Brought to you by the letter
by Joe Lavin


Move over Bill. We have a new scandal boy in town. George
W. Bush may or may not have used cocaine in his life, and that
is apparently big news in Washington. Now, the fact that
someone may or may not have done something can set off a
scandal. Pretty impressive, don't you think? It's insta-scandal.
No need for proof. Just add rumors and stir.


For those of you who may have missed it (And what? You're
not following the presidential election yet? It's less than 15
months away! What's wrong with you?), the story is essentially
this: Presidential candidate George W. Bush (or W as he likes to
be called) refuses to say whether he has ever used cocaine.
After sticking with his "When I was young and irresponsible, I
was young and irresponsible" line for months, he finally
backtracked recently by boasting that he could easily pass all
background checks given to federal employees. His last word
on the subject was this: "I could have passed the background
check and the standards applied on the most stringent conditions
when my dad was president of the United States -- a 15-year
period.''

Well, leave it to a Bush to answer a question in such a
convoluted way. You'd think he could answer the question like a
normal human being, but this was apparently his way of saying
he hadn't used drugs since at least 1974. It seemed an odd
response. Call me cynical, but when I'm choosing a President, I
think I would prefer the candidate who at least has the common
sense to lie about something like this.

Most commentators are trying to figure out why Bush is handling
the questions this way, but I think I might have figured it out.
Didn't he say that he wanted to make education important in his
campaign? Maybe this is just his little way of doing it. Whenever
he is asked about cocaine, perhaps he plans to answer in a way
that makes us all have to think. This time, he did it with a two-
part question. All over the country, people had to (a) remember
that his father became President in 1989 and (b.) subtract 15
from 1989 in order to realize that in 1974 W may possibly have
been using cocaine to help him discover his very own thousand
points of light.

By the time this is over, I suspect he'll have us tackling more
difficult questions to figure out when he last could have used
cocaine. Soon, we will even be able to answer complex math
questions about his possible cocaine use.

"A is traveling across a 15 mile lake in a canoe at 3 MPH. If at the seven
mile mark, A passes W, who is traveling in the opposite direction at 1
MPH while standing up naked in his canoe smoking a crack pipe, then
what year is it?"

Yes, all thanks to the Amazing W, children's test scores will
jump dramatically. Take that Japan. Americans will be the best
darned educated people in this here world.

Obviously, it would be nice if the media could concentrate on
more substantial issues, but you can hardly blame them. It's not
as if George W. Bush actually has much substance. Up until
now, he has been best known for being the rich frontrunner that
nobody knows anything about. It wasn't his job performance
that made his early polls numbers so high. It was simply that
initially many people had him confused with his father.

As for W's experience, he doesn't actually have much of that either -- just
four and a half years as Governor of Texas, a state where the legislature
dominates politics and where apparently the Governor's primary
responsibility is to reject as many stays of execution as possible. Let's
face it. Bush is still something of a blank slate, and unfortunately for him
the cocaine rumors are starting to take up some valuable space on that
slate.

But will Bush's apparent courting of the Republican cocaine
addict vote really hurt him? Probably not all that much,
considering the amount of money he has raised and the fact that
a scandal-weary public seems willing to ignore something that
might have happened over 25 years ago. True, he looks like a
hypocrite for his tough stand on drugs, but it doesn’t seem like
all that many people care. And who knows? Maybe this is just
part of his "big tent" policy of "compassionate conservatism." Is
there room enough in that tent for both the religious right and
former cocaine users?

We'll just have to wait and see, but for his sake I hope he went
out and bought a really big tent.