Poora Laura

The unusual collection of President-crunching quips from the First Lady at the recent White House Press Correspondents' Association bash has left some of us dazed. Not confused, just dazed. But enough time has passed now to make a sensible evaluation.

For those of you who missed it (including the mainline media news), Mrs. Bush interrupted the President while he was in the middle of a joke, saying she'd sat silently for the past few years during this event and now felt it was her turn to tell the jokes.

It was your usual put-your-husband-down-in-public fare, and most of it was hilarious. But only most. The usual tongue-in-cheek jabs at a spouse are usually laughable because there's a bit of truth in them. And lowering yourself to the level of the audience is okay within certain boundaries. Unfortunately, Mrs. Bush all too eagerly spied the forbidden fruit and took a big bite.

She first admits that she's more sexually starved than Susan and Gabrielle on Desperate Housewives. Then she confesses that she and the Second Lady slipped away to enjoy the bikinied Chippendale boys teasing them. Lastly, she told one about the President's ignorance of ranching. He "tried to milk the horse. What's worse, it was a male horse."

Of course, this audience roared in spite of any shock value coming from the podium. They couldn't believe what they were hearing. And it was just what they wanted, fodder for their next party.

The evangelical Christians are taking the First Lady to task, as is talk show host Michael Savage. Shocked that such gutter talk should come from the mouth of the wife of the free world's leader, they call for an apology. They say this is beneath the dignity of Laura Bush and the office of the Presidency. They say it dishonored her husband in the extreme.

Okay . . . here's my take. I can either say, "Laura, you should be ashamed of yourself, wash your mouth out with soap, buy a full page for an apology in the Washington Post, and ask God and your husband for forgiveness," or "Laura, I'm pretty certain that you've never seen Desperate Housewives, don't have a clue about what the guys at Chippendale's do, and don't understand the anatomy of a horse or the sexual nature of your description. One of your Democrat friends probably wrote these jokes for you and you didn't have a clue about how crude they were."

I think I'll have to go with tar and feathering, but really wish Laura was just plain too dumb to know what she was doing.