Hypocrisy in the US Navy

Here's a posting by Tom Ricks:

The Naval Academy has made a terrible mistake by waiving its "zero tolerance" of drug use for a football player who tested positive for marijuana use. What exactly makes the Navy, after punishing so many sailors for puffing a little weed, think this guy should be an officer? The Academy's leadership -- and I am guessing the entire Navy's -- looks like a bunch of hypocrites.

I find nothing new here. For time immemorial the upper classes have insisted that they not be subject to the rules applied to the "little people". I remember a famous case in Vancouver several decades ago when the former Chief Justice of the BC Supreme Court broke out of a "alcohol treatment facility", got plastered, and got behind the wheel, and was arrested for drunk driving. Here's the guy who applied the rules. What happened to him for flagrantly breaking the rules? Nothing! He got a break and was simply sent back to the detox centre to finish his time.

I remember reading a story about some poor sucker who was hungry in the Great Depression and stole an apple. In the early 1960s he was finally being released from prison for his "grand larceny" of trying to feed himself. Meanwhile there newspapers were full of Wall Street flim-flam artists who got slaps on the wrist for defrauding little old ladies and charitable institutes out of their life savings (similar to the Bernie Madoff scandal). Since these were "white collar" crimes, the upper classes were sent to country club "prisons" to golf away their time while the guys who knock over the corner store -- and this guy who stole an apple -- rot in hellholes reserved for the lower classes.

I remember working on a military project and reading through the specs for the new fleet of maritime coastal defence vessels and noted that the enlisted sailors got a tiny footlocker in which to store their gear while the officers got spacious closets and lockers. I was struck by the fact that an officer got more space to store his "liquor ration" than the enlisted guys got for all of their stuff. This in a democracies "navy". I found that hard to swallow.