W & MJ... and let's not forget coke!

This is old news, a 3-day-old NY Times story, but it seems still to be a live issue: it's the taping of Dubya when he was merely a candidate and not the guy with his hand on the button. Most of the buzz I've seen or heard focusses on his seeming-admission of marijuana use. Such an odd issue, given that every democrat who's ever run against him has more or less freely admitted at least to trying it (speaking of, does anyone else remember an interview with Bill Bradley when he was running, and Cokie Roberts gets very serious and asks "Well, I have to ask you something that a lot of people are curious about: have you ever used marijuana?" And Bradley, without hesitation says "Yes I have, and I want to know if you have." Roberts gets flustered and makes some kind of attempt to dodge the question, but Bradley persists and proceeds also to ask the cohost of whatever show it was). In a certain sense, this shouldn't be an issue because who really cares? Ah, but that is the issue, isn't it? There are people who care and, more to the point, those people are part of his base.

It was, at the same time, rather interesting to see how that vague admission was couched: "I wouldn't answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried." And later he criticized Gore saying "Baby boomers have to grow up and say, yeah, I may have done drugs, but instead of admitting it, say to kids, don't do drugs." It seems, then, that he's revealing that more or less everyone of a certain age and/or social class has tried marijuana. The difference is that conservatives go on to feel guilty about it or at least repudiate it in an attempt to curry favor with the social conservatives. Or, if you want to put a better spin on it, it's "just say no even though I didn't."

It's also a reminder of what a strange marriage the Republican party is. Theoretically, they include the libertarians who should be saying "hey, whatever, free market if people want to buy smack legally they should be able to do so." At the same time, a significant portion of the party takes a much less laissez-faire attitude toward, well, every question of conscience and would happily regulate our lives from here to, well, kingdom come.  Strange.

Perhaps even more interesting in this story, though, was cocaine. Bush was worried about the allegations of cocaine use, and when the guy with the recorder, Wead, said that Bush had in the past publicly denied using cocaine, Bush said "I haven't denied anything." Really. Very interesting. Which is to say, "I cannot tell a lie... so I won't tell you anything"? And oddly, it worked. Bush showed a teflon side himself: he refused to deny the coke allegations rather than be caught in a lie later, and his schtick of "made mistakes but learned from them" was apparently enough to deflect criticism. Or else dems just weren't mean enough. Though I do remember a picture that I had as my background for a while...

tags: political  

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