Privacy? Good Idea!

The London Times, anticipating Barack Obama’s visit to Europe, writes:

The White House was rocked yesterday by claims that the daughter of Joe Biden, the Vice-President, was shown on video snorting cocaine.

The video purports to show Ashley Biden, 27, snorting lines of white powder at a house party in her home state of Delaware.

It surfaced days after Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, declared that the United States shared the blame for Mexico’s violent drug wars. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Mrs Clinton said on a trip to Mexico.

“Rocked”? I don’t know. The White House certainly wasn’t rocked by anything that appeared in American newspapers, which studiously ignored the story, with the exception of a couple of tabloids.

I’m not very interested in Ashley Biden’s cocaine use (assuming the woman in the video is in fact Ms. Biden). But then, I wasn’t very interested in the Bush twins’ underage drinking or the drug-related arrest of Sarah Palin’s daughter’s boyfriend’s mother, either. Yet both were major news stories. Does anyone seriously believe that if there had been a video of Barbara or Jenna Bush snorting cocaine during their father’s administration, the press would have refused to write about it?

It’s nice that our newspapers have decided to respect the privacy of people like a Vice President’s children. It would be even nicer if they extended the same courtesy to members of both parties.

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