Well, I think we may have solved the mystery of why Laura Bush would want to out her husband as a non-poet. She probably got an advance copy of
her new "authorized" biography.
Not that she didn't have reason to be hostile before, but this is truly disgusting. Bush not quite the family man we expected? Well, clearly it's his wife's fault.
An annotated excerpt, originally from the Washington Post
So far, [Jenna and Barbara] have shown little inclination to embrace the life of public service modeled by their parents, uncle and grandparents.
Like, remember when their father used to show up drunk at White House dinners when his father was president? and when he showed up drunk with his little brother in the car and threatened to punch out his father the Vice President? And when their grandpa covered up for those guys who sold arms to the people who killed those marines and used the money to support an undeclared war to destabilize legitimately elected governments in the region? And when their great-grandpas funded the Nazis? Why can't the girls show that kind of commitment?
They are girls born rich, blessed with intelligence, good looks, trust funds, loving parents, boundless opportunities, freedom from many of life's daily vexing challenges. Yet they persist in seeing themselves as victims of daddy's job. In this attitude, they have been subtly encouraged by their mother. Laura Bush would never permit herself to feel victimized by her husband's decisions. She regards herself as a full partner who embraced his ambitions because she wanted for him what he wanted for himself. His happiness has been as important to her as her own, or greater. No, any victimization she might have felt has all been transferred onto her girls.
Of course, she famously didn't want him to go into politics, and he did anyway. They tell this cute story about how she made him promise before they got married that she would never have to be part of a campaign. He lied.
Laura Bush left her career as teacher and librarian at 31. By the time the twins were born in 1981, Laura was 35. The couple hadn't been sure they would ever be able to have children of their own, and then Laura nearly lost the babies late in her pregnancy, so she and George felt doubly blessed. Their gratitude was so deep and persistent that over time, it seems to have turned into indulgence.
Of course, the overindulgence might have had to do with the fact that daddy was a sloppy drunk until they were five (when we're told he stopped), and probably wasn't as helpful as he might have been, what with mommy threatening to leave him and daddy driving her into concrete walls and stuff.
In many ways, the Bush twins were excellent candidates to make a good transition to life as children of a political figure. It was the family business, after all, and the twins' parents entered it only after they had addressed their concerns about what it would mean for family life, they told the Dallas Morning News in 1995. "She was the last one to sign on, the most reluctant," the president said of Laura. "Our girls were so little," she said.
They were 12.
In interviews during the gubernatorial years, both Bushes referred again and again to how embarrassing their children found them. Always, they seemed to think this was perfectly normal behavior for teenagers.
Every time he went to one of Jenna's volleyball games, the opposing team would ask for an autograph and picture. "Jenna and Barbara's reaction, of course, was total humiliation," he said. Laura seemed resigned to being an object of ridicule for her girls. They made fun of her clothes, her shoes, her hair. "Mom," they would tell her, "your hair is so stiff it would stay put in a hurricane."
Rarely were the girls asked to come downstairs and say hello to dinner guests. "We've been very careful not to make them go to things or be in the limelight," Laura explained. "At this age, they don't even like to admit they have parents." Later, during the presidential campaign, Laura would return to this theme again. The twins were proud of their father, she said, "and they want him, of course, to do whatever he wants to do, but at the same time, they want the privacy that I think every senior in high school wants. You know, most seniors in high school don't want to even admit they have parents, you know, much less a parent who is a governor or a presidential candidate."
Imagine. She's not allowing her children to be a prop for daddy's political career. The irresponsible bitch.
As the family began to discuss whether George should run for president, the girls were adamant in their opposition. Both would be in college before the election. They would never have to live in the White House or attend school in Washington, as Chelsea Clinton had done from age 12. But that calculus didn't move them. To Jenna and Barbara, it was clear that their emancipation from the strictures of living at home would coincide exactly with the arrival of a Secret Service detail to their college dormitories...
When inauguration day arrived, Jenna and Barbara dressed to be noticed in trendy expensive outfits by Texas-born designer Lela Rose and sexy stiletto-heeled knee-high Jimmy Choo boots. When the moment came for the actual swearing-in, the 19-year-old girls fidgeted toward the edge of their chairs, then stood up, unsure how to behave. It fell to President Clinton, who gave each of them a gentle nudge toward their parents, and still they stood there, shoulders slumped, looking at their toes. Finally, their grandmother Barbara Bush, seated behind them, had seen enough. In one swift, practiced gesture, she reached forward to her granddaughters, first one, then the other. She put her thumbs between their shoulder blades and used her fingers to pull their shoulders up and back. The message was clear: Stand up straight! Remember who you are! We are Bushes, and Bushes stand up straight.
Yeah, they sound as if they were thrilled to be there.
The mainstream press honored the administration's request to not pry into the girls' lives. Their respective campus newspapers primly refused to cover them. But the tabloids had become intrigued. Jenna and Barbara, people quickly surmised, were not like the preceding first daughter.
During her years in the White House, rather than fleeing political life, Chelsea had seized it. She called her father's secretary and asked for a ticket to his State of the Union address. When her mother embarked on a tour of the most disadvantaged spots in India and Africa, she wanted to go along. Chelsea went to parties and drank and had boyfriends just like many other teenagers -- which is what Jenna and Barbara craved -- but Chelsea had a gift for keeping her mishaps out of the public eye. She cultivated the protection and support of other adults in the White House, and she treated her Secret Service agents with respect. Accordingly, they were more inclined to protect her when she got herself in jams.
No, of course we can't prove it. The Secret Service just loved the Clintons so damn much that all the evidence has been covered up. While every right-wing asshole in the country was looking for anything they could find to smear her family with, Chelsea was staggering around DC drunk and the Secret Service, who pretended to loathe Clinton as part of the coverup, kept it all really really quiet.
Since her dad has an addictive family and doesn't drink, she probably learned that on all the street corners the Secret Service let her hang out on.
It only took a month after their dad became president for Jenna to land in the headlines, with news that she had used her Secret Service detail to spring a male friend from a Texas jail after he was arrested for public intoxication. The White House refused to comment about the incident, and so did the Secret Service when a spokesman was asked about the propriety of using agents to spring drunk kids from the county clink.
It was the first of many conundrums the Bushes would face as their daughters traversed their last years of being underage. Should they reveal the particulars of an incident to prove that nothing improper had happened, or maintain the no-comment policy and allow questions to bloom into controversy? Within weeks, the National Enquirer had printed a full-page photo of Jenna laughing and holding a cigarette, crashing to the floor atop a giggling female friend, and Barbara had given the slip to her Secret Service detail as she and some fellow Yale students drove to Manhattan to a World Wrestling Federation match, according to an article in the Yale magazine Rumpus. Using an electronic pass to go through a tollbooth, the car in which Barbara was riding then speeded up and left the agents, who were paying their toll in cash, behind.
See, that is a conundrum. Should they talk about how their daughters were blithely breaking the law in front of federal law enforcement agents, or should they let people think the girls had done something Wrong?
Even when Laura was confronted with evidence that her girls were deliberately and dangerously evasive with their agents, she seemed unwilling to correct them. The agents were told to back off. The press was blamed for the reports. The unofficial position was that the twins were just singled out for unfair attention, even after Jenna was busted for underage drinking twice in four weeks. That summer of 2001, Jenna sat in a crowded bar and tried to sweet-talk the bartender into breaking the law and serving her, but he lost his nerve when he saw the guys with the earpieces and asked her to leave. Jenna, according to an account in U.S. News & World Report, was furious. She yelled at her agents, then fled down a back alley. They gave chase, said the magazine, and when they caught up with her, she taunted them: "You know if anything happens to me, my dad would have your ass."
See, none of this would have ever hit the papers if they had talked about it and proved there was nothing wrong, but if there was something wrong, it was Laura's fault for modelling drunken irresponsibility as the child of a sitting president. Natch.
But when she called her father to complain that her detail was interfering with her drinking, he sided with her agents. Not so her mother. Laura didn't want her girls to feel constrained, and the agents were ordered to pull back from traditional methods of coverage, according to the magazine's account.
The President tried, he really did, but sadly for the characters of these two lost children his wife is the head of government and the Secret Service report to her, so his concern came to naught. He did try, though.
In Austin, in May 2001, Jenna was cited for underage drinking and appeared in municipal court, where she was fined and given community service. A few weeks later, at Chuy's restaurant in Austin, she and Barbara and three friends slipped into seats about 10 at night and ordered tequila shots and margaritas. The bartender immediately recognized the president's daughter, according to the account he later gave police. "The blonde in the pink halter top is Jenna Bush," he said. "You'd better card the whole group."..."Please," she implored, according to the officer's account in the police report. "She then stated that I do not have any idea what it is like to be a college student, and not be able to do anything that other students get to do."
Both twins were charged with misdemeanors. Jenna was booked with misrepresenting her age to buy booze, a charge complicated by the citation already on her record. She faced far stiffer penalties for the second offense, under Texas's tough "zero tolerance" policy, which her father had signed into law in 1997. Barbara was charged with being a minor in possession of alcohol. Barbara pleaded no contest and got the eight-hour community service and an order to attend alcohol-awareness class. Jenna was fined $600, lost her driver's license for 30 days, had to do more community service and attend alcohol-awareness class.
Yeah. Zero tolerance. Betcha lots of two time losers in Texas got fines smaller than their allowance and lost their license for a month and had to let their Secret Service agents drive them around.
Again the White House refused to comment. "If it involves the daughters and their private lives, it is a family matter," said spokesman Scott McClellan. This episode seemed egregious enough to demand some spin, however. A senior administration official let slip to CNN that a "not happy" President Bush had called Jenna from California, where he was talking up a park preservation program. There would be no word from Laura, however. Asked if she had spoken to her daughters, aide Ashleigh Adams said, "If she did, that would be private. Out of respect for the girls' privacy, we don't comment on them." In the days that followed, press secretary Ari Fleischer repeatedly lashed out at reporters who tried to ask questions about the incident.
Laura continued not to comment. Her husband let it be known to the national press that he was really pissed and read them out. Ari Fleischer, always complicit in teaching the twins responsibility, told the press it was a big frameup.
In the spring of 2002, while on that European trip, Laura Bush was asked if her girls had gotten more used to the limelight. "No," she said, "I would have to say not. They're going to be juniors in college. They just want to do like other teenagers do."
At the same time, those girls had gotten expert at exploiting the notoriety they had gained as the president's daughters. They popped up in Hollywood, where Jenna had an internship with an entertainment company, and danced the night away with a posse of 20. In St.-Tropez, Jenna partied with Sean "P. Diddy" Combs. In New York, the twins sent one of their Secret Service agents over to procure an introduction to rocker Chris Cornell, the frontman for the band Audioslave. The girls were not averse to showing up at places where controlled substances were enjoyed. At a Four Seasons Grill Room party for wunderkind designer Zac Posen that Barbara attended, the air smelled of pot, according to the New York Daily News.
In Los Angeles, they showed up at a Nike party, where they met movie star Ashton Kutcher, who ended up taking them back to his house, he told Rolling Stone. "So we're hanging out," he said. "The Bushes were underage-drinking at my house. When I checked outside, one of the Secret Service guys asked me if they'd be spending the night. I said no. And then I go upstairs to see another friend and I can smell the green wafting out under his door. I open the door, and there he is, smoking out the Bush twins on his hookah."
Rich kids get internships, smoke pot. Claude Rains just had a stroke.
When she talks about her girls at all publicly, the first lady is given to making bland, nonspecific declarations of love and support. "I think they're a lot of fun to be with," she said. "I guess I would say that I'm engaged by them, with their personalities. . . . I think, like every parent, if your children are happy, then parents are happy. And if they're unhappy, then there's nothing more difficult for parents."
President Bush is slightly more revealing. "I love them a lot. I am impatient with them. I wanted them to be normal when they were teenagers, and I wanted them to be working ladies," he told Ladies Home Journal. "I've got to slow down. I've got to allow them to become the bright young ladies that they're becoming at their own pace, and not at mine.
Laura feels that the girls should not be leveraged on behalf of their father. He disagrees.
"They are beginning to realize that they've got to take some responsibility for their own lives and beginning to think about their career paths," he said. "Laura chose her career path . . . early. I didn't choose mine until a little late. And uh," the president said, chuckling, "I never really was that worried about the career path.
Yeppers, that's pretty straightforward. Keep your pants zipped, kids, or no job from grandpa's friends.
Do you suppose this is why Barbara Senior took such a hard line with Neilsie's wife? because I can't see someone sitting still for this if she had options that involved living indoors.
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