Rein it in, Bubba: Former first lady breaks her surly silence. (ap photo)
Beltway has long regarded Laura Bush as one of the most misconstrued figures of the entire Bush administration. A gentle librarian? A Stepford wife? A mild-mannered pie-baker? Think again. She will cut you — no joke. Laura Bush is double-tough, she just hides it well.
LB is a survivor, though — and she learned from the best: Her mother in law, Barbara Bush — another famously misunderstood former first lady. Gentle grandma? Homespun dog-lover? Good natured, white-haired lady in pearls? Wrong! But we digress.
All week, Beltway has been getting geeked up about President Bush’s upcoming book, “Decision Points.” Spill, Bushie! We feel certain it will be better than Rove’s book, and apparently the former president has been beavering away on it since he left Washington.
But now comes word that Laura Bush’s memoir is already in print and true to her nature, full of seething rage! The NYT mysteriously nabbed a copy of “Spoken from the Heart.”
Mrs. Bush takes on Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat who is speaker of the House of Representatives, for calling Mr. Bush “an incompetent leader” and for saying he lacked judgment, knowledge and experience. She also bristles at the insults thrown at Mr. Bush by the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, quoting him as calling her husband a “loser” and a “liar.”
“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.”
Mrow! The former first lady also claims that she, the president and members of the administration may have been poisoned during a trip to Germany for the G8 Summit of world leaders.
They all became mysteriously sick, and the president was bedridden for part of the trip. The Secret Service investigated the possibility they were poisoned, she writes, but doctors could only conclude that they all contracted a virus. After noting several high-profile poisonings, she wrote, “we never learned if any other delegations became ill, or if ours, mysteriously, was the only one.”
Wow. The blog traveled with the White House to Germany on that trip — was it the salted herring?
