Interesting Comments from Laura Bush

The conservatives, as the media acknowledge, have been vocally stating their opposition to Obama's speech to school children. They claim it's "indoctrination." When Ronald Reagan did the same thing, or George H.W. Bush, were they crying out about "indoctrination"? I don't remember hearing any such thing, and I'd wager I'm not just forgetting.

And the Republicans marshalled people to turn out at the town meetings on health care reform and be very vocal and literally yell and scream and shout down the speakers.

And now we have the "tea parties," more of the same thing. I'd like to know who is organizing and funding these things. I doubt that they are really grass-roots or spontaneous upwellings of popular sentiment.

Evidently in a recent interview with CNN, former First Lady Laura Bush has acknowledged how partisan and polarized the country is getting. She said her husband did not succeed in "reaching across the aisle" in Congress as he had been able to do as governor of Texas; he did not expect national politics to be different from Texas politics. Maybe back in Texas he didn't have the same cronies doing the same kind of dirty work as in Washington (I won't mention any names but I've already blogged about a former Vice President--and then there was Rove).

Mrs. Bush says that the reason for all this shrillness, stridency, partisanship, and polarization is because we now have more congressmen from energetically liberal or energetically conservative (my word, not hers) districts. I don't know if that's true, but it's interesting. My own idea would have been that the Republicans are just trying to stir things up with battle cries of "socialism" and "socialized medicine" because they are already preparing for the 2012 elections.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Stein