RIP, Barbara Bush

lol

 

A much younger Mark Knoller of CBS News.

 

Who’s Counting? At the White House, It’s Mark Knoller | Washingtonian

When Knoller retires, they really should name the press working room after him. I realize the briefing room is named after James Brady, but I don't know if there is a more respected person who has covered the WH.

 

Meanwhile, umm, Roger Stone ...

Roger Stone Disses Barbara Bush as a ‘Nasty Drunk’ on News of Her Death

All the best people.

 

First comment on that story is fucking great.

 

Thanks for sharing that. Great story.

I also loved the title (subhead, actually) of the blog, which is by an off-the-boat Irish guy who runs an Irish bar in NYC and is evidently a big baseball fan: "The craic of the bat."

For those who don't know, "craic" is Gaelic for fun, good times, etc. And it is indeed pronounced "crack."

Perfect.

 

So I'm going to offer a slightly different take here. Barbara Bush was fine. She seemed like she was basically a decent lady whose privileged background helped her become an effective partner to a very distinguished and high-profile businessman/appointed official/high-level politician and certainly looked and played the part of America's grandmother to the extent anyone needed her to. But it feels like the hagiographies I'm seeing are a little over the top. By many accounts, she could be quite nasty to those who weren't her social "equals." There were her ugly comments about Geraldine Ferraro, for example. Then there were the grossly obtuse comments about things "working out well" for the "underprivileged" Katrina refugees in the Astrodome. Of course she seemed basically to have a good set of values and she seemed pretty real in certain ways. So I guess what I'm saying is she deserves the same tributes any other well-known personality gets when he/she passes on, but the pile-ons and hatred directed at people who are saying, "Hey, wait a minute, let's not get carried away here..." are a little much.

I think a big part of this is that the Republican party has gone so far off the deep end in so many ways, and our politics have sunk so low, that turning George and Barbara Bush, who were perfectly fine, into George and Martha Washington, is an easy way for those on the left to try and flash their bipartisan cred without actually really needing to be bipartisan in any meaningful way. Kind of like supporting Jon Huntsman or John Kasich in the GOP primary while knowing you'd never actually vote for either of them in a general election. Or lambasting Trump for saying stuff about John McCain, who you did not support for president at the time.

 

But wait........there's more.

Roger Stone steps up attacks on Barbara Bush: 'She is descending into hell right now'

What a scumbag.

 

I wasn't excusing Roger Stone in my above post, by the way. Referring more to FB pile-ons I've seen on anyone who hasn't exalted Barbara Bush as a saint.

 

Here's the deal. I'm sure Barbara Bush could a bitch when she wanted to be. I've met very few Southern women from her generation who didn't bare their claws when the need arose, and I include my own dear mother in that regard. And I'm sure she enjoyed her share of liquor from time-to-time. She was human; we aren't all completely pure in every way. But, according to almost every account, she was a lady in every sense of the word and deserves to be remembered as such. One of the most rock-solid adages in the lexicon are to never speak ill of the dead, at least not until a respectable amount of time has passed.

 

She also has something in common with way too many of the Greatest Generation: She raised a bunch of spoiled, entitled, greedy kids. I'm sure she was a nice lady, but that's the primary part of her legacy.