The Family Silver

“Poor George……..he can’t help it, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth!”

Ok, I didn’t say it first, Ann Richards, did. (Ok, maybe she stole the “silver foot” part, but that doesn’t matter, it was a great line.) She said it in 1988, when she was the Texas State Treasurer, during the Democratic National Convention. She was, of course, referring to George the First, and his propensity to say things that seemed to be insensitive coming from someone who led such a privileged life. After all, George was the millionaire son of the millionaire Prescott Bush, who made much of the family fortune as the banker that financed the Nazi military buildup to war in the 1930s. As the son of such a powerful man George Sr. was allowed to become a naval airman at the age of 18. (After the war he was allowed to get a Yale degree in only two years.)

The reason I bring it up is that George 2 seems to have inherited that “silver foot.” He is so out of touch with the common man that last week when talking about how Louisiana would be rebuilt the one example of “loss” that he came up with was: "Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house - he's lost his entire house - there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."

Trent Lott’s house? Are you kidding me? Thousands of people have lost their lives. Hundreds of thousands have lost their homes and all Bush can muster up is that he looks forward to sipping ice tea on the front porch of his millionaire buddy Trent Lott’s seaside home overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. I am sure that is great comfort to those people that have lost everything to know that Trent’s front porch will rise again.

But it’s ok, according to George’s mom, Barbara; the refugees are being well taken care of. On Monday, while touring the Astrodome, she declared that they did not have it so bad, because, after all, they were already poor to begin with.

She said, " so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." I am surprised that she didn’t say “so let them eat cake.” She did go on to express her fear that they might actually like their new situation too much: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas."

Yeah that is pretty scary Babs. Maybe you can just keep them all on their green cots in the Astro dome, sort of like a zoo, a great place for rich white women to safely view actual poor people.