climate of the '90s. But they are often triggered by specific allegations,
such as when Gennifer Flowers charged in 1992 that she had had a
long-running affair with candidate Bill Clinton." Kurtz is apparently
unaware of Flowers' more recent allegation that Clinton offered her cocaine.

More important that the political double-standard, though, is the fact that
not only are both leading presidential candidates former users of drugs for
which hundreds of thousands of Americans have received criminal penalties,
including draconian prison sentence, but that the incumbent was closely
connected to major Arkansas drug operatives.

Here's how Kurtz brushes off this issue: "Other politicians, including Vice
President Gore, have acknowledged past marijuana use with no apparent
penalty. But an admission of having tried cocaine, the focus of major
federal anti-drug initiatives and much inner-city violence, could be more
problematic."

For one person to end up in prison for years for doing what someone else
can do and still be elected president is not problematic, it is obscene.