|
Laura Bush
comes alive - is she really sick of W?
- By Jackson Thoreau
www.OpEdNews.com
- News flash: Laura Bush is not
your ordinary Stepford Wife.
-
- That same lady who during the
2000 campaign told a story about the one time she dared to
criticize a W speech ending with him driving the car through the
garage stole the show at last Saturday's annual White House
Correspondence Dinner. For the first time in memory at such an
event, the White House occupant’s wife got up and had her say. And
it was, er, interesting, to say the least.
-
- Here are a few choice comments
from the woman many previously thought could make a good Stepford
Wife candidate:
-
- "George's answer to any
problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chainsaw. Which I
think is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well."
-
- Speaking about Cheney, Laura
said, "It's always very interesting to see how the ranch air
invigorates people when they come down from Washington. When Vice
President Cheney was down, he got up early one morning, he put on
his hiking boots, and he went on a brisk, 20- to
- 30-foot walk."
-
- She complained about spending
weekends with the family at their retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine.
-
- "All the Bushes love
Kennebunkport, which is like Crawford, but without the nightlife,"
she said. "People ask me what it's like to be up there with the
whole Bush clan. Lemme put it this way: First prize - three-day
vacation with the Bush family. Second prize - 10 days."
-
- Interesting. I think she
really meant a lot of that and is a little sick of W and the
Bushes. Somewhere beyond the mask of jokes lies the truth.
-
- Kitty Kelley says in her book
on the Bush clan that Laura always keeps to herself at
Kennebunkport and sits on the porch, chain smoking and reading
novels. Kelley also says that Laura not only smoked pot back in
her college days at SMU but dealt it around campus, too. I wonder
what she had to smoke to get up in public and call her
quick-tempered mother-in-law "Don Corleone."
-
- While many thought Laura's
routine was funny, some didn't. Michael A. Peroutka, a far
right-winger who ran for president last year under the
Constitution Party's banner, released this highly-critical review
of Laura Bush's comedic act:
-
- Dear Friends of the
Constitutional Republic,
-
- Several months ago, I
criticized the public remarks of the Bush twin daughters at the
Republican National Convention as foolish, embarrassing and
dishonorable to their parents. When I began my critique, I asked:
Is it just me or did anybody else cringe and feel sorry for our
country because of what these young women had to say?
-
- Well, I've had a similar
reaction, and would ask this same question, concerning First Lady
Laura Bush's recent remarks at the annual White House
Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington DC.
-
- In a well-rehearsed routine
that was supposed to be funny - but was not - Mrs. Bush began by
stepping to the podium and interrupting her husband who was
speaking. Referring to the President as "Mr. Excitement," she
noted that on a typical evening he was sound asleep
- by 9 p.m. and she was watching
the TV show "Desperate Housewives" with Vice President Dick
Cheney's wife Lynne. Noting that she was a desperate housewife,
Mrs. Bush added: "If those women on that show think they are
desperate, they ought to be with George."
-
- One reviewer has said that if
this sleazy show had a subtitle, "it would be 'sex and the
suburbs'" - illicit sex, of course, sex outside of marriage.
Referring to this program's "dark take on American domestic life,"
the reviewer noted that various episodes have been about
"betrayal, an affair, an accident, a cover-up, an arrest, a
murder, a burial and a memorable scene involving a urine sample."
-
- Mrs. Bush also said that one
night, after the President went to bed, she and Mrs. Cheney,
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and [Bush adviser] Karen Hughes
"went to Chippendales." She said she wouldn't say what happened
but Mrs. Cheney's Secret Service code name is now
- "Dollar Bill." A "Washington
Times" story describes Chippendales as "a strip club where women
tuck cash into male dancers' skimpy thongs."
-
- Mrs. Bush said the President's
mother was less like the "Andy Griffith Show's" character "Aunt
Bea" and more like Mafia boss "Don Corleone." She made fun of her
husband's inability to pronounce correctly the word "nuclear." And
she said the President has learned a lot about
- ranching since he once tried
to milk a horse - "what's worse, it was a male horse."
-
- Ex-Roman Catholic priest and
TV talk show host John McLaughlin is quoted in the "Washington
Post" as saying, with a chuckle, about Mrs. Bush performance: "She
was successful in disabusing any thoughts that she's a Christian
fundamentalist extremist." Well, yes. I would say that she did
this with vengeance.
-
- Ironically, it was a liberal
journalist who got it right. David Corn, a reporter for the
far-Left "Nation" magazine said, of Mrs. Bush's standup routine:
"It was very risque. I was wondering what the social conservatives
and James Dobson had to say about all these jokes that were laced
with sexual innuendo. Not a very family-values-type speech."
-
- Several news reports have said
that Mrs. Bush saying what she said was the president's idea.
-
- In his historically
instructive book "Myths In Stone: Religious Dimensions Of
Washington, D.C." (University of California Press, 2001), Jeffrey
F. Meyer, a professor of religion at the University of North
Carolina, says this about President George Washington's concern
about ceremony and domestic behavior:
-
- "[He] sensed that everything
he did was significant. From the procedures to be observed in high
government rituals down to questions of domestic etiquette - how
the president should relate to leading citizens and to ordinary
citizens, what kind of house he should occupy, and what clothes he
should wear. All of these issues, he realized, were expressive of
the status of the president. He
- understood that all these
items would, to use contemporary jargon, 'make a statement.'"
-
- Indeed. And the same thing can
be said about the behavior of a president's wife. The actions of a
president's wife are significant and revelatory of the status of
the office of First Lady. And what
- Mrs. Bush has demonstrated is
that the status of her being First Lady is not a pretty one.
-
- One TV reporter noted that on
this particular evening in Washington, D.C., all of us had seen "a
side of Laura Bush that the public has never seen." I, for one,
wish that Mrs. Bush had no such side but – since she does - that
it had never been shown in public.
-
- For God, Family, & the
Republic,
-
- Michael A. Peroutka
-
- When right-wingers start
dissing people who should be among their favorite leaders and
praising the stance of writers for The Nation, something weird is
afoot. Interesting times, indeed.
-
Jackson
Thoreau, a Washington, D.C.-area journalist, contributed to Big Bush
Lies, published by RiverWood Books and available in bookstores
across the country. Thoreau's latest book, Thou Shalt Not Cheat: How
Bush & Rove Bent the Rules, From the Sandlot to the White House, is
due out in late 2005. He can be emailed at jacksonthor@yahoo.com or
jacksonthor@gmail.com.
Add your comments below
|
Contribute
$$ to OpEdNews
|
|
