NYT Columnist: Laura Bush Like Deranged '24' First Lady & Evil Harry Potter Character

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Bush hatred has taken on a new, virulent mutation: animus towards First Lady Laura Bush. Witness today's New York Times column by Judith Warner, ‘24’ as Reality Show [subscripton required].

Warner's jumping off point is Kiefer Sutherland's response to a question about the advent in this coming season's "24" of a woman president. Observed the actor who plays Jack Bauer: “I can tell you one thing. We had the first African-American president on television, and now Barack Obama is a serious candidate. That wasn’t going to happen eight years ago. Television is an incredibly powerful medium, and it can be the first step in showing people what is possible.”

That prompted Warner to write:

I giggled a bit nastily over this at first. What was next — claims that fingering China as a one-nation axis of evil on “24” had presaged the country’s exposure this spring as the source of all perishables tainted and fatal? That screen first lady Martha Logan’s descent into minimadness anticipated Laura Bush’s increasingly beleaguered late-term demeanor? (Has anyone but me noticed her astounding resemblance to Dolores Umbridge in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”?)

"24" aficionados know that Logan is a former First Lady gone mad who is currently institutionalized at a mental health facility. According to Wikipedia, "a quick scale of squeaky notes would accompany the background soundtrack whenever her character appeared, known affectionately among fans as the "cuckoo music.'"

As for Dolores Umbridge, she was one of Harry Potter's antagonists. She was the High Inquisitioner at Hogwart's School, known [per Wikipedia] for "cruelty and abusive punishments against students; she stands out especially for forcing Harry and Lee Jordan, and, it is assumed, other students who get detention from her, to write lines using a quill that magically causes the words to be cut into the skin on the back of the writer's hand and uses their blood as ink."

So Laura Bush reminds Judith Warner of deranged, cruel and abusive-to-children characters. I might suggest that the derangement resides in this author, prey to a particularly pernicious new form of BDS.

Contact Mark at mark@gunhill.net