It was big news when President Clinton said he “never inhaled.” People laughed at the absurdity of the statement. Everybody knew he inhaled. His denial was done with a wink and a nod. I suspect that a lot of you who are reading this article also inhaled.

A younger Barack Obama wrote a good deal about his drug experimentation in his 1995 book Dreams From My Father. As you read the excerpt below, ask yourself this question: If this had been written by a Republican presidential candidate, what do you think the liberal media reaction would have been? There’s a further question: Why wasn’t the story part of the vetting process when Barack Obama was running for President? The media knew like they knew about JFK’s sexual exploits and Martin Luther King’s plagiarism. Why is Mitt Romney’s one-time hair-cutting story of 50 years ago so important and not Obama’s cocaine use?

“I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow [cocaine] when you could afford it. Not smack [heroin], though — Mickey, my potential initiator, had been just a little too eager for me to go through with that. Said he could do it blindfolded, but he was shaking like a faulty engine when he said it…

“Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed; the final fatal role of the would-be black man. Except the highs hadn’t been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind. Something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.

“I had discovered that it didn’t make any difference whether you smoked reefer in a white classmate’s sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you’d met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids… You just might be bored or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection.

“And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism. That’s how it seemed to me then, anyway.”

What’s been the reaction from the media now that the alternative media has been vetting the president’s past on a number of issues? They’re reporting the story but with no judgmental commentary. ABC News reports that it had contacted the White House for comment. The response? “The White House told ABC News that it has no comment.” End of story.

I do not believe that experimenting with drugs, even with the enthusiasm displayed by Barry Obama, as his friends called him, should disqualify a person from running for political office. My beef is with the double-minded, double-standard media. The media are reporting the story, but with editorial whimsy:

Yahoo: Bill Clinton he was not.

BuzzFeed has a handy “User’s Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama” compiled from excerpts in David Maraniss’s new book Barack Obama: The Story.

TIME magazine titled its article the “Audacity of Dope.”

And NPR has “Inhale to the chief”

ABC’s Jonathan Karl reminds us Obama has previously written about his drug use.

 Bucking moral conventions is cool . . . Conservative principles aren’t. That’s the difference.