I have since had reason to rethink both reactions, of which more later. But it's worth examining why it was that I immediately found a dope-smoking, line-snorting, brewski-quaffing Bush more congenial than the same imaginary Republican cutout without those props. Call it the counterculture fallacy, a direct descendant of the Beat fallacy that preceded it by a decade: Lefties of a certain age, like me, still presume, in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, that a conservative who has messed around with mind-altering substances is somehow cooler, less straight, less, well, right-wing, than a conservative who hasn't. Leave aside the question as to whether either booze or coke qualifies as a mind-altering substance; it's reflexive for '60s vets to see Republicans who have "partied" as more enlightened than those who haven't.

Why? Part of it is that in those Greening of America salad days when you could still say "counterculture" with a straight face, conservatives came across as being opposed not just to liberation, sexuality and equality, but to sensation itself. We all knew that the Man wanted to lock down not just unorthodox actions, but unorthodox experiences. Whatever else it might have been, to seek out what Rimbaud called the "systematic derangement of the senses" was definitely to leave the paths trod by Young Republicans on campus. Our syllogism had all the logic of a Cheech and Chong exchange: Conservatives didn't get high: Ergo, getting high was progressive. The good guys got high; the bad guys didn't.

Alas, the equation of highness with holiness proved to be one of those '60s ideas that vanished in a puff of smoke. Smoking big spliffs turned out to be quite compatible with machine-gunning Bosnian Muslims. Drinking and taking drugs, it turned out, could be fun but could also lead to addictions and various pathologies -- bummer! And as for the Man, it turned out that he had been more of a party animal all along than we counter-culturists had ever dreamed. Those Episcopalian-bred stockbrokers and sturdy captains-of-industry in training liked a high old time just as much as their freaky cousins, and had more money to pay for it. Unbeknownst to pious lefties, a frat-boy party quickly sprang up next to the Rimbaud one, both of them listening to Hendrix and taking the same drugs -- but when the party was over, the frat boys still voted Republican.

That is, of course, the story of George W. Bush. But the crucial additional fact is that after the party was over, he made the penalties for doing what he did in his indiscreet youth much more severe. (The zero-tolerance law that may -- but probably won't -- bedevil Jenna was the work of his administration.) In that regard, those black-and-white '60s distinctions still hold true: At least the drug-tolerant lefties had the decency to respect the joyous impulse. Caught up in a sterile guilt-punishment formation we are all too familiar with, the conservatives hypocritically decry the very things they once eagerly did, with zero insight into why they did them. Once you realize that -- and just how profoundly formulaic, unenlightening and yes, conservative, Bush's "young and irresponsible" days were -- those impulses to welcome him into the brotherhood of roach-clip-handlers seem pretty idiotic.

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