Posted on 05/02/2005 6:00:13 AM PDT by fight_truth_decay
Who knew? First lady Laura Bush took over the podium from her husband at Saturday night's annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner and knocked 'em dead, keeping Washington's most powerful politicos in stitches as she worked the ballroom like a seasoned stand-up comic.
CUT
Although Washington's movers and shakers laughed at Mrs. Bush's performance, some in the press woke up with a Sunday morning hangover and began to criticize her monologue as immodest at best and downright bawdy at worst.
"Laura Bush cracks risque jokes at the White House Correspondents' dinner," sniffed Agence France-Presse. CNN reporter Elaine Quijano, who attended the dinner, also apparently had her sensibilities scarred by some of the first lady's quips.
"In some respects, I think for some folks it was a little shocking because she kind of crossed the line a little bit in some people's minds," she said.
"It was very risque," the Nation's David Korn said yesterday on Fox News. "I was wondering what the social conservatives and James Dobson had to say about all these jokes that were laced with sexual innuendo. Not a very family-values-type speech. I'm not sure I want to explain a lot of those jokes to my 4-year-old."
Eyebrows were raised by the first lady's bit about the president's ranching skills, which Mrs. Bush said her husband lacked because the elite schools he attended, Andover and Yale, "don't have a real strong ranching program."
She then added: "He's learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What's worse, it was a male horse."
The crowd howled. The joke, a female Associated Press reporter said, "had women giggling in the bathroom."
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
Does Howlin type your posts for you or just verbally tell you what to say????
The jokes were not offensive, the outrage was fake. It was not conservatives who were criticizing, it was just stupid liberals making fun of conservatives being outraged at the Whoopi Goldberg and other liberal off color humor. Apparently some of the news organizations didn't recognize the satire for what it was.
Since you seem to be so familiar with it, exactly what is "my influence?"
You can call off your gang now.....
Who is MY GANG???? I need to know this.
My wife was offended. Wanna call her outrage fake?
Do you ride the short bus to your computer?
You make no sense at all, just continue to post paranoid fantasies about small groups and pings.
Howlin didn't ping me to this thread. I didn't ping Howlin to this thread. I was reading it while I was working, but didn't post until you got snide about OhioWFan, who is as faithful and true a Christian as you can find anywhere.
Edited to add OhioWFan to the "reply to" box, because I
mentioned her.
I guess we will just have to respectfully agree to disagree.
I don't believe the left is capable of being offended and are just feigning it to fuel their divide and conquer strategy. The left will use the disapproval of some social conservatives to their benefit in a two-fold manner. It allows them to claim to be "just as moral and upstanding" as conservatives and to initiate cat-fights such as have occurred on these threads where we appear to be eating our own.
I am truly sorry to see they have been succeeding.
I'll bet the ranch you don't know a thing about George OR Laura Bush.
She talks about how exciting and fun he has made her life all the time.............in fact, she even said it at the dinner. You are clueless.
Absolutely Ohio very well put she says she married him because she knew he could make her laugh for the rest of her life, that I thinks says it all about the routine and her delivery of it - it was their humour.
Hey, why is that so hard to understand? They were jokes and people who grew up in the country has known that horse or cow/bull story for many, many years. Why get uptight over something that every country person has heard since they were kids?
Laura was funny without uttering one off color word or snide remark. She showed her real class while dispelling the fears that people have about a "right wing Christian theocracy" led by the Bush's. I love them for being good people and respect them for being so smart!
Remember all the "outrage" when Pres Bush spoke to Ozzie Osborne at this dinner, all silly.
I didn't know we were a "gang" and you're the gang leader...LOL!!!!
Your wife sounds like a humorless prig. Sorry, no offense intended.
I was suggesting that the posters who wish to chastise Ms. Bush should be morally consitent and chastise those on their side of the issue who make baseless and crude remarks about the First Lady. If you cannot critizize those that are supposedly with you, don't critizise Ms. Bush.
Wow, the "S.I.V. Brigade" (AKA the "Panties in a Bunch Bunch") is out in force today!
"Gee, what can we get outraged and offended about today?"
Well, you can color me clueless, too. If I have a gang, I damn well want to know who is in it and what we do!
I think you'll like this short interview with the speechwriter:
White House Letter: Joke writer to the stars of Washington politics
Elisabeth Bumiller
MONDAY, MAY 2, 2005
WASHINGTON When Laura Bush wise-cracked at the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner on Saturday night that she was a "desperate housewife" married to a man who was sound asleep by 9 p.m., a slight, worried man stood in the wings hanging on to every line. As well he might, since he had written most of them for the first lady's inaugural act as a stand-up comic.
Judging from the laughter at her words - "George's answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chain saw, which I think is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well" - Landon Parvin, joke writer to the political stars, could relax.
Bush not only made fun of her husband (and Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) but also of her mother-in-law, the former first lady Barbara Bush, whom she likened to Don Corleone in "The Godfather."
She described time spent at her in-laws' summer home in Maine like this: "First prize, three days' vacation with the Bush family. Second prize, 10 days."
Parvin, who normally writes jokes for the president, also wrote jokes and presidential speeches for Ronald Reagan and is remembered in Washington for the lyrics to "Secondhand Clothes," the song that Nancy Reagan performed at the 1982 correspondents' dinner lampooning her taste in designers.
Although Parvin was loath to speak about how he cooked up one-liners for the current first lady - "I shouldn't be talking, I like being my little mole-ish self" - he did speak before and after the dinner about presidential stand-up comedy in general.
"In the scheme of things, it's not important," Parvin said. "But everybody wants to do well. Someone said humor is like standing up naked in front of an audience, then turning around and saying, 'What do you think?"'
The one advantage that he has in writing for presidents, he said, is that it's easier to get a laugh. "I noticed it first with Reagan," Parvin said. "Reagan would come into the East Room, and he would have a little throwaway line, and it would get a laugh, and it wouldn't have gotten a laugh with most people. What it did was break the tension. It's the unexpected, I guess. People don't expect presidents to be funny."
In Bush's case, her routine was her husband's idea. Tradition calls for the president to deliver one-liners to the 2,500 White House correspondents and guests at the Gridiron dinner in the Washington Hilton ballroom, but Bush has now done that three times. His wife agreed to step in, then sat down with Parvin and Susan Whitson, her press secretary, to work on ideas.
Playing off "Desperate Housewives," the racy hit U.S. television show, was a natural, even though Whitson said in a brief interview after the dinner that Bush had never actually seen it. Whitson said the first lady had heard about the characters and plot from her twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, who are fans, and was planning to watch the entire first season on a DVD she has at home.
Once Parvin finished his script, Bush had several days of rehearsals, including one shortly before the dinner. She went on right after dessert, as the president was at the lectern launching into his worst jokes from the 2004 campaign.
Laura Bush suddenly got up and "interrupted" her husband, saying "not that old joke, not again." Then she added, as the audience laughed: "I've been attending these dinners for years and just quietly sitting there. I've got a few things I want to say for a change." Whitson said that while the president was in on the setup, he did not know what his wife would say, and he reacted mostly by guffawing with a bright red face.
Parvin, who said writing a speech about the Iran-contra scandal was a lot easier than writing jokes, termed self-deprecating humor essential for presidents. As a joke writer, he said, his most important task is to meld personality and topicality.
"First of all, you get the person's character in your head," he said. "But a lot depends on what's going on at the time. It's just a feeling that's in the air. So you take that feeling and distill it down to lines that reflect the perception of that person's character."
Parvin, 56, writes for Republicans but also for Democrats whom he likes, such as Bill Clinton's friend Vernon Jordan and Robert Strauss, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He is the son of a University of Illinois accountant and says that he was a well-liked but unfunny misfit growing up. In 1981, he was writing for the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm when he got a job as a Reagan speechwriter.
He now writes serious speeches for politicians and executives from his home in Fredericksburg, Virginia, but is called in every year to do Bush's routines for four Washington events: the Gridiron; the Alfalfa Club; a radio and television correspondents' dinner; and the White House press dinner. Bush, he said, "works on the script, and practices, and takes it seriously." Parvin (and the president) have had one recent bomb, however: Bush's joke at the radio and television dinner last year that "those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere" as a slide showed the president rummaging under the Oval Office furniture.
Parvin, who said his job is to remain in the background, begged off having his picture taken.
"Just say I look like a withered Brad Pitt," he said.
Oh, yes, I do! Thank you for reminding us of that; once again, much ado about nothing!
Rush is on right now telling how great our Laura was...
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