Miley Cyrus’s Dad: Concerned Parent? Publicity Whore? Both?

Maybe I’m missing something.

I’m not about to enter the business of defending Miley Cyrus, her antics or her music, except to offer this: Is she doing anything that’s so much different from what countless kids her age do? So she likes to show a little skin, she’s got terrible taste in music, she occasionally hangs out with the wrong crowd, and she was caught with her lips wrapped around a smoking bong. None of that stuff is doing her image or her faltering music career any favors, but at least the stuff she was inhaling was supposedly legal.

To my knowledge, she still hasn’t been caught stealing, drinking and driving, or hitting on somebody else’s guy. She’s a teenager testing the waters of freedom, living for today, not thinking so much about tomorrow. That doesn’t mean she’s morphing into Lindsay Lohan. Yet suddenly, everyone’s acting like she’s cruising through Sodom and Gomorrah on a highway to hell.

It’s nice that her dad Billy Ray is owning his role in bringing out his kid’s wild side in his recent GQ interview. I’m not sure whether to believe his claim that he’s never earned a dime off of his 18-year-old daughter, but it does seem like he’s using her fame to drum up some publicity for himself. I can buy his contrition, but it seems to be tainted with ulterior motives. If he wants forgiveness and to right his wrongs, wouldn’t it be better for him to do it in private? Maybe start healing in family therapy before airing all of the Cyruses’ dirty laundry in the pages of GQ’s March issue?

If Miley is as much of a near-lost cause as he seems to think, doesn’t he realize that putting it out there for all the world to read in a national magazine won’t do anything to help her? Being admonished by a parent is never any fun. It’s less so when it’s done publicly, in front of all your friends and, if you’re lucky enough to have them, your fans.

The fact that Miley can still score a plum gig hosting the March 5 episode of “Saturday Night Life” without a new album or a high-profile project to promote shows that neither her life nor her career are completely wrecked. She doesn’t seem to mind that she’s been the target of derision on “SNL” in the past which says she’s got thick skin and a sense of humor, even when the joke’s on her.

Maybe dear dad did do something right after all. But the next time Billy Ray wants to unburden his soul and say what’s in his achy-breaky-heart, he might stop to think about doing it one-on-one with Miley-if she’s still speaking to him.

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