You've probably heard this quote already, but Barbara Bush went on NPR tonight and really let one rip:
"What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality...And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."
Haha! The girls at the club must've loved that one! Barbara Bush is, as she's always been, a crack-up. But that should be assumed. This, after all, is brought to you by much of the same genetic material that went searching for promised WMD's under furniture to entertain journalists at a comedy dinner. I don't much remember Clinton using Waco as fodder for a laugh-in, but maybe I just missed it. The overwhelmed and under-armed have long had gallows humor, and now, it seems, the overcomfortable and underaffected have executioner's grins.
But I'm being too uncharitable. I'm glad Momma Dubbya unhinged her jaw and let that one slip. In humor there's truth, and considering all the bullshit obfuscating everything else this clan says, I'm grateful for every weakened, beaten bit of honesty that darts out. For this family, the poor exist in a fixed-state. They are what they are, and social policy should accept them as is. That's why blacks dying early doesn't require an initiative against blacks dying early, it's a potential wedge to aid social security privatization. And it's why Louisiana's poor, who were stranded and drowned because they lacked the resources to flee, merit nothing more than a crack at their living conditions. The poor aren't to be helped because they aren't to be changed, they just are, little bits of interstellar flotsam flitting through Barbara Bush's brilliant galaxy. A good person, a person with a bare minimum of empathy, would be appalled that Americans were satisfied being exiled to an overcrowded stadium. A person with a direct line to a son in Oval Office would beg their child to make it stop.
Barbara Bush joked about it on NPR.
