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Let there be snark.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

You cannot shame the shameless.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

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Republicans in disarray!

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Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

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You are here: Home / I’m Sorry, But Ick…

I’m Sorry, But Ick…

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I find this sort of thing to not only be disgusting, but really weird:

George W. Bush’s pro-life stance solidified when he was a teenager in Texas — after his mother suffered a devastating miscarriage and showed him the fetus in a jar, the former president said in an extraordinary interview that airs tonight.

“She said to her teenage kid, ‘Here’s the fetus,’ ” the shockingly candid Bush told NBC’s Matt Lauer, gesturing as if he were holding the jar during the TV chat, a DVD of which The Post exclusively obtained.

“There’s no question that affected me, a philosophy that we should respect life,” said the former president, who had to drive his distraught mother to the hospital at the time.

I have no idea what it is with right-wingers making their kids look at dead fetuses, but I find it really, really bizarre.

Reader Interactions

96Comments

  4. 4.

    Tom Levenson

    Off center, but this really reminds me of how much an all-hat-no-cattle rancher Bush the lesser actually was.

    I’m a city boy, but my uncle was a sheep farmer (no jokes, plz), and you see all kinds of yucky sequels to pregnancies, from the sad ones (still births and the like) to just the messy reality of live birth.

    George the lesser led a sheltered life methinks. Plus we all knew Barb was the weird one in that marriage. Too much antifreeze in the bloody mary’s in that household, perhaps.

  6. 6.

    Bubblegum Tate

    If miscarriage made him oppose abortion, why didn’t he conclude that God was the abortionist in this case?

  8. 8.

    smedley

    And if the wingers had their way, an autopsy would be required to determine the cause of death of the fetus. Barbara would have to testify that she, in no way, caused the death of the “person.”

  10. 10.

    tamied

    A jar? For FSM sakes, I thought these people respected life (ha). She should have given it a decent burial.

  11. 11.

    MTiffany

    “There’s no question that affected me, a philosophy that we should respect life,”

    Unless of course that life belongs to an Iraqi child or civilian…

  12. 12.

    Rick Massimo

    “There’s no question that affected me, a philosophy that we should respect life,” said the former president, who had to drive his distraught mother to the hospital at the time.

    A philosophy that stood him in good stead when he had to make the decision whether to kill thousands of innocent people by invading a country that hadn’t done anything to us.

  13. 13.

    geg6

    Sorry, but who doesn’t know that the Benjamin Franklin lookalike with pearls, Barbara “Isn’t it great how Katrina worked out for all those lazy ass blackety black black blacks” Bush, is a sicko whackjob that so fucked up her kids that they are all psychopaths? I’m sure this is the least of the sick things she subjected those kids to over the years.

    Gawd, I hated that woman back when she would pinch her nose when forced to socialize with Nancy Reagan (not that I really liked Nancy or anything, but the Hollywood stink, you could just tell, gave Bar the vapors). I hate her more today, and I really didn’t think that was possible.

  14. 14.

    Carnacki

    Serious, what the frak? What kind of mother keeps that in a jar and then shows it to the children? Remember his father was pro-choice until the enticement of Reagan’s vp job proved more important than principal.

  16. 16.

    Sinister Eyebrow

    Wow. What a screwed up childhood he had. That says much more about W’s parents than him.

    No wonder he’s such an unempathetic douchebag.

  18. 18.

    ArchPundit

    And I worry about the damn anti-abortion protesters and my kids seeing the pictures.

    WTF–who fucking does this? I’m not big on protecting kids from the world, but that doesn’t mean you go out of your way to expose them to shit.

  19. 19.

    david mizner

    Both his father and his mother supported abortion rights long after the alleged “sample in the jar” incident.

  21. 21.

    gmknobl

    We’ll respect life unless it gets us and our buddies some money, in which case it’s “Bring it on!,” “Bingo” and “You’re d*mn right I approved” torture. Oh, and let’s bomb the islamists back to the stone age. Does it matter that that disrepects life? No.

    What a two-faced, fascist, non-Christian jerk.

  22. 22.

    Norwegian Shooter

    You left off the second best part:

    But “the purpose of the story wasn’t to try show the evolution of a pro-life point of view,” Bush insisted to Lauer. “It was really to show how my mom and I developed a relationship.”

    I’ve heard it before that George was really his mother’s son – in the context that Barbara was a b-tch.

  24. 24.

    licensed to kill time

    This drip, drip, drip of excess Dubya acid is giving me heartburn.

    I hope his book dies a quick death and is remaindered in the dollar bin of history forever.

  25. 25.

    SpotWeld

    Keep in mind Bush and his generation grew up at a time when the popular belief was that “coddling” children by hugging them and forming a parental bond was a cuase of later developmental problems.

  26. 26.

    Pangloss

    This incident, if true, explains a lot more than just his view on abortion.

    I wonder if Laura has the high school classmate she killed in a jar somewhere.

  27. 27.

    jrg

    It’s a good thing Barb told him what it was, or his drunk ass would have thought it was a jar of pickled pig’s feet.

  29. 29.

    General Stuck

    I have no idea what it is with right-wingers making their kids look at dead fetuses, but I find it really, really bizarre.

    I suspect, because, when they grew up and wanted to torture living things, they would know what a real human person looked like so to treat it with constitutional protections and international law.

  31. 31.

    kc

    @Gravenstone:

    That’d certainly be enough to kick start me on the road to heavy drinking.

    Shit, just reading about Barbara Bush waving a fetus in a jar at Dumbya makes me want to take to the bottle right now.

  34. 34.

    TooManyJens

    …what?

    This is a really confusing story. I wonder how much of that is because it’s been kicking around in Junior’s addled brain for decades. Who knows if this actually went down anything like the way he says it did.

    The jar’s the only part that actually makes the slightest bit of sense, as the full article says she put the miscarried fetus in the jar to take to the hospital. As gross as this sounds, they might have told her to do that so they could check to make sure there weren’t any fetal body parts left inside her that might cause infection. IANAD, but I know they have to do that after abortions, so it would make sense to do it after a miscarriage as well.

  35. 35.

    A Duck

    Gawd how I hope they find Dubya dead in bed with a live boy AND a dead girl, but, sadly, I fear that Georgie is really at heart a sad colorless little man, and that even his perversities must be bland and tame.

  39. 39.

    beltane

    Barbara Bush was actually not one of the pro-life fanatics. I think she saved the fetus in a jar in order to present it as a gift to the Dark Powers.

  40. 40.

    mai naem

    I don’t believe this story. It just sounds too stupid and I don’t see Babs going around with a fetus in the jar, showing the jar to the teenager and then telling him “there’s a fetus.” Gimme a break. Furthermore, I have seen a fetus as an adult and even I as an adult had a “ewwww” reaction. I can’t see a teenager’s reaction being any different. I am willing to bet Bush didn’t even know what a fetus was until he stopped drinking . You are talking about the 50s/early 60’s for crying out loud.

  41. 41.

    Citizen Alan

    It’s a family of psychopaths. Just a god-damned family of psychopaths. Like Tobe Hooper took the Sawyer clan from “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and reimagined them as a patrician political family holding high class soirees in their house while they carve up hitchhikers in the basement.

  42. 42.

    Zifnab

    So I’ve got two queries.
    One: Is this one of those winger tale tails they like to fling around to make themselves look hard core? Like John McCain finding the Sweet Baby Jesus in a Vietnamese prison while he fought off his torturers with a shiv made out of his own fingernails? Or Ronald Reagen bringing down the Berlin Wall with the sound of his voice?

    Two: Who on earth thought this was a good idea to include in an biography? Bush’s ghostwriter must be nuttier than he is.

  43. 43.

    Mike Kay (Team America)

    This is bullshit.

    His mom and dad were pro choice. Poppy sponsored federal aid to planned parenthood as a congressman, earning him the nickname “rubbers”. His grandmom established the first planned parenthood in Connecticut.

    And of course Bush famously secured an illegal abortion for his girlfriend (Robin Lowman) in 1971, two full years before Roe v. Wade.

  45. 45.

    Anne Laurie

    I call bullshit. WASP ladies of that period didn’t want their kids to know they even had genitals, much less discuss the messy stuff that might emerge from those “we don’t talk about them” orifices. My bet would be that Incurious George is conflating his alcohol-addled memories of his Mater’s post-miscarriage “bad times” with Santorum’s famous spontaneous-abortion-in-a-jar child abuse tales.

    Not that I think Bar Bush is too sane’n’balanced to pull something like this, but — the day her actual post-born little daughter died of leukemia, Bar insisted the whole family participate in a golf outing. Dubya’s talked before about how “not talking about” Robin’s death warped the family dynamic. A woman who greets the death of a little girl after a long, horrible illness as Something to Be Ignored is not a woman who shows off the results of a miscarriage to her (surviving) offspring.

  48. 48.

    kdaug

    Look at how she dehumanized her child – not “This is your little sister”, but “Here’s the fetus”. Add to that what others have said here – placing it in a jar of formaldehyde and keeping it (as what, a souvenir?), and her comments about the N.O refugees being “better off” in a stadium than in their flooded-out homes…

    The woman is a certifiable sociopath. It’s not hard to see how little Georgie came by his predilections.

  49. 49.

    Dennis SGMM

    To paraphrase Barbara Bush’s own remark about the Katrina refugees, I guess that fetus was actually better off.

    Edit: kdaug beat me to it by three minutes. Curse my arthritic fingers!

  51. 51.

    beltane

    @Anne Laurie: All this story proves is that George Bush is every bit as sloppy with the truth as Sarah Palin. Since we’ve already known this, the story actually proves nothing at all.

  53. 53.

    Chyron HR

    This story doesn’t quite ring true.

    She said to her teenage kid, ‘This is a better son than you’ll ever be!’

    Now that sounds more like the Bar we know and love.

  56. 56.

    Noonan

    @Anne Laurie:

    Bush is asking people to believe that he and his mom — who was pro-choice — had a moment that resembled the marketing campaigns of pro-life zealots. That would be one hell of a coincidence.

  63. 63.

    bemused

    @Anne Laurie:
    The Bush parents going golfing and not talking about GW’s sister dying was the first thing I thought of. Pulling the curtain on that tragedy juxtaposed with showing teenage GW his sibling fetus in a jar is just plain bizarre. Weird people, the whole Bush bunch.

  65. 65.

    Ash Can

    This story is every possible kind of fucked up. If it’s true, I’m gobsmacked that a mother could do that. My own mother miscarried at seven months. My brother got a name, a proper funeral and burial, and a small, tasteful headstone. To this day he rests in a verdant corner of the same pretty little countryside cemetery where my father is buried. To treat him like W says his mother treated her fetus is beyond imagination. I’m a mother myself, and the idea of it freaks me the hell out.

    And if the story is not true, what kind of mind fabricates a story like that?

    Christamighty, I need a drink.

  67. 67.

    Jay in Oregon

    @david mizner:
    I knew someone would beat me to this:

    Would someone please show him a dead Iraqi in a jar, please?

    This, this, a thousand times this! Better yet, one jar for every Iraqi civilian his war killed.

  69. 69.

    scarshapedstar

    Couldn’t you inculcate an appreciation for “life” with, I dunno, living things? Like kittens or something?

    Why does it have to be a tiny, shriveled corpse?

    And if Boy George felt a dead fetus was a beautiful snowflake, then why did he blow up live frogs by shoving lit firecrackers up their asses?

  70. 70.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    George W. Bush’s pro-life stance solidified when he was a teenager in Texas—after his mother suffered a devastating miscarriage and showed him the fetus in a jar, the former president said in an extraordinary interview that air tonight.

    Did he also mention he was pro-choice when he ran for Congress is 1978?

  74. 74.

    David in NYC

    It sure sounds like fucked-up shit; then again, everything I know about the Bush family involves something being seriously fucked up. Who really knows?

    But, as always, the first thing that pops into my mind when I see “Barbara Bush” in print, or hear her name spoken aloud, is that Richard Nixon, of all people — yes, THAT Richard Nixon — said about Babs:

    That woman sure knows how to hate.

    He admired her for it, of course.

    And, yes, that quote is for real — Bob Woodward writes about it in The Final Days.

  75. 75.

    MazeDancer

    @Sinister Eyebrow:

    Screwed up childhood is right.

    When little Georgie was 7, his three-year-old sister, Robin, died of leukemia. His parents had never told him she was even sick.

    Barbara went into a deep depression. Apparently it became 7-year-old Georgie’s job to try to rescue her. Because his making jokes and trying to jolly his mother back to life seemed to help her. Not a burden a small child should have to bear. His formative years did not serve George, or our country, well.

  76. 76.

    Nylund

    Its like how Grover Norquist’s dad used to steal his ice cream to make a point about the government stealing your income in the form of taxes.

    It really seems like so many philosophies of the right wing are directly attributable to the fact that their parents were weird and mean.

    Some of us had good and decent parents and don’t want our lives screwed up just because some childhood trauma warped your world view.

  77. 77.

    ckelly

    God, these comments are fucking brilliant.

    In no particular order…

    Matt
    It also would have been a better president than him.

    david mizner
    Would someone please show him a dead Iraqi in a jar, please?

    wasabi gasp
    It was probably just a bottle of Tequila.

    Can we have a three-way tie for thread winner?

  78. 78.

    Bubblegum Tate

    @Nylund:

    It really seems like so many philosophies of the right wing are directly attributable to the fact that their parents were weird and mean.

    Somebody really needs to study this further.

  79. 79.

    Ruckus

    @Anne Laurie:
    Agreed. Bullshit.

    Not all of our parents were saints, or even decent and a lot of people are screwed for decades or even their entire lives, but this goes way beyond the believable. I’ll bet most 50’s moms didn’t talk about any part of sex, the good and the not so good. (was going to do the spaghetti western thing there but couldn’t bring myself). These people were not poor, they didn’t live in a shack in the country, they had resources, so she miscarried at home, didn’t call her doctor, an ambulance, whatever?
    Same word again, Bullshit.

  83. 83.

    Jim, Once

    Barbara Bush was actually not one of the pro-life fanatics. I think she saved the fetus in a jar in order to present it as a gift to the Dark Powers.

    Let’s talk about Bar’s mom Pauline and Aleister Crowley, who once stated, “I was not content to just believe in Satan, I wanted to be his chief of staff.”

  84. 84.

    merrinc

    @beltane:

    This.

    But speaking of kooky things wingnut women do…the pet rat belonging to a far right acquaintance died after a couple of years, as rats are wont to do. She decided to use it as a teaching moment and marched her three children (9 yrs and under) into the kitchen where she proceeded to slice open the dear, departed rodent and instruct the kiddies on anatomy.

    (No, they are not homeschoolers.)

  85. 85.

    Maody

    Babs bothers her ‘beautiful mind’ with a fetus in a jar? This is so frickin’ icky if true, which I doubt. Dubya is just brain famished by booze or has early onset Alzheimers.

    I was actually going to eat dinner… dunno now. Maybe staying up late to see Birth of a Nation on TCM will take on a whole new meaning.

  87. 87.

    englishmajor

    I have to say, I think you guys are in the wrong on this one. Yeah, Bush is an ignorant creep and Barbara’s a haughty bitch, BUT it’s not uncommon for women to try to bring the remains of a miscarriage to the hospital with them. Maybe things are different now, but when my (liberal, pro-choice, Democrat) mom miscarried 30 years ago, that was what she was instructed to do. She didn’t show it to me (I was 10), but she was shaken up enough that, had I been older and had to drive her to the hospital, she might have. So, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong on the facts (Babs prob didn’t put it in a jar just to showcase it) and, though it pains me to say it because I love you, wrong on the sentiment. Don’t be jerks just because it’s funny.

  88. 88.

    Sad_Dem

    Maybe the revelations will keep coming. Visits by the “therapist” and his spinning hypo-wheel, weekends with the priest, and those games of hide-and-seek with Bongo the Clown….

    I thought I already had an idea of just how effed up Shrub’s childhood had to have been. I was wrong.

  91. 91.

    TuiMel

    Count me as among those in the camp that this is just attempted Dubya myth-making, akin to his walk on the beach w/Billy Graham.

    As to the family of psychopaths, I believe it of Babs and Dubya at minimum. I’m not sure about Poppy, Jeb, and the others, but they are enablers.

  92. 92.

    Keith G

    The unfortunate would be being was to be Barbara’s namesake and has earned a permanent place in Bush family lore as “Bar in a Jar”.

  94. 94.

    junebug

    Everyone in Texas has known about this story for a while. I laughed when I read that W got special permission to print it — from his mom.

    All of you doubters . . . what can I say? There were those of us in Texas trying to tell you guys, but our voices were very small.

    That’s it.

  95. 95.

    Triassic Sands

    I wonder where the jar is now. Surely, it was saved to be used in the proper upbringing of all future Bush kids. I mean it’s not like you can just order up a new miscarriage for each succeeding generation. Imagine the damage that would be done to any child unfortunate enough to not get to view a dead fetus in a jar.

    When I was a kid, I saw a two-headed baby in a jar in a museum. I found it interesting (and sad), but it didn’t make me think anything profound (like two heads are better than one, for example, since that obviously wasn’t the case).

    Personally, I can’t imagine why anyone (who is mentally healthy) would want to stuff a fetus in a jar and show it around…not even to a son who was undoubtedly an obnoxious little jerk.

  96. 96.

    tortdog

    You guys are wrong, and seems that the partisan goggles prevent otherwise reasonable people from thinking straight. ABC News even picked up that bloggers were mocking Bush for this story, when doctors advise that women do keep the fetus and bring it to the doctor for analysis.

    http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/barbara-bush-miscarriage-george-bush-memoir-viral-reaction/story?id=12101996

    Do you hate people who disagree with your politics so much that you just have to engage in knee-jerk criticism?

    Classless.

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