Politi-flicks: Et, tu, Laura?

You have to go back to Pat Nixon to find a Presidential wife making less of an active impression than Laura Bush, and now that she does speak she's supporting her spouse by castigating the media.

It's a time-old technique only these days the sheer number of actual bombings, abductions, tortured corpse discoveries and U.S. service people dying each week is making that technique look shopworn at best, pathologic at worst.

Here's the clip (on Crooks and Liars) that's got me intriqued, with Norah O'Donnell who's not known for throwing hardballs at El Presidente, on NBC. I haven't seen much of our First Lady and she seemed rather promising back in 2000, an ex-librarian who had events with writers at the White House.

Until The Selling of the War kicked in and they started turning down the invitations.

She's looking thinner (again) than I remember her, and stumbles over the replacement of Donald Rumsfeld, some Freudian blockage over the term, "Secretary of Defense". Then she goes into a sort of Republibot defense of the President by attacking the media for reporting the big news of all the slaughters. When asked by a politely incredulous O'Donnell what good news the media is missing, Bush hits the schools immediately -- while NBC shows kids entering school between two amateur sentries dangling Uzi's.

The strangest section kicks in at :36 with El First Lady minimized screen right and video newsreel of her husband playing on the left, like the future newscasts in Robocop, portraits of an entirely disfunctional America.

First it's him looking old and unconvincingly flimflam at the Press Conference microphone flanked by the Pentagon officials he brought in on his save-my-debacle "listening tour".

Then it's the tired old Republicans from the past, including the two most responsible for seating him (as a way to truncate a full Florida recount), James Baker and Sandra Day O'Connor, trying to staunch their mistake and maybe their consciences delivering the Iraq Study Group Report but stuck across the table like a negotiating foreign nation from George W. Bush, who has since flushed the report down the media black hole by ignoring it.

At 1:26 she starts in with the blame game, which gives NBC their permission to run counterpoint footage, this time allowing her image more balance or dominant while devoted the right side of the screen to violence in Iraq, fire and carnage.

She closes out by using the phrase "our troops" a noticeable number of times, her body frozen in position but clearly on more comfortable ground and ending on "the holidays".

Per numerous press reports, our First Lady was a longtime chain smoker and still sneaks at least an occasional cig when she's sure she's clear of any cameras. Maybe that's why we haven't seen her so much. Must have that nic!

So with her husband's legacy going all to ruin, her daughters at military age instead running around Buenos Aires with unemployed lovers, and supermarket tabloids spreading rumors of marital collapse, is it any wonder that she'd be craving those evil snoids once again?

Image what its like to be Laura Bush these days with all the pressures she's under. Does she wake up all Stepford? Does she wake up feeling trapped?

Does she wake up aghast?


As always, Politi-flicks is cross-posted to The Daily Reel.