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A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

The Bush Cartel has an obsession with everyone else’s sex lives -- but do they meet the same standards that they set up for others?

The buzz about the Janet Jackson half-time performance shows no sign of abating. Part of the complaint appears to be, that while that type of performance might work in other venues, it was inappropriate for such a large nationally televised audience that might include children. Of course, Viacom, which owns MTV AND CBS isn't likely to suffer any real backlash from the Bushes. After all, CBS refused to air a MoveOn.org ad that showed how Bush is really taking away the future of our children, so the Bush Cartel is just putting up a stink for show. The Bush Cartel never stabs a loyal media outlet in the back.

Yet, not too long before the Super Bowl, there was another nationally televised event where the main star delved deeply, and inappropriately, into the issue of sex: the State of the Union.

In a speech widely viewed as ineffective, the President paid lip service to key issues like the economy. However, he did devote precious time to the issue of sex when he discussed abstinence and gay marriage.

Conservatives, like Bush, are obsessed with other people’s sex lives. So, today we pose the question: what standards apply to them?

Let’s start with abstinence, a favorite subject of President Bush. Clearly, the issue of not having sex is critically important to Bush since he discussed it in the State of the Union. Bush wants people, especially children, to learn abstinence. We wonder: does that same standard apply to the Bush family and the White House staff. Not too long ago, there was a great hullabaloo about the impending marriage of Ari Fleischer who routinely espoused the Administration’s viewpoint on social issues like abstinence. Yet, the national media never asked how the Bush abstinence policy applied to his life. And what about his successor, the unmarried, but engaged, Scott McClellan. Does he have to be abstinent? Condi Rice isn’t married. Is she abstinent? And that leads us to the Bush children. Do the Bush twins have an abstinence only policy? And what about the family “heart throb”: George P. Bush.

Some will say this is their private life and should be off-limits. We would normally agree. But George W. Bush put this issue on the table in prime time. He is the one who started the conversation about our sex lives. So, when it comes to abstinence, do the Bushes practice what they preach?

The same standard needs to be applied to the Bush family when it comes to the sanctity of marriage. In fact, anyone who propounds to support abstinence outside of marriage, really should have a clean slate before they start preaching to others. The poster child in the Bush family for the sanctity of marriage has to be Neil Bush.

Neil, the President’s younger brother, recently divorced his wife of over 20 years because he was having an affair with a woman who was a volunteer for his mother. He has proposed to the new woman. Even better, the divorce proceedings discovered that while traveling on business during his marriage, Neil was often visited by women who "just showed up to have sex with him." That's right, they just unexplainably knocked on his door when he was traveling overseas, offered to have sex with him, according to Neil, and then left the room. He obliged.

Recently, Neil was ordered to undergo DNA testing to determine if he fathered a child by a woman with whom he was having an affair.

Then there were all those rumors about Poppy Bush and a young female aide who would travel with him during many of his Vice-Presidential trips. Somehow, she disappeared when the press tried to question her about the allegations. Were she and Poppy Bush involved in an abstinence only relationship? And what did Barbara have to say about it?

And, of course, rumors of romps with a Florida state official continue to haunt Jeb Bush.

With this going on in his own family, the President boldly proclaims his vow to "preserve marriage" through abstinence outside of marriage.

Maybe he should talk to the Republican caucus in Congress. There appear to be a lot of adulterous, non-abstinent members of that group. Heck, Newt Gingrich was "shtooping" a Congressional staffer while on his second marriage and demanding the impeachment of Clinton for oral sex! But Newt made his mistress an honest woman by divorcing his second wife and making the young damsel, more than 20 years his junior, the third Mrs. Gingrich.

Of course, the congressman who almost succeeded Gingrich, Bob Livingston, had to quit before he assumed the post of speaker because Larry Flynt outed him as a serial philanderer. The only reason Dennis Hastert became Speaker of the House was because he is more interested in a juicy turkey leg than a woman's leg. He was,apparently, the only guy the House Republicans could find who was more interested in the groaning board than groaning on a bed with admiring young lasses.

And we won't even get into the number of gay Republicans in Congress who regularly support the Bush agenda, despite Bush's use of homophobia as a wedge issue.

When it comes to worrying about marriage and gay relationships, the Bush family really needs to clean out its own closet -- and the GOP bedroom -- before they start looking at the sex lives of others. If the Bushes and their right wing pals want to worry about everyone else's sex lives, their own bedroom romps become fair game.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

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