Posted on 05/11/2005 6:59:03 PM PDT by rface
A word of caution for Laura Bush. Make sure the mike is off before you start telling those jokes. You know the ones I mean. The ones rated XXX by the family values folks who turn out in droves to support George and his friends.
Remember Hillary Clinton . . . oops, "Rodham" Clinton. The time she put on those designer clothes and posed for a fashion layout in Vogue magazine and sold as many copies as Jackie Kennedy to the consternation of her friends.
"She didn't prove, as her advocates insist, that a modern woman can be all things," pouted one woman in a letter to the editor. "She proved that after becoming a powerful lawyer and policy maker, she still needed to be a sex object."
Laura, in a talk at the White House correspondents' dinner, got off a doozy describing husband George's efforts to become a Texas rancher after all those years of book learning at Andover and Yale, with an occasional detour down to Morey's.
I repeat the line in a family newspaper for the simple reason that it is crucial to this column and in no way intended to rouse the prurient interests of the reader, if I have one left after reaching the fifth paragraph.
"He's learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse," she said. "What's worse, it was a male horse."
It was jokes like that that got me thrown out of Miss Madden's fifth grade class at the Thomas A. Watson School.
I didn't see her tell the joke in the original, which, incidentally, was written by Landon Parvin, one of Ron Reagan's former speech writers, but I got a look at the audience reaction in the reruns.
Democrats laughed uproariously; most Republicans smiled nervously; those Republicans who listen to Rush Limbaugh and read Ann Coulter looked like lobsters that had just been dropped into boiling water by Mary Tyler Moore.
But there is a better than even chance that a good standup routine won't hurt Laura's standing with the American people after all.
Remember Nancy Reagan was pilloried for her practice of accepting the loan of fashionable clothing from American designers, saying she was just giving a boost to the nation's fashion industry. Her advisers convinced her to give them to museums.
Whereupon, as a parting shot, Nancy turned up at the annual Gridiron dinner wearing a garish outfit of prints, a boa and beads, singing, "Secondhand clothes/To museum collections and traveling shows." Critics were charmed.
But no First Lady has ventured so near to the edge as Laura Bush.
"One night," she said, "after George went to bed, Lynne Cheney, Condi Rice and Karen Hughes and I went to Chippendales (a male strip joint). I won't tell you what happened, but Lynne's Secret Service code name is now "Dollar Bill."
Have you guys heard the one about the traveling salesman and the farmer's daughter?
You betcha!!! Come on down! We love the company!!! :-)
Texas isn't a geographical state, so much as it's a state of mind you know. You can exercise being one of us conservative Texas ladies up in Wisconsin! Welcome!!! :-)
dare i ask what wuz in them there brownies? :-)
Sugar and spice, and everything nice.
MMMmmm... that sounds good!
Laura is damned for telling a joke. Clinton is revered for living one.
Liberals have to be negative about everything the Bushs do to poise themselves for 08.
Oh, indeed it was. And very low in calories.
Agreed. I think even Bob Hope told that old horse joke a few times over the years in one form or another.
No sweat, Laura rules.
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