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.
sounds like aWol is trying to horn in on some santorum there ;}
Left by preznit giv me turkee on November 10th, 2010