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Michelle Obama has led a life that sounds like a really bad B-movie, the sort of life that brings out the gossip hound in every journalist. Her first brush with controversy came when she was still in her teens, and killed a male friend who was rumored to have just broken off a serious relationship with her. Some years later, she met and married the young Harvard graduate Barack Obama, whose problems with alcohol -- and, it is strongly indicated, other substances -- caused him to storm around in violent rages until she finally got him to lay off the sauce a little over a decade ago.
Oh, wait: That's not Michelle Obama I was describing, it was Laura Bush.
Seriously: If you change the names from "Michelle Obama" and "Barack Obama" to "Laura Bush" and "George W. Bush" in that little spiel above, you have a litany of little-known facts about the woman currently living in the White House as our First Lady. If Michelle Obama had done any of these things, the collective screech from the howler monkeys known as our GOP/Media Complex could be heard on Mars and her husband's campaign would be effectively over. But of course Laura Bush did them, and the press paints her as a stainless saint and helpmeet.
As usual, the media raises the bar up to Mount Everest for Democrats and their spouses, whereas for Republicans and their spouses they drop it in the Marianas Trench.
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Michelle Obama rocks!! Love that woman. I’m sure Charlotte thinks she’s dim though.
Beautiful, PW. Thank you. It amazes me how few people know these details about LB. The fog that covers up the darkness is incredible. And the double standard needs to be pulled down, hard.
LS, YOU are on a roll today! LOL!
The Supremes put pickles in our ice cream.
¿ Que?
Look at how Hillary was vilified as First Lady, Nancy Reagan, Barbra Bush and Laura Bush not so much.
Lahoma tells me she wants to live to see the day a Native American woman is sworn in as president of the United States. I feel the same way.
I believe Pickles is Little boot’s nickname for the missus.
You never hear anything about her at all. Other first ladies used to make speeches, open libraries, have causes they worked on and Pickles hasn’t don’t anything (that I can see) since the first year in the WH.
It’s strange - maybe she actually moved out.
hey Phoenix Woman–
heading back to Minneapolis, MN after several outrageous days in Paris…can’t wait to get back to my favorite cafe, Espresso Royale Cafe, in Dinkytown…
That’s her (Laura Bush) nickname, pickles.
I’ve always wondered how any intelligent woman in her right mind would marry George W. Bush.
Exactly.
I think you answered your own question.
Cool! Caffeine is our friend. :-)
As per usual PW, great post, thanks.
DING DING DING! We have a winner!
Laura Bush. Thank God I am not her.
She should run!
His dad is really, really, really rich and powerful…a good “catch”..And they had sex at least once…twins. What more do you want in life?
To be Laura Bush takes a special kind of woman.
*sigh* I remember being SO proud of LaDonna Harris when she was named Barry Commoner’s running mate. That brings back memories of hopeful times.
o/t
Phoenix Woman !
hope you saw my note earlier in the day about McCrazy joining the anti-vax freaktrain AND your post was given props (with link)over at HealthLawProf Blog
Ya, probably is a good thing you aren’t her. Snuggling up that loser very night… .
This one needs LOTS of Diggs. You all know what to do.
omg the dreaded double post ! - can a lurking mod delete one of them ?
And think about it. If the twins weren’t in vitro, she actually…. EWWW!
My comment at 22 is in response to your comment of 7, OKK. For some reason, reply isn’t always sticking when I click it.
Hi PW. Great post!
The thought here is that Laura and George are probably a fairly good match. Intellectually speaking.
I think Michelle is hot! The world is in for lots of surprises…good ones.
I agree - someone who somehow can do some major rationalizing. She was 31 when she “met” Chimpy Mcflightsuit. She was not some starry-eyed freshman that he’d picked up someplace. She already had her masters degree and had worked. I think George Sr. and Babs were just at their wits’ end about George, were casting around for someone “suitable” and Laura Welch had just come home. I think the whole thing was arranged, personally.
A proper consort for the Dauphin?
One time…that’s all it took…
Ewwwwwwwwwwwwww
VictorKarlLaura, I really love you, I’ve got something for you…Victor Ashe….uh, huh…
tee-hee I was downstairs rattling off to myself again.
Evening pups…ahhh Michelle, now there is the woman I wish was running for prez (sorry barack)
Toby, you are probably correct about the ‘arrangement’ but when I first read your comment I swear the word looked like ‘deranged’.
We love LaDonna Harris. We have looked at her for years. We loved her husband too. Fred Harris is one of ours (Oklahoman). Thank you for the mention.
It amazes me that Laura’s deadly past never came up in 2000. If you read all the accounts of her accident from the time it seems clear that she at least wanted to hurt the boy BAD, if not a murder suicide or something. Tell Laura I looooooooooove her. Oops, too late.
Ding, f’ing, Ding!! Victor wasn’t appropriate…ya know.
I think folks should all just lay off the first ladies. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have your husband drag you through all of that to begin with and at no pay and very little thanks. It’s amazing more of them just don’t run off to Paris and drink wine.
Well, given Laura Bush’s MIL, there might have been that as well.
“Mcflightsuit”. I like that.
Here’s the Wiki on Laura.
The last entry I see is in 2006.
I think Mary Todd Lincoln was a little like that. She was always going off to New York mad shopping for White House furnishings.
O/T Geraldo going after Lou Dobbs for targeting illegal immigrants!?! I would so pay to see that man fight
BBC News World Service: Hillary may not the delegates in TX because of TX’s crazy system…she may not get the Hispanic vote she was hoping for..
In nearly 8 years of the Bush presidency, I can’t think of any single thing where Laura Bush has not been anything but a perfect Stepford Wife, so far as coverage of her in the press goes. No controversies, no public stands of any substance. Seriously, she’d make a great prototype for a generic first lady.
The closest I’ve seen to anything a like a scandal was a brief tabloid line that W was seriously drinking again and she’d moved out of the White House. That disappeared real fast.
If she’s not tranked to the gills, I don’t know how she does it.
thanks, kiddo - it’s my one contribution to the FDL Lexicon. ;)
hey there…
well as kiddo suggests ‘W’ and Laura are well-matched, and heaven knows they deserve each other, the crux being that we’ve not deserved either.
BBC World Service: America is in a dark mood…the Iraq war is having quite an effect on the American psyche….
I really do think that Babs and Poppy had a very looong talk with Laura and told her what her job responsibilities are: never embarass us, keep a lid on George, have a couple of kids, always look good, smile nicely, and stay out of trouble.
amen to that!
Wrongio. If you have that kind of a platform, and decide to throw it away, you are a loser. A first lady has access to lots of “helpers” to do SOMETHING WORTHWHILE if she wanted to. She wouldn’t even need to be well. She could hire people to do everything…
Compare Laura Bush to Hillary Clinton. Which of these two would you rather have a conversation with? I think I’ll take Clinton.
hehe…
Can you just imagine what Michelle could do to Laura in a television debate. I don’t think I could watch it.
They do serve wine right there at the white house ya know!
Laura Bush always looks so spaced out. Or is it just me?
Why kiddo, you’ve proposed a contest which Hillary wins by a true landslide! Not even Diebold could game that one …
I think her expression is more a case of applications of Botox than drugs, but I’m not sure how she can get through her day without some chemical help.
I asked Lahoma who she related to more. Laura or Michelle? I thought she (Lahoma) was going to punch me out.
Definitely not just you
Betsy,
YGM
I was at a party the other night, and someone there “in the know”, said that W drank cocktails at parties, while late in his term as governor (well after he supposedly quit)….I trust this person, an attorney, implicitly…he said he didn’t get drunk, but he did drink, he said. He also said that W completely changed when he became prezdinent and wouldn’t shake the hands of those that were his friends previously.
Your European impressions would make for a good “report”. Hope its not too cold in MN when you get home!
now you do.
Sounds like high school.
Maybe that’s the problem the republicans are all having. They never grew up. It’s perhaps an issue of always having mom and dad to fall back on, they never had to make it on their own.
Putting up Laura Bush against Michelle Obama is red meat on the table. I am satisfied with this meal. What you have here is an intellect (Obama) opposed to… well… you decide.
I am among the many Michelle Obama fans. That woman has some serious smarts.
Bob in HI
Some good news, via Atrios:
Seconding LS, a report about the world outside the fascist curtain would be wonderful upon your return. Paris! France! Liberation! We’ll probably have to settle for a wee ‘change’ but …
Do regale us, please. Foreign adventures … ah.
Republicananiacs are not difficult to figure out. They are rich and aim to stay that way. No matter the costs.
Yes.
Good point. I know my friend, and his colleagues, were puzzled at the time…not any more.
We need links to similar coverage by the WaPo, they are such craven suck-ups to whoever is the incumbent.
bottom line, Shrub is an unrecovered addict. George Bush Jr. (Shrub) is an addict and a bully who is taking out his addicted cravings & stubborn rages on the entire country of the United States of America and anyone else he can bully around like the Tony Blair British govt., Iraq, Iran, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, Canada, Mexico, …… Yet, when seriously dangerous countries like Russia or China or Pakistan or Saudia Arabia or India or Indonesia bark back at Shrub, his balls shrivel up and he goes yelping back to his little poodle-pen.
Woohoo.
One down. how many to go?
President Obama is coming to town. He is coming to lead us into a new dawn.
Serious?!?! About bloody time! One more down, many more to go.
Am I the only one who would love to see a debate between the cindy McCain and Michelle Obama?
I don’t know why, but I hope HRC sticks it out to the end no matter what. Just a feeling.
Why? You think that would be good for the dems going forward?
Ha! Dream on….Michelle would eat her alive. No contest there, but they are not running.
Well now, it would be putting Cindy McCain up against either Michelle Obama or Bill Clinton. What a joke!
Oh, I know they aren’t running, but I would still enjoy it.
Who can you think of that WOULD be a match for Michelle Obama in a debate?
Not many!
LOL I don’t even think Obama could match her
Excellent! But why? I mean I know she’s incompetent, but that hasn’t changed anything in the recent past…
PW excellent post and it once again illustrates who biased the MSM is.
We really live in a propaganda world. What a shame.
No one. Not a one.
Cindy seems like another Stepford. I haven’t seen much of her, but that’s the impression I get. Carrying on the Bush legacy in more ways than one.
What a scream. ;0)
Linky:
http://www.ksfo560.com/home.asp
Be back, gonna go whip up dinner
Wish I had been a fly on the wall when they gave her the news
In case something comes up about Obama that none of us can imagine. He has still not been vetted.
Well, consider that George W.’s career had been up to that point a guy who ditched out on a possible National Gaurd career when they started testing pilots for drugs and alcohol. Oh…and the Viet Nam war was winding down so much that the odds of him being re-assigned to an active duty unit if they did decide to punish him for not showing up for mandatory physicals was zilch. If he had done this one year earlier he would have been sent to ‘Nam.
Then Dubya decided he would use that million-dollar pilot training (although TANG suspended his pilots license) to fly “horticultural specialities” from El Salvador and Honduras to Florida and Houston. Reports are the plane he was flying was later discovered to be used by the CIA and narcotics trafficking in the 1980’s. He did that for a couple of years, and also a stint flying in Alaska. He’s never discussed any of this period in his life.
Then, after Daddy got him into Harvard Business School, where his professors have said that he was disruptive and a poor student…he decides to visit his Papa in China, where George HW…Sr. is ambassador. For six months he did nothing, although he later said he chased “unsuccessfully” Chinese girls. Yeah, sure! Does anyone really believe that the Chinese Gov’t would not have “set up” the Ambassadors son with a nice situation (that could be clandestinely filmed through two way mirrors)? That was not only SOP for the Eastern European KGB trained intelligence groups, but it had a long history of use under Mandarin China before THAT. Horney young Western diplomats son, ripe for blackmail and prying intelligence information out of! I suspect China has some embarassing video of the War President on file in Beijing soimewhere.
BTW his mom, Barbara, walked out of the household at that time…not stomaching either China, or her family life. So Papa assigned Dubya the task of hosting the annual Fourth of July BBQ for the handful of expats in China at the time. The boy was good at that sort of stuff. He was well-trained for parties where the booze flowed like water
Posted earlier today, this hit piece on Michelle Obama in the Asia Times tells us the neocon phenomena is transnational.
http://atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JC04Aa01.html
Commenting on Michelle Obamas’ Princeton, thesis, written c. 1985, that is, in the midst of Ronald Reagan and Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is Good” America, “Spengler” writes:
Never mind that Spengler’s “novel” observation fits thousands of bright, twenty year-old, over-achieving scholarship students over the last four decades who were granted “access” to but not “membership” in the elite personified by the Ivy League (and their foreign counterparts, eg, Oxbridge, the elite French professional schools). For many, it was a kind of platform ticket that allowed them to see the fast trains coming through the station, but disallowed their actually boarding any of them.
Nevertheless, that access was an important but limited attempt at democratization; it remains even more so today, thanks in part to the restricted budgets and financial aid allowed by George Bush and like-minded GOP-controlled state legislators, who are limiting access even to traditionally open state universities. Legacy George always despised those kids; they earned their place, but “ruined” the atmosphere of institutions the elite regard as their own.
Spengler’s Schadenfreude is palpable. Spengler can’t wait for Michelle Obama’s “profound rage, amplified by guilt” to scupper her husband’s campaign. Regardless of whether the nominee is Obama or Hillary, something tells me Spengler will be waiting longer than it takes for George Bush to admit a mistake.
Ah, the significant, other debate! Bet Bill would just shine …
Hey! No whipping raw food.
Speaking of Howler Monkeys, we, the people of the country formerly known as Canuckistan apologize for the actions of our own maximum snow-howler, Prime Minister Stephen Harper:
“The (Canadian) government regrets any implication … that Senator Obama has been saying different things in private than in public.”
Sorry.
.
Michelle Obama comes across as a person with a purpose. A good purpose. Laura Bush. Not so much.
Interesting:
“Meanwhile Gloria Steinem, one of Hillary Clinton’s best-known supporters and a feminist idol, questioned the relevance of McCain’s ordeal as a prisoner of war. “This is supposed to be a qualification to be president? I don’t think so,”
http://www.wienerzeitung.at/De.....cob=331668
This is gonna be so dirty…so dirty…
Uh-oh, the Marine Corps is investigating a Hawaii based Marine that just returned from Afghanistan and posted a Utube of him throwing a puppy to it’s death off a cliff while serving there… Okay, I agree, but, what about Tillman and three shots… 8-(
Ouch - no good. McCain’s POW experience is central, in his own mind if no one else’s, to his credibility as a candidate.
HA!:
I suppose she’s made enough money on this republican title wave to make it through life quite comfortably, though. It’d be a pity if she had to work.
The numbers are that the Hispanic votes are going to count considerably less because they didn’t turn out in the 2006 midterm. African Americans turned out in big numbers in Texas in the 2006 midterm.
Here is a pretty objective account of the numbers from Chuck Todd at MSNBC.
Obama has 1194 delegates; Clinton has 1037 so she is down 157 delegates. Clinton is up with Super Delegates but they are defecting and poised to defect tomorrow night if she doesn’t surprise a lot of people. She has 254 and Obama has 208 aside from defections I might not know about.
If Clinton were to win both Texas and Ohio by a margin of 52-48% she gains 5-6 delegates; then if you throw into that equation that Obama wins Vermont by a landslide as he is polled to do, that cuts her net gain down to 2-5 delegates.
And even if she wins both Texas and Ohio 52-48, she still has to win every one of the remaining 12 states by a 70% margin which is not going to happen.
The Clinton team has already distanced themselves from a number of comments Gloria Steinhem made over the weekend–some of which were fairly surprising.
Here’s the only way that that Clinton remaining in the race after being defeated in Ohio or Texas would help. She would have to covertly cooperate with Clinton ta make this work.
First, they would have to continued having debates. But they could use these “free appearances” as rival candidates. But both could use the opportunities by attacking McCain rather than one another. They could praise each others ability to serve the country and their policy proposals, offering that they were flexible on integrating the others ideas into their own plan.
And they could defend each other from scurrilous attacks by the likes of Russert and “Tweety”. But the time the pundits and networks caught on that they had been punked the Democrats might have gained several months of free advertising while McCain was sitting half bankrupt and without “meaningful” races. Clinton and Obama could in the meantime use the remaining races to generate interest in the Democratic Party, advance party registration, etc.
Kiddo says good night. And so do I.
Lahoma.
The New Yorker has a profile on Michelle Obama: http://www.newyorker.com/repor.....ct_collins
Interesting reading, and seems reasonably fair.
I have had trouble seeing how either of them has any significant national security or foreign policy experience that distinguishes them–they are both well traveled but one of them grew up in other countries because when his mom remarried an Indonesian.
Being on Senate Armed Forces or Foreign Relations doesn’t necessarily give a candidate foreign policy experience. If you want a candidate with considerable foreign policy experience Joe Biden or Wesley Clark can lay claim to that. Wesley Clark has experience making important military decisions and neither candidate has experience in that area.
I think one stands out as having considerably more insight and judgement, and maybe we’ll find out what the voters think of that by this time tomorrow.
Pickles couldn’t hold a candle to Michelle or Hillary. She’s so medicated I am surprised she can remember her own first name. Talk about Stepford wife, complete with plastic smile.
The Asia Times hit piece uses classic Rovian techniques, describing Michelle Obama’s strengths and success as if they were her husband’s campaign’s worst nightmare. It trashes women and all other over achievers in the bargain.
Like her husband, Michelle Obama is from a lower working class Chicago family. She beat world class odds and earned a scholarship to Princeton. She performed well there, despite the wrenching social differences between her and its “average” students (not to mention normal undergraduate angst), and has continued to perform exceptionally in adult life.
Rather than describe this woman in the glowing terms the ReichWing reserves for Condi Rice, who has a similar background and achievements, this article describes Michelle Obama’s outstanding success as if it were “a ticket for failure”, hers and her husbands. Imagery potently at odds with reality, but which is pounded out as relentlessly as a toothpaste commercial. Meet the ffokers, the neocon spin machine just gearing up, but using tried and true methods.
Don’t be so sure.
My better half saw Michelle speak and was blown away by her as a person, and by her command of issues. My wife was a Edwards backer at the time.
I saw her speech at UCLA with Oprah and it was better than anything I’ve ever seen from Barack.
I’d imagine she has had plenty of practice dealing with smarmy, know-it-all men in her life, and would have no problem handling Bill when he tried his crap. So Bill took on H.W. Shrub, Ross Perot, and Bob Dole in debates? Bill’s never had to debate someone even remotely as smart and as well-spoken as Michelle. It would be interesting.
I wonder if Michelle would have a little extra motivation as well, going against a “man” that disgraced his wife, daughter, White House, The DemocratIC Party, and America as Bill did with an intern. A mother of two young daughters is probably not going to have much respect for a sexist pig like Bill Clinton.
I was being snarklish, Bill has begun to bloviate and Michelle exudes a kind of class he couldn’t emulate in a month of Sundays. Besides, I’m prejudiced as to whom I think is the wiser.