May 9, 2007--Mother's Bad Boy

There have been so many Bush gaffs and malaprops that my mother-in-law has a 365-page calendar that has one listed for each day. He teed up another one the other day when he appeared on the White House lawn with Queen Elizabeth and said, “You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17__.” The crowd and the press went wild after he corrected himself. It was 1976, silly, not 1776.

He then turned to look directly at The Queen and, after a moment, tossed her a wink. Yes, a wink. Check YouTube if you don’t believe me. And then she appeared to say something back to him. Turning to the assembled grandees, he retorted, “She gave a look that only a mother could give a child.”I thought that was very funny but from press accounts here and in England, we appear to have a new international flap. (See linked NY Times article as one example.)

Let’s deconstruct this to see what might be at issue—It couldn’t be his innocent slip of the tongue. That was both familiar and innocuous enough. But it could have been the fact that he turned to look directly at The Queen—people don’t just look at The Queen. That is unless she looks at them first. Even worse might have been the wink. Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever winks at her. I suspect that no one ever winked at her, even when she was just a girl. So that could be his worst transgression.

But then again, as I'm doing here, his capital crime might have been his referring to her as “she.” Who is he to do that? And in public no less. Nobody, and I mean nobody refers to Her Majesty as a mere “she.” She’s called, sorry, The Queen or Her Majesty.But I suspect that even though The Queen is old enough to be his mother, for President Bush to imply he was still like a child and to say that she treated him as if she were his mother, that could be the ultimate no-no. After all, when in 1991 she, Her Majesty visited his father, Bush 41, Mother Barbara made sure not to seat him at the Queen’s table for fear that he might make a wisecrack. But in spite of her best efforts, he did make one, managing to get close enough to The Queen to ask her, after telling her he was his family’s “black sheep,” who her family’s black sheep was.” She reportedly snapped back at him, “None of your business.”

Now I despise George W. Bush as much as the next fella, but this irreverence of his is refreshing. Even a tonic. With all the phony genuflecting going on during The Queen’s visit, and the unfathomable guest list for her state dinner, which included Elisabeth Hasselbeck of The View, I love the fact that my president is treating her in such an American way.

Now if we could only get him to end our involvement in Iraq . . .