Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Laura Bush book: Car wrecks, poisonings and petty politics

By Thomas Hart,

Laura Bush killed a guy. That’s one of the biggest stories in the new Laura Bush book, “Spoken from the Heart.” Laura Bush killed a guy in a car crash when she was 17, but it wasn’t her fault. Laura Bush, her husband President George W. Bush and their entourage got sick during a visit to Germany, and guess what? They were poisoned. The Laura Bush book also lets the world know that the former president’s wife is deeply hurt by Democrats calling her husband names.




Laura Bush pay day

The Laura Bush book, in the patented shift-the-blame, paranoid style popular among certain hard-right conservatives, is billed by amazon.com as an “intimate portrait of the first lady.” “Spoken from the Heart” is due to be released in early May, but the New York Times managed to score a copy from a bookstore. Laura Bush is the latest of many people involved in the Bush Administration to cash in on book deals. Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc., outbid several publishers in an auction for rights to her story. The Huffington Post reports that rival publishers doubted the information Bush wants to share is the same that the public wants to read; they also question whether her advance matched the $8 million in instant cash Hillary Clinton scooped up for “Living History.”



Laura Bush killed a guy

The New York Times review said the Laura Bush book devotes considerable pages to a car wreck that killed a star athlete at her high school. In a world where Vietnam war veterans are Swift-boated and candidates–even Republicans–are slandered with lies about fathering illegitimate black children, it’s a wonder that journalists who must have known about Laura Bush’s fatal car accident long ago never reported it. In November 1963, she ran a stop sign with her dad’s Chevy Impala and killed Michael Douglas.



Laura Bush book details car accident

In the Laura Bush book the New York Times said the former first lady said she was troubled with guilt after the crash. But she didn’t reach out to the Douglas family or attend his funeral because her parents didn’t want her to. She also said it was dark, the stop sign was too small and the victim was driving an unsafe car: “It was sporty and sleek, and it was also the car that Ralph Nader made famous in his book Unsafe at Any Speed,” according to the Laura Bush book.



Laura Bush book: red meat for Republicans

The Laura Bush book throws red meat to the Republican base by calling out Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, for calling George W. Bush “an incompetent leader.” She also reacts to comments about W by Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, who is quoted in the Laura Bush book calling her husband a “loser” and a “liar.” Considering the current belligerent stance of the Republican party, she comes across as somewhat of a hypocritical whiner:



“The comments were uncalled for and graceless,” she writes. “While a president’s political opponents, as well as his supporters, are entitled to make what they see as legitimate criticisms, and while our national debates should be spirited, these particular worlds revealed the petty and parochial nature of some who serve in Congress.”



Laura Bush book: best of

Other tidbits in the Laura Bush book the New York Times considered worth noting include her suggestion that W’s universally ridiculed fly-over of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was in the best interests of the victims and aid workers on the ground. Any GOP true believer will get out the credit card to read her revelation of the insidious plot to poison the president. On a trip to Germany for a G8 Summit, everyone got sick and W was bedridden. The Secret Service investigated the possibility they were poisoned, she writes, but doctors could only blame a virus.

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