I generally don’t pay too much attention to Laura Bush’s policy opinions; she’s not an elected official, she has no obvious power to speak of, and her comments are rarely of any consequence.<\/p>\n
They are, however, frequently annoying<\/a>.<\/p>\n On MSNBC this morning, Norah O’Donnell asked Laura Bush about a new poll that found “only 2 in 10 Americans approve of the job that the president is doing on Iraq.”<\/p>\n Mrs. Bush placed the blame squarely on the media. She said, “I do know that there are a lot of good things that are happening that aren’t covered. And I think that the drum beat in the country from the media, from the only way people know what is happening…is discouraging.”<\/p>\n Mrs. Bush added that she hopes there is “more balanced coverage by the media” in the future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now, I had more or less assumed the “what about the good news?” tack had been dropped from the GOP talking points, because the question was just too transparently dumb to keep repeating. Maybe the First Lady’s office hasn’t received updated instructions on how to spin the fiasco.<\/p>\n For that matter, the Iraq Study Group seemed to settle this “debate” once and for all last week when the panel noted that violence in Iraq has, if anything, been underreported<\/a>.<\/p>\n But in the bigger picture, I think it’s worth noting that Laura Bush keeps inserting herself in political debates in awkward ways. In May, she dismissed public opinion and said, “As I travel around the United States\u2026A lot of people come up to me and say, ‘Stay the course<\/a>‘.” Around the same time, Laura Bush jumped into the immigration debate, saying that the National Anthem “should be sung in English, of course<\/a>.”<\/p>\n A few months before that, during a visit to Liberia, the First Lady said that she does not believe<\/a> Republicans are mired in a “culture of corruption,” and added that she would be “glad to campaign for Republicans who ask me to campaign for them or do fundraisers for them.”<\/p>\n Indeed, she’s even played media critic before, complaining to Bill O’Reilly<\/a> in 2004 that the “there’s a big move away from actual reporting” and there’s too much “opinion” in the media. (Yes, she apparently missed the irony.)<\/p>\n Laura Bush has also weighed in on the anti-gay constitutional amendment<\/a>, Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure<\/a> as Defense Secretary, and gun control policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Just to be clear, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the First Lady sharing her opinions on matters of politics and public policy, but I think it’s a little odd that a) the right used to complain bitterly when Hillary Clinton did the same thing; and b) if Laura Bush wants to remain above the fray, why does she keep making controversial political statements?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I generally don’t pay too much attention to Laura Bush’s policy opinions; she’s not an elected official, she has no obvious power to speak of, and her comments are rarely of any consequence. They are, however, frequently annoying. On MSNBC this morning, Norah O’Donnell asked Laura Bush about a new poll that found “only 2 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nFor example, shortly before the November elections, the First Lady was asked about the Michael J. Fox campaign ads on stem-cell research. Bush sided with critics<\/a> of the actor, telling a C-SPAN audience, “It’s always easy to manipulate people’s feelings, especially when you are talking about diseases that are so difficult.”<\/p>\n