Did Cokie Roberts Ever Use Cocaine? Part II
Presidential candidate Bill Bradley followed Chatterbox's cocaine-question
playbook Sunday on ABC's This Week (see "
Did Cokie Roberts Ever Use Cocaine?"). That is to say, Bradley, when asked
by Sam Donaldson whether he'd ever used any illegal drugs, turned the tables
and asked This Week's panelists about their own drug histories.
Slate's "
Pundit Central" column has an excellent summary of the exchange, but
Chatterbox believes readers of this column will want to scrutinize the text for
every last ambiguity (for the complete transcript, click here):
BILL BRADLEY: I have used marijuana several times in my life, but never
cocaine.
COKIE ROBERTS: Senator, on guns and violence ...
SAM DONALDSON: Excuse me, Cokie. Recently in your life?
BRADLEY: No.
SAM: When you were a kid?
BRADLEY Well, yes. Right. Have you?
SAM: I think a couple of times I've tried it. And I inhaled.
BRADLEY Have you, Cokie?
COKIE: Oh, listen, I was so pregnant during those years. The senator ...
BRADLEY: George? Who wants to know?
GEORGE WILL: No.
SAM: How come you give George a pass?
GEORGE: No. I'm from the Falstaff generation.
COKIE: Can we get to guns and violence?
GEORGE: That's my Shakespeare ...
BRADLEY: Shakespeare, that's right.
COKIE: The--you wrote an Op-Ed on guns ...
Chatterbox's post-game analysis:
The context suggests that Sam, like Bradley, is admitting
only
youthful marijuana use . But it's possible he's being cagey
and is ducking the cocaine question. (It's also possible--this is
admittedly a fanciful reading--that in saying "I inhaled," Sam's referring to
both marijuana and cocaine; though if that were the case he'd probably
say, "I tried them ," not "I tried it .")
Cokie keeps trying to change the subject. That may be because she
agrees with Chatterbox that it's a phony issue. Or, it may be because
she doesn't want to answer the question. In fact, she doesn't
answer the question; she just says she was "so pregnant during those years."
This answer implies that she couldn't take drugs because she was
constantly pregnant during the 1970s. But obviously she wasn't pregnant
for the entire decade . (She has only two kids.) Hence this is not only a
non-answer , but a non-alibi . Does this mean she's hiding past
drug use? Chatterbox (who opined in his
previous item that Cokie is "almost certainly not" a past cocaine user)
guesses not. Rather, Chatterbox suspects Cokie of being too embarrassed to
admit that she's one of those goody-goodies who never tried
marijuana
or
cocaine .)
George answers "no" twice (for some reason, Sam thinks he
hasn't answered the first time). It doesn't seem especially surprising that he
never tried
marijuana or cocaine . But what does he mean when he
says he's "from the Falstaff generation"? It's possible George means that his
generation's drug of choice was alcohol (presumably not "sack," Sir John
Falstaff's favorite beverage). Specifically, George may mean that when he was
in college he drank a lot of Falstaff Beer. (For an unofficial history of the
Falstaff Brewing Co.--third-largest brewer in the United States during George's
college years--click here.) More likely, however, George is alluding to Falstaff's
observation in Henry IV, Part I
, that "the better part of
valor is discretion" (Act V, Scene iv, line 120). In this context, that might
mean that when George was young and relatively irresponsible, he didn't want to
mess with dangerous and illegal substances. Or, it might mean that today
he doesn't want to discuss the matter at all (in which case we'd need to
reinterpret his two "no"s to mean "No, I don't want to talk about this").
The other George--George Stephanopoulos--didn't have to answer the question
because he wasn't present during this segment. But George S. previously
told
this column that he'd never used cocaine . Chatterbox forgot to ask
George S. whether he'd ever used marijuana, but doesn't feel like calling him
back to ask now.
Bill (Kristol) is never around when this question gets asked.
He was out of the office when Chatterbox was phoning around for the
earlier item, and, like George S., didn't appear during this segment
yesterday. Chatterbox continues to have no
opinion about whether
he ever used illegal drugs.
Addendum:
Brian Lamb got asked Monday morning on C-SPAN's
Washington Journal whether he'd ever used cocaine or any
other illegal drug. He said
no . Also on the show was Matt
Drudge of the Drudge Report , who said, "I haven't done cocaine"
but declined to say whether he's used any illegal drugs . Through
a bizarre sequence of events,
Slate
editor Michael Kinsley
ended up being the one who asked Lamb about past drug use. Kinsley said
he'd answer the question if asked, but no one asked. (Drudge refused to
ask, and Lamb seemed about to ask, but then didn't.) However, Kinsley long ago
confessed in the New Republic's "TRB" column that he "experimented
with marijuana in the distant past," and wrote, "I deeply regret this
youthful indiscretion." (The column, "Regrets Only," is included in Kinsley's
1995 collection, Big Babies .) After taking his first puff during
freshman year in college,
I found the drug had no effect on me whatsoever, and I determined
not to experiment with illicit substances any further ... However, a few days
later I experimented with marijuana once again. On that occasion I enjoyed it a
good deal more. This youthful indiscretion I also deeply regret. During the
next several years, overcome by the spirit of scientific inquiry, I
experimented with marijuana perhaps two hundred or more times ...
Kinsley now tells Chatterbox that he also tried
cocaine .
The C-SPAN caller who got all this started identified himself as the
columnist "HC" from a satirical Website called C3F . (Click here for its
witless
Slate
spoof.) HC said he was "stoned," inspiring
this classic C-SPAN exchange:
BRIAN: Why are you stoned?
HC: Because I enjoy it.
BRIAN: What are you stoned on?
HC: Marijuana.
Disclaimer: Although Chatterbox deplores self-righteousness and
hypocrisy regarding illegal drug use, he also deplores illegal drug use itself.
Specifically regarding cocaine, a lesson of the 1980s was that its use is both
addictive and potentially deadly--two facts that were unknown to youthful baby
boomers who tried it during the 1970s. That doesn't justify the ongoing
disparity between criminal sentences for possession of powder cocaine and
possession of crack--crack is much more likely to be used by blacks, and is
punished much more harshly--but it does justify the tougher approach law
enforcement agencies take in general today, as compared to two decades ago.
