Clockwise from lower left: George W Bush with newborn twins Barbara and Jenna. Laura Bush with six-month old twins, looking exhausted. Fake ID confiscated from brunette twin Barbara Pierce Bush in a New Haven bar. Tabloid photo of blonde twin Jenna Bush partying.
Chelsea Clinton, bombarded with “She so ugly” jokes while still in her teens, should have been so lucky as to be invisible. Years after her father left office, Chelsea remains a target for rabid attacks. (Google hits in past six months: 29,000 for “Chelsea Clinton”, 7,000 for “Bush twins”.)
The Bush twins got into the papers only when busted for underage drinking, and then only briefly. (Pro-morality-right-wing-Bush-supporters dismiss these arrests, like their daddy’s DUI when he was 30, as youthful hijinks.) The twins vanished again once their age made their drinking legal.
The twins aren’t the issue here–their father is. Because there may be a darker connection between the twins’ invisibility and Bush’s past history:
“During his presidential campaign, Mr Bush has repeatedly refused to answer questions about self-described “youthful indiscretions” or deny rumours that he had used cocaine in the 1960s or early 1970s. He gave up drinking in July 1986 after waking up with a hangover following a 40th birthday party.”
The twins were born in November, 1981, so for most of the critical first five years of their lives, their dad was a problem drinker. Then he quit–why? His autobiography tells us:
“I am a person who enjoys life, and for years, I enjoyed having a few drinks. But gradually, drinking began to compete with my energy. I’d be a step slower getting up. My daily runs seemed harder after a few too many drinks the night before.”
In the early eighties, W’s business ventures lost many millions of dollars for family-and-friend investors.
Did business worries, or those “few too many drinks the night before,” create problems for his wife or his little daughters? If so, they were not as important as his daily jogging.
Kids get their own page on the White House website. The Clinton White House kids page introduced visitors to recent White-House kids. The Bush White House kids page has links to info about pets Spot and Ebony–Mrs. Cheney gets more ink than Barbara and Jenna.
Well, I suppose we’ll get to hear all about their early lives, once the Bush twins decide to start penning ghost memoirs.
Thanks to David Weinberger for wondering about this issue in such an interesting way he made me wonder also.
2 responses so far ↓
1 The Children's Liberation Front (actually, Yule) // Jun 4, 2003 at 10:31 pm
The “rabid attacks” guy you pointed to is unbelievable. I cannot fathom how someone can seriously speak of Nazi Sippenhaft with any kind of admiration, no matter how tinged with irony. To hell with him.
About the twins: I was reminded the other day that Laura has disappeared, and mentioned it in my blog on June 1. I seem to remember that Barbara Bush (mom) & Laura Bush narrowly escaped a plotted bomb attack while accompanying Bush 41 to Saudi Arabia, and that Bush 43 was shaken to his loafers by this. Could it be that he’s keeping Laura out of sight for “protection”? If so, doesn’t this make him a tad paranoid? Do the people want a paranoid world leader?
2 Betsy Devine // Jun 5, 2003 at 9:12 am
You’re right, Laura is almost invisible–conservatives get angry when married women aren’t. I guess my point about the twins is that when Bushies dismiss his hard-drinking angry days as way-back-then-not-important-now, they are forgetting that the guy had a couple of impressionable little kids very much at his mercy. The Bush team has made prodigious effort to keep the twins silent and hidden away. Even what little we know of them suggests they wouldn’t do good public imitations of religious young ladies from a happy family.