Shameful

One of the things that most people never noticed in the senior Bush administration was what a completely awful human being Barbara Bush was, and is. (Her comments about Katrina victims having a better situation now that they were in the Houston Astrodome did shine a little light on this, but it's still relatively under the carpet.) I don't know that much about our First Lady, aside from the fact that she once ran a stop sign and killed someone. Of course, this isn't held against her, but it's hard to imagine this wouldn't be a daily "aside" on political talk shows had Hilary Clinton done the same.

This morning, on the Today show, Laura Bush had the following reprehensible exchange with Ann Curry:

Ann Curry showed some video from Iraq and asked Bush, in a hushed, solicitous tone: "You know the American people are suffering, watching --"

The first lady replied: "Oh, I know that, very much. And believe me, no one suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this. And certainly the commander in chief who has asked our military to go into harm's way --"

Curry: "What do you think the American public need to know about your husband --"

Laura Bush: "Well, I hope they do know the burden of worry that's on his shoulders every single day, for our troops. And I think they do. I mean I think if they don't, they're not seeing what the real responsibilities of our president are."

OK, that's egregious -- the soldiers don't suffer more than him? The families of the soldiers? The patients in Walter Reed? Perhaps you think I'm overreacting here, but Atrios sums up my indignation especially well:

Consider, if you will, a parallel universe in which Bill Clinton presided over a deeply unpopular war in Iraq which was increasingly opposed by members of the Republican party. Thousands of US troops had died, and many thousands more had life-altering injuries. And, then, First Lady Hillary Clinton said, on a popular morning show, that over the course of the war no one had suffered more then she and her husband had.

Just imagine for a moment how that would've played out on talk radio, Drudge, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the nightly news, the Sunday shows, the wingnut columnists, the liberal columnists, NPR, etc...

I imagine few honest members of the media industrial complex could deny this point, though most refuse to learn the broader lesson implied by it.