January 07, 2004

The Bush post I can't resist. Laura Bush admits George W. didn't write that poem.
posted by tracicle 20 years ago
  • this from yesterday's Guardian: ...{t}he president didn't really write that humiliatingly poor verse at all. "But a lot of people believed that he did!" Laura Bush crowed on a US talkshow. Um, yes - possibly because you told them he did? We call Jake Yunker, the first lady's spokesman. "Mrs Bush and her speechwriter worked to develop the poem," he explains, inadvertently deepening the shame by revealing the masterpiece to be the work of two people. Not to get too pious about this, but isn't that, you know, one of those "lie" things the president's had a problem with recently? "That would have to go above me," says Jake, but inexplicably the first lady doesn't find a moment to call before press time.
  • From the Neil Gaiman link: Imagine the real presidential poems: complex sestinas and triolets, rondels and villanelles, crammed with allusion and metaphor, litotes and auxesis, and every kind of metre from iambic and trochaic to anapestic and spondaic and that other one I can't remember the name of. Poems in the manner of Byron, of Shelley, of Ezra Pound. Sonnet sequences of such brilliance that they cannot be read without tears unbidden pricking the eyes of the person reading. Sensitive, subtle, gentle, fierce poetry. Good poetry. Great poetry. If he's writing poetry like that, it would need a full-scale cover-up. America would never trust someone who wrote real poems in a position of power. America understands how dangerous poets are, and would not allow one in the White House in any position of responsibility. I like that.
  • I would never let a poet be in a position of power, nor a soccer coach by the way... I'm kidding.
  • You know that chimp look he gets in-between thoughts, or after bonking his head on a helicopter door? I imagine if he really wrote poetry he'd look like that a lot more.
  • I heart Neil Gaiman.
  • Roses are red, violets are blue, So Mrs Bush speaks with a forked tongue, too.
  • So Mrs. Bush is a bad mother and writes crap poetry? She is so not my favorite first lady.
  • Thanks for that link, zemat. This is my new all-time favorite paragraph: Family photos show him playing the guslen, a one-stringed Serb instrument. He is also a poet and a former petty criminal.
  • I figured it out. Seriously. This is damage control. Karl Rove (or someone) had a vision of this poem appearing in a commercial during the full-on campaign season, used in order to make Bush look stupid. By claiming someone else wrote the verse, they've neutralized its effectiveness as a campaign tool for the Democrats. If Dean/Clark/Kerry/Sharpton decides to use it, they can paint the Dem candidate for being "mean-spirited" in their attack on Laura Bush. Not that Republicans have ever gone after the wife of a President or anything. I still like Gaiman's explanation better, though.
  • As long as we're spared a sequel to the song "Let the Eagle Soar."