“I know nothing about Iran Contra. I was out of the loop.” George Herbert Walker Bush said, as Vice-president under Reagan, when asked about Ollie North.

    “Our intelligence showed weapons of mass destruction. Not my fault.” George W. Bush said, when asked how he got it so wrong.

    “Was that wrong?” Reggie Bush asked, when told accepting money from an agent while he was at USC could land him and his school in trouble.

    Above are examples of the Bush Defense, meaning that if your name is Bush you can claim a lack of knowledge about things you should know about, therefore absolving you of all guilt. For instance in example number one, when the elder Bush, who was director of the CIA prior to being Vice-President, says he is out of the loop, he means he has no knowledge, even though he appointed many of the intelligence gatherers at the Agency and even though he sat in on meetings with Mr. North. 

    Carry this further. When the younger Bush says he invaded Iraq on false intelligence he is using the Bush Defense, a nice maneuver considering one of the platforms he ran on was strengthening the CIA and its fact gathering capacity.

    Now with Reggie, the Bush Defense comes to college at a private school where being connected and mingling with those in the know is one of its appeals. So when Reggie says he didn’t know about any dealings his step-dad had with Micheal Micheals (the agent’s real name) he’s using the Bush Defense. In this case it’s the “it happened under my nose but my nose happens to be big so I can’t know everything going on under it” version. Where USC uses the Bush Defense is when they say “Well, yeah, we knew there was an agent in the locker room but there’s no law against that. Besides we can’t be expected to know what parents and step-dads are doing behind closed doors.” That is similar to George the Elder’s Iran-Contra denial. “Yes, I heard Ollie talking about freeing the hostages and yes, I heard Ollie talking about possible arms for Iran but I shouldn’t be expected to put two and two together.”

     The Bush Defense only works if you assume the defendants have a certain head-in-the-clouds manner about them. When describing George and George, Jr., yes, a case can be made but as for Reggie, when he had hotel and credit card receipts, not as much.

     And when USC tries to trot out the Bush Defense of the George Senior – “out of the loop, how could we have known?” variety, it’s embarrassing. It’s especially embarrassing if you bill yourself as “The World’s Leading Private Research University.” How can you call yourself a leader in research when you don’t even know what the most famous student on your campus is doing? We’re saying this to the president, Stephen B. Sample. Yes, just like the Michael Michaels name above, Stephen B. Sample is a real name… and also the president of a RESEARCH university! 

        It is embarrassing, yes, if USC relies on the Bush Defense too much. For one, it’s hard to claim to be a smart, sharp going-to-find-out-the-information institution and yet say “Duh, we were in the dark.” For two, a sharp, smart private research institution has to compete for contracts from other smart, sharp schools and one of those schools is up-the-road Stanford. And here’s the kicker. You know who broke the Bush story, the guys who found out about Reggie and parents receiving nearly $ 280,000 in cash, rent and gifts? Yahoo Sports, that’s the who. These guys found out information people at USC couldn’t find. To what school did the nerds at Yahoo Sports go? You guessed it – Stanford. Uh, oh… rock and hard place.