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In bygone decades, profiteering presidential brothers evoked national indignation, their misconduct symbolizing not merely the erosion of our civic virtue but the personal deficiencies of their elected siblings. Richard M. Nixon's parvenu image was only reinforced by the eventual disclosure that Don Nixon in 1956 had borrowed $205,000 from Howard Hughes for a line of "Nixonburgers." The wisdom of entrusting the White House to a Georgia peanut farmer was revisited when, in the late 1970s, Billy Carter became a lobbyist for Libya and introduced his own line of "Billy" beer. Bill Clinton, admittedly, had only a half brother, but Roger Clinton's general turpitude--his drug conviction, his soliciting money with promises of presidential pardons--seemed to parallel his semi-sibling's emergence as the first president to be fellated by a White House intern in the Oval Office and to have his DNA tested for a (unrelated) paternity suit.

What, then, to make of the lack of national outrage over the latest doings of Neil Bush, brother of the current President? Of Neil's current ventures in crony capitalism, it is hard to know which is the less seemly. Made public last November, as part of the messy divorce proceedings against his wife, Sharon, was a contract between Neil and China's Grace Semiconductor firm, according to which Neil was to be paid more than $400,000 per year to serve on Grace's board and to offer it "expertized advices." (Grace's cofounder, Jiang Mianheng, just happens to be the son of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.) A second contract documented Neil's $60,000-per-year consultancy to Crest Investments, whose top partners, John Howland and Jamal Daniel, also are principals of New Bridge Strategies, the well-wired Houston firm seeking to cash in through lobbying and advisory services to corporations hoping for contracts to rebuild war-torn Iraq. Also made public in the divorce proceedings were Neil's eyebrow-raising "sex romps" through Asia, where attractive women would frequently turn up outside his hotel-room door to solace him in his loneliness.

But yesteryear's civic disdain seems to have been displaced by European-style cynicism. The press has greeted the revelations with the sort of idle fascination that the British tabloids display toward the marital and business follies of the non-reigning royals. In fact, the comparison to the British monarchy is hardly far-fetched. The Bushes became America's quasi-royal family in 2000, when George H.W. Bush was succeeded, after an eight-year interregnum, by his eldest son. The notion of an American imperium, bolstered by military conquests in the Middle East, likewise created a role for an imperial family. Following the White House success in the 2002 midterm elections, during which the invasion of Iraq had been all but proclaimed, the New York Times offered a regal analogy: that it was "hardly too early to examine the nature of the Bush dynasty, and why--at the moment at least--it has largely escaped the antagonism that led the founders to fear any hereditary power or titles." The lack of outrage at Neil Bush's exploits would lend support to such a theory of neo-dynastic emergence, in which Neil has come to be seen, in the eyes of the public, not as a mere presidential brother but as something akin to a hereditary royal. Princes will be princes, after all--and it's not as if anyone can do anything about it anyway.

In a family of financial buccaneers, Neil s bravado has always stood out. His first company, JNB (Oil) Exploration, which was set up in 1983, primarily explored the bank accounts of Colorado G.O.P. heavies such as Ken Good, who gave Neil $100,000 to invest in commodities, and Bill Walters, whose bank gave JNB the line of credit ($1.5 million) that paid Neil's salary. After Neil became a director of the Denver-based Silverado Savings & Loan in 1985, he managed to secure $200 million in loans--before long in default for Good and Waiters while not seeing fit to disclose his own relationships to them. After Silverado went bankrupt, Neil set up Apex Energy with a personal investment of $3,000, which was fattened by a $2.3 million loan guarantee from the federal Small Business Association. Like JNB earlier, Apex failed, leaving only minor assets to repay the large SBA-guaranteed loan, most of which had to be shouldered by taxpayers. From there, he set up another vehicle, Interlink Management, which sought business opportunities for U.S. firms in the Far East. Interlink was half owned by Thailand's wealthy CP Group, the same company that later got in trouble for trying to buy influence in the Clinton Administration through large contributions to the Democratic Party. Through Interlink, Neil earned more than $1 million from the CP Group alone for introductions and advice.

When the elder George Bush was simply a first-term elected president, the misadventures of his third son were no laughing matter. In 1990 the Silverado scandal was front-page news for an entire year. As Silverado slid toward a billion-dollar bankruptcy and a federal bailout, Time magazine wrote of "mounting public fury" against Neil Bush, while a Newsweek poll reported that seven in ten Americans considered his misdeeds to be "very" or "somewhat" damaging to his father's reputation. The commentator Edward Luttwak joked that, as then-President Bush shook his fist at Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, he in fact was "happily content to see photographs of Saddam Hussein replacing those of Neil Bush on the front pages." Two years later, Bush pere was defeated for reelection with a mere 37 percent of the vote.

Since George W. Bush restored his family to the White House in 2000, however, the tenor of national discussion of such business dealings seems to have become far more easygoing. When the Grace Semiconductor deal was revealed, the New York Times ran the story on page 28; the Washington Post relegated it to the Style section. Not even Neil's "sex romps" elicited the mocking media drumbeat that greeted Don Nixon or Billy Carter or, for that matter, Neil's own, earlier misdeeds. It was as if the nature of the misbehavior itself had metamorphosed. What once had been perceived as an insult to the republic now was regarded with a tolerant "boys will be boys" approach. The reason, of course, is that Neil Bush could no longer be dismissed out of hand, as Don or Billy or Roger were. Other presidential families may come and go, but the Bushes are here to stay--even their perceived black sheep.

In fact, all four Bush brothers have engaged in such behavior throughout much of their adult lives, long before they attained princely status. Many Americans will remember that our current President cut his own Neil-like commercial swath through the Texas (and Persian Gulf) of the late 1970s and 1980s. Some of the 1977-79 financing for George W. Bush's first unsuccessful oil venture, Arbusto, came from two rich Saudi families--the Bin Mahfouzes and the Bin Ladens--by way of Texan James Bath, their North American representative, and the 1980s buyout of his oil business by Harken Energy revealed a half dozen connections to the shady Bank of Credit and Commerce International. In the 1989 buyout and reorganization of the Texas Rangers baseball team, the taxpayers of Arlington, Texas, wound up having to pay off an expensive local bond issue, which, arguably, had been floated for the private purposes of George W. and his partners.

Jeb Bush, today the governor of Florida, kicked off his own business career in the early 1980s, around the time his father became vice president, by locating in the Miami area and trading on the family's Cuban-emigre, C.I.A., Iran-Contra, and federal-government-program connections. Jeb's entanglements included a business association with Camilo Padreda, who later pleaded guilty to defrauding the Department of Housing and Urban Development of millions of dollars. Jeb also received a $75,000 real-estate fee from Miguel Recarey, the onetime head of International Medical Centers, who was determined to have defrauded the federal Medicare program through overcharging, false invoicing, and embezzlement. In 2002 a Florida pump company with which Jeb Bush had been associated was charged with using $28 million of a $74 million loan by the U.S. Export-Import Bank to pay bribes to Nigerian officials and grease the palms of company insiders.