Joan Walsh is a typical liberal hypocrite. She literally says it’s racist to do what she herself did. Only of course it wasn’t racist when she did it.
Here’s her article attacking George W. Bush as a father and then attacking his daughters back in 2001 (note that the picture of Bush’s daughter below was a prominent part of the Salon.com piece) back when it was wonderful to demonize the president:
Thursday, May 31, 2001 01:00 AM PDT
The first family’s alcohol troubles
President Bush downplayed his own drinking problem and hid a DUI. Now his daughters are making news for underage drinking. Is there a connection?
By Joan WalshI don’t envy Jenna and Barbara Bush, going off to college under the watchful eye of the Secret Service and the international media. But the sudden flurry of headlines about the first twins’ alcohol-related mishaps raises new questions about the way their father handled his own “young and irresponsible” past.
I always thought it was a bad decision for Bush, as a politician, to refuse to acknowledge his wild youth — which, by his own account, lasted until he was 40. But now it seems it was a bad choice for Bush as a father. After his 1976 drunken-driving arrest was revealed last year, Bush said he didn’t admit it when he decided to run for president because he didn’t want his daughters to know about it. That was a mistake, and the twins’ recent run of bad behavior seems designed to let him know that.
There’s no evidence either twin has a drinking problem, but the string of news items involving their partying and scrapes with the law in the last few months can’t be ignored. First came the tale of Secret Service agents ferrying home Jenna’s boyfriend after he was arrested for public drunkenness. Then there were randy National Enquirer photos of Jenna, a University of Texas freshman, and a beer-drinking pal, and a story about her alleged marijuana use. Yale freshman Barbara, supposedly the studious twin, had a false I.D. confiscated at a New Haven, Conn., bar. In April, the Enquirer featured a lurid tale of Barbara’s drunken spring-break binge in Mexico, and by the end of the month all major newspapers were carrying a story about Jenna being cited by police at an Austin bar for underage drinking, while Secret Service agents waited outside.
Now, barely a week after a court appearance to deal with that alcohol citation, Jenna has been caught again using a false I.D. to buy alcohol at an Austin restaurant, with sister Barbara at her side.
Of course, many of us would have provided lively tabloid fodder in college if we’d been subjected to the scrutiny Barbara and Jenna Bush must endure. And their college drinking doesn’t mean they’ll turn into alcoholics as adults. Most teenage party girls become responsible citizens, eventually. Still, their recklessness in the first months of their father’s presidency suggests their parents screwed up by downplaying and even denying President Bush’s own drinking problem.
Bush’s he-man decision to quit drinking cold turkey is the stuff of legend. The morning after a boozy 40th birthday party in 1986, he woke up at Colorado’s tony Broadmoor Resort and decided, on his own, to get sober. Alcohol had begun to “compete for my affections,” Bush said later. Certainly he didn’t need Alcoholics Anonymous, he told the Washington Post: “I don’t think I was clinically an alcoholic; I didn’t have the genuine addiction. I don’t know why I drank. I liked to drink, I guess.”
But his close friends tell a slightly different story: “Once he got started, he couldn’t, didn’t shut it off,” Bush’s buddy Don Evans, now commerce secretary, told the Washington Post last year. “He didn’t have the discipline.” That sounds a lot like an addiction, though only Bush himself knows for sure.
He refused to discuss details of his drinking or rumored drug use throughout his political campaigns, relying on the stock excuse, “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.” His parents have also repeatedly denied he had a drinking problem, even after several family crises involving his drinking came to light: an ugly Christmas confrontation with his father in 1972, after Bush drove drunk with his brother Marvin, crashed into a neighbor’s garbage cans and offered to fight “mano a mano” with his father; and the 1976 DUI incident near the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, with his then-teenage sister Dorothy in the car.
We know Bush’s problem drinking, including the DUI, was a family secret. The night a reporter broke the DUI story, Laura Bush called both daughters, in Austin and New Haven, to break the news to them. “I made the decision that as a dad I didn’t want my girls doing the kinds of things I did, and I told them not to drink and drive,” Bush told reporters. But he didn’t tell them about his own arrest.
The secrecy, of course, was a mistake. Anyone who works with alcoholics and their families knows honesty is crucial: The drinking parent needs to come clean about his or her problems, and kids need to understand the family dynamics that were established around the drinking. And as teenagers, they need to know that alcoholism is a disease — whether because of psychology or physiology or some combination of the two — that is remarkably hereditary, and think about their own drinking in that context.
“We know for a fact that [Jenna's] father had a long history of alcohol use and abuse,” Lynn Ponton, a psychiatrist who studies teenage risk-taking, told Salon. “And this is an opportunity for the Bushes … to talk honestly with their children about risk-taking and really provide guidance and increase communication. And I would wonder what type of communication is actually taking place.”
I wonder, too. I’d bet there hasn’t been enough communication in the WASP-y Texas Bush family, and it looks as if the first twins are acting out as a result. Even with a Secret Service detail, there are ways for young women to party, if they’re discreet. Clearly, the first twins aren’t. Their blatant risk-taking and public partying (the Secret Service waits outside the bars where they drink illegally?) seem designed to force a family reckoning that their father’s drinking never triggered.
I’m reluctant to play family therapist for a family I’ve never met, but I’d say that Bush may have gotten past voters with evasiveness about his drinking problem, but he hasn’t satisfied his daughters. And if he sticks to the sanitized, up-from-Broadmoor version of the story, he may someday find he won the White House at the cost of an honest relationship with his daughters.
An earlier version of this story appeared in Bushed! last month.
EnlargeThat was then. As liberal fascism always declares, it can’t be fascist when we do it. So liberal roach-thug Walsh apparently gets pissed off about what is actually a pretty straightforward piece at Breitbart and writes this stinking pile of crap that these days passes as “journalism” (note the considerably more flattering picture of Obama’s daughters in which they look considerably less drunk than their choice for Jenna’s pic above).
For the record, I read over the Breitbart piece. Somehow I missed the parts that Walsh alleges are there about a) the color of Obama’s skin; b) the unfitness of Obama as a parent; or c) the disgracefulness of the president’s daughters. Please note, however, how Walsh just flat-out poured hate on George W. Bush as a father and slammed his daughters even after acknowledging that she had any actual factual basis for doing so:
Tuesday, Mar 26, 2013 09:51 AM PDT
How not to seem like a racist
A tip for right-wingers angry about charges of racial bias: Try treating the Obama daughters with decency
By Joan WalshEnlargeSasha and Malia Obama(Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
Writing my piece on Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson, I missed a huge example of overlap between their two sham-empires: the reporter who broke the Caller’s now-disgraced “scoop” about Sen. Robert Menendez patronizing prostitutes, Matthew Boyle, now works for Breitbart.com. And on Monday he penned the ridiculous story revealing the location of Malia and Sasha’s spring break vacation (which is now at the top of the Drudge Report).
On Twitter Monday and Tuesday, Breitbart fans attacked my focus on their hero’s bizarre racially driven crusades. They continue to insist that they’re being unfairly tarred with the charge of racism, when they’re the real “post-racialists” who just don’t like Barack Obama because he’s a liberal. I have some advice for right-wingers who don’t want it to seem like their anti-Obama animus is racial: Try treating his daughters with respect.
You’ll remember back in December, the NRA went after Sasha and Malia with an ad insisting that the fact that they have armed protection, when the administration was supposedly blocking armed security at America’s schools (actually, it wasn’t), was the height of hypocrisy – ignoring the many threats to their safety faced by the children of presidents and the tradition of Secret Service protection, for all of them.
The Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper went even crazier, with a piece alleging that the girls’ school, Sidwell Friends, a Quaker school, had armed guards, too. Anyone familiar with the Quaker tradition of nonviolence found that claim strange, and of course, like most claims about the Obama family that come from the right, it turned out not to be true.
Unfortunately for the untalented Mr. Boyle, journalists have a consensus about not revealing the location of the presidents’ children’s vacations. Reporters don’t write about minor first children except when they’re attending “official or semi-official events.” It’s considered a security risk. As the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi reported last year:
The ban on such coverage has existed through many administrations by informal agreement with the White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents the interests of journalists who cover the president.
“There’s a general feeling among the press corps that it wants to be respectful” of the president’s children, said Caren Bohan, the White House reporter for Reuters who is president of the WHCA.
When Agence-France Presse wrote about Malia’s trip to Mexico last year, a few U.S. outlets picked it up, and the administration tried to get the details removed. Then an earthquake in Mexico made the first daughter’s vacation newsworthy, and other sites, justifiably, reported it.
A year later, along comes the brave Matthew Boyle, fresh off his Menendez humiliation, to tell Breitbart readers about the Obama girls’ vacation. The news hook seems to be that it’s a waste of money.
“It is unclear how long the first daughters will be staying in the Bahamas, or what the cost will be to taxpayers,” Boyle harrumphs. “Earlier this month, the White House canceled public tours as a result of the recent budget sequester, citing Secret Service staffing costs.”
Esquire’s Charlie Pierce put it better than I can:
What possible interest does this serve, except to titillate the dark and envious nether parts of Boyle’s 22 readers? (No link, because fk that pudgy little monster.) There is no possible news value to this. Sooner or later, the frolicks of what my pal [Eric] Boehlert calls the “rightwing entertainment complex” are going to get someone killed.
The theme of most right-wing stories on Sasha, Malia and Michelle Obama’s vacations and leisure-time activities seems to be that they’re entitled princesses, when they do exactly the same kinds of things other presidents’ families have done throughout history. There’s only one difference I can see.
Drudge is also hyping the president’s vacation with the blaring headline “A vacation a month.” That’s another racially tinged trope on the right, that our first black president seems to be a little, well, lazy, because he can’t stop taking vacations. Of course, Obama is on track to take about a fifth of the vacation days George W. Bush did over his two terms. Obama took 131 vacation days in his first term – which would amount to 262 if he kept that pace in his second term. Bush took a staggering 1,060 vacation days over eight years, by far the most vacation in history (he also took the longest single presidential vacation in the modern era, a full five weeks.) Can someone explain why Obama is supposedly the vacation-hog?
Oh, and the comments on Boyle’s Breitbart.com story are pretty awesome, too. Here’s a good one:
They will indeed grow up to be monsters. Very, very, angry and vengeful monsters. Just like momma… Especially after they are forced to visit their obamination of a father in a federal penitentiary following his impeachment and conviction for Treason… Although I’d far prefer they visit his plot occasionally following his hanging for treason.
Boyle is perfect for his new employer (although he was a pretty good fit for the Daily Caller, too). In a post explaining why he jumped ship (which didn’t mention the higher salary he got), he bragged about “enlisting in Andrew Breitbart’s army … I’m shipping out today. It’s time to go to war.”
A war on the president’s daughters? Boyle ought to talk to some veterans of actual war. What a putz.
Paul Farhi’s story on the media’s traditional treatment of first children quoted Democratic pollster Celinda Lake on the political appeal of Obama’s family: “The value of the family is enormous. The more you know this family and the more you think of Barack Obama in these terms, the harder it is to vilify him.”
That’s true for the vast majority of Americans. But not the haters and racists who belong to Breitbart’s “army.”
EnlargeThe galling, appalling hypocrisy of liberals and liberalism is disgusting beyond belief.
Hey, maybe if Barbara and Jenna Bush had jetset all over the world on other people’s money the way Obama’s daughters have, they wouldn’t have, they wouldn’t have ever had any issues with alcohol. That and the fact that the Bush daughters were in their college years rather than their grade school years like Sasha and Malia.
I have documented in the past that being “white” is no more a defense against “racism toward whites” than liberals accord to black conservatives for being immune to racism because they’re black. Do I seriously need to post articles of liberals going after conservtive blacks in a racist manner? Condoleeza Rice, Justice Clarence Thomas, Allen West, Michael Steele, Stacey Dash, Dr. Benjamin Carson, pretty much ANY black person who has ever expressed conservative views in his or her life, is labelled “Uncle Tom,” Oreo Cookie and far, far worse. So blacks can’t be “racist” because of the color of their skin on liberal theory unless they’re conservative blacks – in which case they are the quintessential ESSENCE of racist bigotry regardless of the color of their skin on the view of these self-refuting turds. And then these hypocrites declare themselves inpeccable – i.e. incapable of sin – while they define their opponents as ONLY capable of nothing BUT sin.
Facts get in the way, of course.
Karl Marx was a self-hating Jew who actively despised Jews in his writings.
If you can be a self-hating black, as liberals assert conservative blacks are by definition and if you can be a self-hating Jew, as Karl Marx clearly was, then just how the hell is it impossible to be a self-hating white???
Thus, by liberals’ vicious attacks against black conservatives as being self-hating blacks, and literally by her own diatribe, Joan Walsh is a far-leftist intolerant racist bigot. She is a self-hating racist race traitor according to her own demonic views. In addition to being a truly crappy excuse of a human being.
This is what pisses me off about the left above all else: they constantly drool out the most vicious and self-righteous slanders while demonizing everyone on the other side for doing the tiniest FRACTION of what they hypocritically do. Unless you actually want to defend her attack against Bush relative to the innocuous piece that she poured her hate on in Breitbart.
It’s time to go, Walsh, you Nazi. That that your fellow jackbooted stormtroopers right out of the Joseph Goebbels Ministry of Propaganda mold will ever make you leave. Becuase they’re all as hypocritical and as fascist as YOU are: they’re just not as STUPID as you are in your glaring obviousness as a biased ideologue useful idiot.
Note: AJ Delgado took on the hypocrite Joan Walsh first.
