I’m not going to say anything about the Bush twins. Don’t even ask me. I was 22 years old once, and I could scarcely have done a better job than Beavis and Butthead did last night. Plus, I wasn’t nearly as lovely and well-dressed. And I went to a college that isn’t even fit to be mentioned in the same breath as Yale.
Still, I had adult supervision, of a sort. No one said, “Hey, let’s put Nance on national television and give her a bunch of stillborn one-liners to read.” You want people to act their age, and while Jenna and NotJenna (credit: TBogg) acted their age, the adults in charge of scheduling didn’t.
But I will say this: I do wonder what the GOP would have said if young Chelsea Clinton had done the same thing in whenever-it-was-that-she-was-22. I wonder how many tiresome Michelle Malkin and Mona Charen and Kathleen Parker columns we’d have to read about “inappropriate” young people, and blah blah blah don’t respect their elders and blah blah blah she drinks you know and blah blah blah.
And just for grins, I wonder how many congressional hearings we’d be having iif a nationally known Democratic governor had posed in the nude — and for Robert Mapplethorpe, yet.
Also, if some lefty version of this were going on. Also, this. (Although, like The Poor Man, I’m strongly reminded of the Real World, and wonder which one is gay.)
But mostly, I don’t think about this. I go to bed at the crack of sunset these days, and I can’t think about much after 7 p.m. I do my thinking in the wee hours, and after I arrive at work at the insanely early hour of 5 a.m., which is a great time to get the jump on world news, since most of the world’s been rocking and rolling for half a day already. Unfortunately, most of the world’s news is depressing. Damn Chechens.
Back-to-school night, last night. We had the profoundly empathetic experience of sitting in Kate’s little chair, hearing her teachers give us the lowdown. We hadn’t planned to be in Fort Wayne this long, but one bright spot is her school, which I think I love. She goes to a magnet school, emphasizing fine arts, which means that part of her schooling will include piano lessons and something called Introduction to Puppets. Next year, if she’s still here, and I doubt she will, she can join Third Grade Clowns. Oh, God help me.
Colleen said on September 1, 2004 at 11:37 pm
Yeah, I hear ya on The Twins. I didn’t see them, only listened on the radio, and I really was kind of rooting for them…not because I like their dad (heck no! I have one of the only Kerry window stickers in town on my car….) but because I was once a young woman, and I wanted them to do well for the sake of the sisterhood. I didn’t want another example of young women as vacuous giggle machines. But I can’t believe they weren’t coached better. I’ve heard nary a peep about their performance in the media. I agree with you…if it were Chelsea, or a Dem kid of similar age, the “liberal” (coff, coff) media would be full of not so flattering reviews.
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deb said on September 2, 2004 at 10:41 am
yeah, chelsea would’ve been eviscerarted if she’d addressed the dems…remember when rush limbaugh referred to her as the “white house dog”? she was 13 at the time.
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deb said on September 2, 2004 at 2:22 pm
er… “eviscerated.” god. that’s what happens when you give blood on an almost-empty stomach.
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Nance said on September 2, 2004 at 2:58 pm
Chelsea the first dog — yes, I remember that. And though this was well before the talk radio/Fox right-wing media juggernaut, I remember readin Washington gossip columns during the Carter administration, in which Republicans sniffed at Amy Carter, attending state dinners with a book to read during the boring parts. SHE WAS 10 YEARS OLD. You can quibble with whether she should have been there in the first place, but that’s a fight you have with her parents. Kee-rist.
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Bob said on September 2, 2004 at 3:18 pm
Some things are just too painful to watch. I only got through about a minute of the video of the Bush Twins before I had to click the little box with the “x” in it.
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Juan said on September 2, 2004 at 3:47 pm
Well, I was rooting for them, and I AM a big fan of their dad. But it took all of 20 seconds before I was cringing and reaching for the remote. I can’t BELIEVE that speech made it through those who vet the scripts.
I just wanted to slap the giggling horse-teeth out of that one.
Rush shouldn’t have said that about Chelsea in a public forum, but David Letterman and Jay Leno shouldn’t be taking the same shots at Linda Tripp and Janet Reno for their looks either.
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Dave Reilly said on September 2, 2004 at 4:08 pm
John Edwards daughter, Cate, is the same age as the Bush twins. Didn’t hear her make fun of her grandmother at the DNC.
This wasn’t something Jenna and NotJenna did though. It was something done to them. Somebody high up in the Bush campaign thought that it would be cool if the twins went out and did a double impersonation of the “dumb” blond from Mean Girls. You would think that at least NotJenna (She’s the one who graduated from Yale, Nance, the other went to UTexas, which doesn’t have much in the way of bragging rights over Ohio U, except football.) would have been smart enough to realize when she was handed the script that she was being told to go out and make an idiot of herself and she’d have said, “Nuh-Unh!”
I don’t know just how detached W. is from his own re-election campaign, but if he vetted their script it means that he approved of his daughters making horses asses of themselves and insulting his mother.
Nice guy.
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Mike said on September 6, 2004 at 11:24 pm
Thanks for the link – I had missed the convention (being Canadian and also not Bush fan) but checked out the video – right to the end I might add. Cringing all the way – what a stupid speech, and so awkwardly presented. Sent the link on to my sister in Toronto – hope she won’t get too upset with me.
BTW – like your blog – just found it today (did you know it was lost?)
Mike
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