News - Should the Bush twins' behavior be an issue for the media?

George W. Bush, who went to great lengths during last year's presidential campaign to conceal his own alcohol abuse and drunk-driving conviction, is now faced with the dilemma of how to handle his twin daughters' penchant for underage drinking in public. My, how the chicks have come home to roost.

As the world now knows, 19-year-old Jenna Bush and her twin sister Barbara were cited by police two weeks ago for trying to purchase alcohol with fake ID cards at an Austin restaurant. A month earlier, Jenna had been ticketed for drinking beer in a local bar. And news reports indicate that both Bush daughters have had previous run-ins with the law related to fake IDs and underage alcohol possession.

Assuming that they have privately engaged in similar behavior, it would appear that the first twins clearly have an alcohol problem.

In raising his children, our illegitimate president obviously ignored Parenting Lesson No. 1 concerning alcohol: Don't be an emotionally distant knee-walking drunk for most of your life unless you want to run the risk of your kid being one, too.

The public nature of the Bush twins' bad behavior makes them worthy targets of the scandal-hungry media. Even so, hypocritical conservatives are pounding their chests and screaming about how "liberals" are exploiting the Bush daughters' alcohol problems for political purposes. Their "everybody does it" defense reveals a cavalier disdain for personal accountability, but hey, we're talking about the children of a Republican president — normal rules don't apply. These same right-wingers have made an industry of apologizing for W's own unspecified "youthful indiscretions" even as they continue to blather about morality and family values, casting stones at the rest of us from their own glass houses.

Underage drinking is a serious matter. The Bush daughters' antics are not simply innocent mistakes blown out of proportion by a liberal-leaning media. These young women must deal with the consequences of their illegal behavior, and they must adjust to the fact that that they are public figures, like it or not.

The bottom line is that the Bush daughters are seemingly possessed of the same diminished intelligence as their father. Most children of prominent people are smart enough to keep their indiscretions tightly under wraps. For the daughters of the president of the United States to indulge their illegal vices in public view is pure idiocy.

But as the saying goes, like father, like daughter.??