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Okay, you know the story:

When Barbara Bush miscarried at home, she had young George drive her to the hospital. In her lap, Barbara Bush held a jar containing the remains of the fetus, George Bush said.

“She says to her teenage kid, ‘Here’s a fetus,’ ” the former president told Lauer. “No question it — that affected me — my philosophy that we should respect life.”

Um, okay. “Here’s a fetus, kid.” That taught George to respect life.

And here’s an earlier version of the incident:

Once, in the mid-1960s in Houston, when his father was out of town, he drove his mother to the hospital when she was having a miscarriage.

Halfway there, Barbara Bush told her son, “I don’t think I’ll be able to get out of the car.”

“I’ll take you to the emergency room, don’t worry,” her son assured her.

“He picked me up the next day. … He talked to me in the car and he said, ‘Don’t you think we ought to talk about this before you have more children?’ ” his mother recalled.

That’s from the same profile where we learn that his parents didn’t tell George that his little sister was dying of leukemia — they just showed up to pick him up at school one day and Robin wasn’t there. And then they told him that she had died two days earlier.

Now, ponder this bit from a NY Times story:

The image of a mother handing her teenage son a jar containing the remains of her just-miscarried fetus may be a disturbing one.

But the scene, described by former President George W. Bush in his interview with Matt Lauer of NBC News on Monday night, has started a national conversation — both about his mother, Barbara Bush, and about the complex psychological fallout from miscarriage.

Mr. Bush called his mother’s action “straightforward,” and added that it illustrated “how my mom and I developed a relationship.” Some opponents of abortion reacted approvingly. Other commentators called Mrs. Bush’s behavior the action of a depressed and angry person.

But experts say the incident is hard to interpret half a century after the fact.

I don’t know what it says about miscarriage, but I think it does point to really twisted family dynamics. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe in upper class circles it’s considered appropriate to show your teenage kid a dead fetus (and then talk with him about family planning the next day). But it’s vulgar to tell that kid that his sister is dying – and, in fact, that she’s been dead for two days.

In other news, Robin of Berkely has done another column in which she psychoanalyzes President Obama:

Now at the helm, Obama is avenging the Sins of the Fathers, even though the fathers are long since dead and buried. Consequently, the Department of Justice drops all charges against the new generation of domestic terrorists, the New Black Panthers, who verbalize their desire to kill “cracker babies.”

The DOJ turns a blind eye toward egregious acts of injustice towards whites. The Feds will even go so far as suing Arizona and threatening other states should they not toe the party line of importing as many people of color as possible.

It all makes sense now! Obama is mad at the African father who deserted him, so he wants to “import” a whole lot of Mexicans into Arizona to get his revenge on white people!

Anyway, because of her expertise, I look forward to her interpretation of how the healthy, positive mother-son bond between little George and mother Barbara formed a man who joked about executing a woman on Texas’s death row.

22 Responses to “Other People’s Families”

sounds like aWol is trying to horn in on some santorum there ;}

The dead fetus story is horribly sad; I actually feel sorry for the *young* George Bush. He never had much of a chance at normalcy and sanity, did he? Some monsters are born (Cheney) and others are made, deliberately and cruelly.

I wonder if his telling this story now is a -very faint- plea for our understanding?

As for Obama, sometimes I think he’s a lying con-man, other times I wonder if he is so inherently intelligent and reasonable that he simply can’t understand that everyone else is/are NOT capable of behaving sensibly, even (in the case of Congress) when it is in the Best Interests of their own country. And he simply cannot grasp that there are real monsters right there in front of him -promoted by others monsters (Murdoch, Wall Street, etc.)- who will NEVER do anything other than that which benefits themselves directly and instantly.

Y’know, a short but unfortunate decade ago this story would have been found in the News of the Weird, and only there, and a relatively decent society would have expected it to be there, and nowhere else.

And now, when they arrest me for keeping grandma’s corpse in her La-Z-Boy in the den all these years, and I explain I did it to show the kids the dangers of smoking three packs of Luckies a day, I expect to become a darling of the religious nutcases, too.

But experts say the incident is hard to interpret half a century after the fact.

Experts in what?

Experts in interpreting things 50 years later.

MEMO

To: Bar Bush
From: Actor212

RE: Showing your kid a dead fetus

IT’S NOT A FUCKING HAMSTER! ARE YOU INSANE????

A woman who can’t bring herself to tell her son his sister is even dying, much less dead, until two days after she’s stone cold doesn’t seem to me to be the same woman who can show a dead fetus in a jar.

My guess is the fetus was a home-job abortion, after Bar found Poppy in flagrante delicto with Gennifer Fitzgerald.

KWillow can’t decide: As for Obama, sometimes I think he’s a lying con-man, other times I wonder if he is so inherently intelligent and reasonable that he simply can’t understand that everyone else is/are NOT capable of behaving sensibly, even (in the case of Congress) when it is in the Best Interests of their own country.

It’s sad, I think, that you’re trying to choose between two fictional and grossly simplistic narratives you’ve been given, and that’s despite the fact that each of them is self-contradictory. Why not think up one of your own?

Also, I note with undisguised malicious amusement that black character roles in the movies of the early to mid-twentieth century usually consisted of one or the other of two character types, both comedy relief– either a con artist or a fool.

Somewhere up there, Willie Best is bugging out his eyes and laughing: “ain’t that a pip? I’se jis like the presinent!”

Christopher wonders: Experts in what?

Psychiatric Epidemiology. You’re welcome.

In other words, I think the NY Times article is worth reading.

They used to say that Nixon was “a complex man.” Boy, I’ll say. It meant different things, depending on who was saying it, but that at least they could agree on.

I may wind up reading Bush’s damn book after all. “A complex man” indeed.

Wasn’t Babs “radically pro-choice” back in those dim days of 1980? So how does this quite work with that? I know they weren’t at the same time but she showed W. a miscarriage to make him pro-life? Not getting it.

Personally I suspect the whole thing is just a delusion brought about during a coke binge in 1974. The by-the-way-your-sister’s-dead thing sounds like a sociopathic WASP thing to me.

Reads to me more like a strange… very strange… retro-manipulation of image.

Which of course begs the question: How the fuck did you want your image to be portrayed?

Since Chris V has already invoked his name, I would just like to remind everyone what Tricky Dick thought of Babs:

That woman sure knows how to hate.

Or at least that’s how Bob Woodward reported it in Final Days.

I just gotta say: if you’re being praised on your hatin’ skills by Dick Nixon, you are definitely a world-class hater.

Stupid effing HTML tags.

Histrogeek writes: The by-the-way-your-sister’s-dead thing sounds like a sociopathic WASP thing to me.

Not to single you out here, but let’s clarify the situation.

The tale recounted makes it sound like Robin was in the car every day with Mom and Dad when they picked up young Dubya at school, and suddenly didn’t show up one day.

In fact, Robin was seriously ill, and George knew it, and had been in New York at Sloan- Kettering for months while doctors (one of them a Bush Uncle) did whatever doctors do to diagnose and treat.

As I imagine most any survivor will tell you, hope springs eternal, and thus there is no real point before actual death that Mom and Dad wrote off the life of Robin.

Incidentally, Bar stayed in New York throughout those final months, while Dad Bush hustled back and forth between business in Texas and Robin and Bar in New York.

If Dubya believed that Robin would be in the car with Mom and Dad, it could only be that he’d been told that Mom and Dad were coming home for good and would pick him up at school, and hoped or assumed that Robin would be with them.

The decision to wait until that moment to tell Dubya could be for so simple a reason as a desire to tell him directly, with both parents present, in a private setting, instead of over the telephone, and I couldn’t really fault them for that decision, I guess.

So, I think it’s clearly not as creepy as it’s been made to sound.

Chris, from what I read, it was creepy – but not as creepy back then as it would be now. When I was a youngster, the big question was “Should you even tell a person that they’ve got cancer?” And the default answer for informing a patient that treatment options had been exhausted and they were gonna die was that you never, ever did that.

It appears that Robin and George W. pretty much never had a chance to say good-bye, and both were deprived of any opportunity to comfort or console each other, and while I blame that on their parents, I can’t honestly express surprise that they did that back then.

One of the worst parts of the story is that when young Robin was close to death, Barbara Bush was at the hospital, while Poppy Bush was on his way there from somewhere more important. The doctors gave Mrs. Bush a choice: palliative care, or a risky emergency operation that apparently would buy her a little time. Barbara Bush had to make that decision without her stupid husband (I believe there was a brother or brother-in-law there who urged her not to authorize the surgery) and she opted for the surgery. She has since stated that she absolutely regrets that decision and wishes she’d not subjected her tiny, ill daughter to it.

The later miscarriage story is also creepy, but for me, the creep factor comes from GWB’s bizarre tone-deafness in relating it in the manner he has – the bloody details, with himself as the Excellent Man-Son.

Obviously, when a woman has a miscarriage, it’s a crisis and she needs help, and usually that help would come from her life partner, aka husband. But again GHWB was elsewhere, so GWB had to step up. And he really really wants the world to know about it. He started a fucking war in no small part to avenge his father…and in no small part to show his father how a real man wins a real war.

This shit should happen in a psychiatrist’s office, over many years, and not acted out on a global stage, with its attendant carnage and destruction. So while I may have individual moments of sympathy with various Bush family members at various times, I don’t forgive them and I really do kind of hate them.

So what the hell were they doing transporting what was essentially a pickled punk to a Hospital? Did they think they could reanimate it?

It don’t gel.

Capm, dude. Are you gonna flush it? Wrap it in newspaper and put it in the trash? Presumably, she wanted and intended to bring the fetus to term, so these products of conception weren’t pickled punkitude to her. And if she hoped to become pregnant again, an examination of the fetal tissue might give important information.

But you already knew that, so I think you are being querulous and grumpy. So I will fax you a beer, mk?

And if she hoped to become pregnant again, an examination of the fetal tissue might give important information.

with aWol’s Jr Human-Animal Hybrid Kit? wouldn’t it make more sense to leave it at the hospital that had, presumably, a real lab with microscopes and everything? chances are aWol had begged Bar to bring it home since he had an extra special stash of M-80s he was saving for the right occasion

sorry, didn’t realise aWol was driving her to the hospital.

Oh, please — give me a break. There was no fetus in a jar. Who does that? A mature woman who has given birth five times is going to go to the kitchen to find a mason jar for a bloody miscarriage she’s just scraped out of her underwear or scooped out of the toilet?

That’s just pure bullshit, plain and simple.

Sure, I can believe, and excuse, given the times, Bar and Poppy not telling junior jet boy that his sister had cancer, but waiting two days to tell him and then going for a round of golf instead of having a funeral?

That is one fucked up family.

Cracker babies…yummmm.

“When Barbara Bush miscarried at home, she had young George drive her to the hospital. In her lap, Barbara Bush held a jar containing the remains of the fetus, George Bush said.”

Back in the days before GPS we had to get around using fetal navigation.

Late to the party, but the not telling GWB about his dead sister rings true in my experience. A friend with a very, very rethug dad kept telling her that her mom was “getting better” when in fact she was dying of ALS. Then one day dad comes home, says “mom’s dead, and I’m marrying your babysitter so she’s your new mom”. A rather difficult scenario for a 9 year old.

Something to say?