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Strong diversion from the issues

March 21, 2005

WHEN PRESIDENT Bush included athletes' abuse of steroids as a principal plank in his 2004 State of the Union address, many reputable news outlets sensibly ignored that portion of the speech, which many thought bizarre, and some thought merely an oddly-conceived attempt to divert voters from more serious problems.

Now Karl Rove, the brain behind Bush's speech, must be chuckling as newspapers as influential as the Globe divert their readers from the Iraq war, the dollar's unprecedented plummet, the scandalous state of healthcare with banner-headline front-page stories on steroid abuse (''Hard words over steroids," March 18).

If either President Bush or the Republican Party seriously considered steroid abuse a problem of national importance, simple logic suggests that neither would have embraced steroid-abuser Arnold Schwarzenegger as the GOP's West Coast standard bearer.

KEITH ARBOUR
Cambridge

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