US ALCOHOL LAWS - Would drive anyone to drink

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Current News : One Thread

ET - Sunday 3 June 2001

America's alcohol laws would drive anyone to drink The 19-year-old Bush twins were condemned as having a 'problem' after being caught trying to buy margaritas with fake ID. In fact, says Mark Steyn the fault lies with a regulatory megalomaniac - Elizabeth Dole.

I raise a toast to Jenna and Barbara Bush. Or I would, if I could get a drink around here. The teenage Bush babes are all over the papers for attempting to buy margaritas with fake IDs at a Mexican restaurant in Austin, Texas, last Tuesday night.

This comes two weeks after Jenna was ordered to undergo alcohol counselling and perform community service for having been found in possession of a bottle of beer. The judge who passed that sentence has now told reporters that it could be revoked and a more serious punishment sought.

According to Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of America's Leftie dronefest The Nation, Jenna Bush has "a problem". "Our DWI President" - that's Driving While Intoxicated - "has set a very, very bad example for his impressionable girls," tuts Margery Eagan at The Boston Herald. "The apples have not fallen far from the tree."

Just for the record, the apples weren't driving, weren't intoxicated, and they didn't fall near the tree or anywhere else, although they might have been walking a little unsteadily and mangling three-syllable words. But, then, so does their dad. And, if Jenna Bush has a "problem", then what does Euan Blair, passed out in his own vomit in the heart of our nation's capital, have?

No, the only "problem" that Jenna has is getting a drink. She and her twin, Barbara, are 19, and, in all 50 US states, it's illegal to drink alcohol under the age of 21. Jenna can drive, vote, marry, own a house, join the army, buy firearms, and hop a flight to Vermont with a lesbian, get one of the state's new "civil union" licences and spend the night having as much sex as she wants.

She can do everything an adult can except go into a Tex-Mex restaurant and wash down her incendiary enchiladas with a margarita. She could buy a handgun, shoot up the liquor store and steal the beer. But she cannot walk in and purchase any.

So Jenna and Barbara are obliged to have "fake ID". To the average Telegraph reader, "fake ID" probably sounds fairly exotic - the sort of thing you see in thrillers, where the guy needs to get out of town in a hurry, meets a furtive-looking fellow down by the waterfront, hands over $10,000 in small bills, and says he'll need it by Thursday. But, in America, fake ID is now as common as, well, real ID.

In college towns, getting a false driver's licence is as easy as getting a haircut. If you're a manufacturer of small 2in x 3in cards or you own a photo booth, you'll be able to retire on the swollen fake ID market. And the economic benefits don't stop there.

Fake IDs have prompted the development of machines that can detect fake IDs. The shares of one such company, Intelli-Check Inc, went up 20 per cent on the news of Jenna's latest run-in with the law. These developments are relatively recent. Until 1984, some states had a legal drinking age of 21, some of 18, and some had no restrictions at all.

But then a lunatic control freak in the Federal Transportation Department decided that she knew better than anyone the age at which people could drink. Although she lacked the constitutional authority to legislate in this area, she had some financial muscle.

She informed all 50 states that she would take away the federal government's highway funding from any jurisdiction that refused to raise the drinking age to 21. South Dakota went all the way to the Supreme Court, but the crazed regulatory megalomaniac won and took her legal team out to celebrate, presumably with Diet Coke.

The maniac's name was Elizabeth Dole, and two years ago she resurfaced, as a Republican presidential candidate. On the stump, the helmet-haired Mrs Dole conceded that she wasn't happy with the legal drinking age of 21 that she'd forced on the nation.

No, these days Nurse Ratched thinks it should be 24. Twenty-four! It would make more sense the other way round: instead of starting drinking at 24, you should stop drinking when you're 24, sober up and start going to work. Come to think of it, for anyone over 24, the opportunities for social drinking in most parts of America are already pretty minimal. In my corner of New Hampshire, they're virtually non-existent.

My mother, who's Belgian and partial to a Stella, was here last year and we swung by the local diner for lunch. She asked for a beer. The waitress looked at her like she was a crack whore. No alcohol. If we'd wanted to, we could have driven 50 miles to the nearest "sports bar" and sat in a basement with guys with no teeth.

I would say that my small town of a few hundred souls is fairly typical: one third are "alcoholics", another third are "recovering alcoholics" and the remaining third are divided between abstemious natives who drink sugary soda and abstemious incomers from downcountry who drink herbal teas in ever more implausible flavours (elderberry pepperoni, etc).

The "alcoholics" buy a case of Bud, drive their trucks deep into the woods and drink it alone sitting on a rock, which is about the only place that they won't be given disapproving looks.

The "recovering alcoholics" meet at the library once a month, when they put a big sign out on the road saying: "Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting Tonight 7pm". It's not terribly anonymous - everyone can see Earl's truck parked outside - but then these days most "alcoholics" don't want to be anonymous.

All kinds of folks now claim to be "recovering alcoholics", even though, in a typical week, they never drank what the average Telegraph columnist gets through by 11am. William Hague would be unelectable here. Okay, I know, he's unelectable over there, too. But what I mean is, if a 14-pints-and-proud-of-it guy entered a presidential primary, he'd get marginally better press than a serial paedophile.

Everyone talks glibly about "the failure of Prohibition" - meaning the years from 1920 to 1933, when the 18th Amendment criminalised drinking and got nothing to show for it but organised crime. But, if you look at the broader picture, the Prohibition movement, which began in the early 19th century, has been a stunning success.

Americans today drink far less than they did in 1800, when beer was affectionately known as "liquid bread" and every farm made its own hard cider. The products that especially exercised the Prohibitionists - rum, gin and other "hard liquor" (or "spirits", in the more convivial British designation) - are headed for extinction.

American alcohol consumption is lower than almost any other industrialised nation - lower than New Zealand, Britain, Australia; barely half that of Spain, Germany, Ireland and France. On the other hand, America has 164 alcohol-related support groups per million citizens, 20 times the number of support groups as France. America isn't addicted to alcohol, it's addicted to alcohol support groups.

I have lived in both Britain and America and I have no wish to go down the Anglo-Celtic route, where villages that no longer support a store, post office or church have four packed pubs. I don't miss the baying, mooning, urinating and pavement pizzas. But immaturity comes in different guises. In America, adulthood is so deferred that many Americans exist in a state of perpetual childhood, 300lb toddlers waddling down the street sipping super-sized sodas from plastic bottles with giant nipples.

It's at least arguable that it is healthier for Jenna and Barbara to have a couple of glasses of wine than the sugary Pepsis and Mountain Dews that the law all but forces them to drink. Excessive late-teen soda intake may well be the reason why so many chipmunk-cheeked, perky-breasted high-school cheerleaders are bloated, lardbutts by 22.

As New Hampshirites know, it doesn't have to be like that. Just across the border in Quebec, they have the same relaxed attitude to alcohol that distinguishes the Catholic countries of Continental Europe. You can drink at 18, the bars are open till 3am, and the danseuses nues weigh under 250lbs.

The jurisdictions that have the least alcoholism are those in which drinking is most socially acceptable and integrated into family life. In Quebec and France, they enjoy drinking. In England and Ireland, they enjoy getting drunk. In the United States, they enjoy getting drunk on insane stigmatisatory excess.

It's obvious that Jenna Bush is going to be hounded by the press every time she's within a hundred yards of a cocktail olive. So she may as well become a role model, not for victims of alcoholism, but for victims of the Dole terror. According to polls, the majority of 18- to 21-year-olds have broken Dole's Law in the past month.

Mrs Dole's discriminatory, targeted mini-Prohibition deserves to be overturned. Jenna Bush doesn't need alcohol counselling or community service. After the past month, she needs a good stiff drink. And, if she's ever in this part of New Hampshire, I'll happily drive her over the border to Magog, Quebec, and buy her one.

-- Anonymous, June 02, 2001

Answers

Dole should take a pineapple and sit on it.

[I was going to be really rude here, but it occurs to me that someone reading this might like the bitch.]

-- Anonymous, June 03, 2001


NYPost

TRAPPED IN HER DAD'S SHADOW

By JORDAN SMITH and ANDY GELLER

June 3, 2001 -- Jenna, at an Austin courtroom, was fined $51.25 and sentenced to community service in May.APSorority sisters at the University of Texas say that many in the liberal town of Austin make trouble for Jenna, seen dancing with dad at the inaugural ball, to show their dislike for Dubya.

Reuters: Jenna Bush is caught in a trap.

The fun-loving half of the Double-Trouble Twins elected to stay home and attend the University of Texas at Austin so she could live as normal a life as possible.

But Austin, a liberal oasis in a vast land of macho cattlemen, is polarized over her daddy, the president and former Texas governor.

Half the people like George W. Bush, and half hate him.

And so, when the 19-year-old Jenna does something that would otherwise be ignored in another college freshman, the half that doesn't like Daddy drops the dime on her, her friends say.

And that is exactly what happened this week when Jenna and her more serious twin, Barbara, were cited for underage drinking, they say.

"She's cool, and she's funny. She's just trying to be a normal freshman in college and do what other college kids do," said a member of her Kappa Alpha Beta sorority.

"It's just ridiculous that people are giving her all this attention because they don't like her dad."

Adds a bartender on the city's popular East Sixth Street strip: "If it would embarrass her father, I'd do anything."

Being in the national spotlight is not something Jenna and Barbara have ever sought.

They value their privacy intensely, and their reluctance to become public figures was a big issue when the family was deciding whether Dubya should run for the presidency.

Barbara, named after her paternal grandmother, decided to follow her in her father's, her grandfather's and her great-grandfather's footsteps to Yale.

Jenna, named after her maternal grandmother, decided to attend the University of Texas and remain in Austin, where the family had occupied the Governor's Mansion for five years.

She wanted a more normal life, friends say.

But for a college freshman in Austin - or anywhere in Texas, for that matter - normal means drinking.

A study by the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse found that, although the legal drinking age in Texas is 21, 60 percent of college kids aged 18 to 20 had drank alcohol in the previous month.

Each weekend night, 20,000 to 30,000 college kids descend on the East Sixth Street, a strip five blocks long that has 55 bars and restaurants.

Jenna, whose main college activity seems to be her sorority, is no stranger to the strip.

In fact, for the last three months, the Esther's Follies comedy club has been running a skit in which a Jenna character stumbles across the stage and is about to flash her breasts when the Secret Service grabs her.

"We were doing this before she got busted, because we all know she's a big party girl," said Kerry Awn, one of the actors.

Jenna was having a beer at the strip's Cheers Shot Bar on April 27 when she was ticketed for being a minor in possession of alcohol, or MIP.

On May 16, she pleaded no contest, was fined $51.25 in court costs, and sentenced to eight hours of community service - which she has completed - and six hours of alcohol-awareness classes.

Her sorority sister, who asked that her name not be used, said everyone gets MIPs.

"I've gotten two in one month. Everyone has," she said. "Jenna's living the life of a normal freshman in college."

Jenna got in trouble Tuesday night when she allegedly tried to buy a margarita at Chuy's Tex-Mex restaurant using someone else's driver's license.

The restaurant's manager, Mia Lawrence, recognized her and called the cops, who suggested she confiscate the fake ID and leave it at that.

But Lawrence demanded that the police "do what they normally do."

Two days later, Jenna was charged with trying to buy liquor with a fake ID, which carries a $500 fine and a 30-day suspension of her driver's license.

Her twin, Barbara, who was with her, and a friend, Jesse Day-Wickham, both received MIPs.

Patrons of Chuy's charged that the restaurant management was really trying to make trouble for Dubya.

"The only reason that Chuy's called the police is because the management doesn't like Bush, and that's not fair," said customer John Ormberget.

In fact, The Post learned that Lawrence told a friend that is just what happened - she doesn't like the president, so she didn't cut his daughter any slack. Lawrence could not be reached for comment.

-- Anonymous, June 03, 2001


I wonder when the resteraunt's next health inspection is due....

-- Anonymous, June 03, 2001

ROTF!

-- Anonymous, June 03, 2001

Moderation questions? read the FAQ