This Week In Jenna/NotJenna
It's the weekend. Time to check up on the Bush twins.
1. Well, this week they've been meeting Young Republicans in Iowa. On Thursday they visited three campuses, and spoke briefly to groups of about 100 or so at each site. The events were by invitation only, and closed to the press. Per one college paper report, "Only Republican students who had signed up before Thursday and were on the list were able to get in with photo identification." Because after that fiasco at the convention, the campaign can't afford to have the press or anybody who hasn't taken a loyalty oath to hear the girls speak.
And what did Jenna and NotJenna tell the young faithful? Reportedly, that their Dad was a normal person and so everybody should vote for him. But Jenna also offered a personal, individual message to some of the students she met.
In Ames :
Jenna Bush told Louis Kishkunas, president of the ISU College Republicans, to take advantage of college life while he could.
"I loved college," she said.
In Iowa City:
Casually dressed in pants and fashionable jackets, the 22-year-old Jenna and Barbara Bush laughed and chatted about the weather and recently graduating college with a handful of UI students before heading behind closed doors
“We miss it terribly,” Jenna Bush said of college.
And in Cedar Falls:
"Stay in college," Jenna Bush told Freed and Hamer, adding that the real world is much different than college life.
Yes, in the real world, you have to work! (Unless you're a heiress, of course.) And working really cuts down on your partying time. So stay in college -- stay there forever!
2. But now that the twins are out of college, they will be serving their country, their mother told the Duluth News Tribune. In Iraq? Um, probably not.
Q: Your twins are about that service age. Do you ever contemplate what it would be like if they were in one of those wars?
A: Yes, sure, absolutely. They probably are not going to join the military, but they both want to serve their country. Jenna wants to teach. Barbara is very interested in doing AIDS work. They share the idealism that a lot of young people their age have, and a lot of the military men and women who are serving our country share with them, and that is a feeling of responsibility, a feeling of duty to their country, the United States. Several people I've met during the course of this campaign have joined the military after Sept. 11. I met a woman in Colorado with three sons who joined. All three sons are in Iraq because they felt a responsibility to serve their country.
So, while Jenna and NotJenna won't be actually be fighting in their father's war, they will demonstrate their feeling of responsibility to their country (the United States, btw) by working as pediatric doctors, inner city school teachers, and fashion models. Therefore, George and Laura can relate to that woman who has three sons in Iraq.
3. Anyway, back to Beavis and NotBeavis's convention speech, because John R. Guardiano has a piece in the National Review Online that explains that everybody who criticized it just wasn't cool enough to get it.
Jenna and Barbara Bush (but especially the former) did come off as ditzy blondes (though they don't have blonde hair). That was the whole point of their shtick, which I, for one, found quite amusing and endearing. The twins' speech (really a comedy act) was a takeoff of the 1995 movie Clueless, starring Alicia Silverstone.
Oh, so it was a takeoff of Clueless! Of course! (And why did I ever think that Jenna has blonde hair? I am such an idiot!)
As a Washington Post review observed, Silverstone's character, Cher, is a "comically overprivileged, super-popular, spoiled-bratty, Beverly Hills galleria golden girl."
Well, now it's obvious!
Her quest to be more than just another pampered suburbanite is driven by the loving example set by her hard-working father, a lawyer with an indomitable blue-collar work ethic, and his thoughtful assistant.
Well, this is where your movie analogy falls apart, John. Sorry, but I'm back to believing that while the speech was clueless, it had nothing to do with the movie. But nice attempt at getting into Jenna's pants. (Or is it Karen Hughes you're interested in?)
But John goes on to explain that the problem was that everybody but him was too old to understand the clever humor the twins employed.
"Our grandmother, Barbara," Jenna Bush said, "doesn't like some of our clothes, our music, or most of the TV shows we watch.... She thinks Sex and the City is something married people do, but never talk about." Now, this joke has some media stuffed shirts tut-tutting their disapproval. "What they hell were they thinking?" cried Howard Kurtz. "Sex jokes about former first lady Barbara Bush?"
But this clearly was nothing of the sort. This was not a sex joke; it did not involve any prurient or scatological interest or punchline, which is what one typically means by a "sex joke."
What Howie probably meant was that it was a sick joke to try to make us think about Barbara Bush ever having sex.
The twins instead were using a pop-culture phenomenon — the eponymous HBO show — to show that they, too, live in 21st century America. They, too, are besieged by the same sorts of pressures and temptations that confront young people today. And they, too, have an older-generation relative, their grandmother, who is trying to keep them on the straight and narrow."Grammie," Jenna warmly said, "we love you dearly, but you're just not very hip." The humorless media observers didn't get it, but I certainly did. So, too, I suspect, did millions of younger — and yes, hipper — Americans.
So, Jenna was actually talking about some new cult television program popular among the cognoscenti? I now see I was so wrong to think that her remark was stupid and unfunny. Thanks, John, for sharing your hipness with us old fogies who don't own TVs.
4. As you might recall, the big punchline of the girls' speech was, "We kept trying to explain to my dad that when we were young and irresponsible, well, we were young and irresponsible!" And now that dancing on tables and puking in allies has become fashionable, guess who's part of the craze?
Molly has another question. "Were you ever drunk?" she asks the adults. Paris looks up. There is a pause. "Yes," the adults admit. The childrens' eyes widen. "It was horrible," one adult says. "I don't recommend it," says the other. "But when I was young and irresponsible — " the first explains. " — I was young and irresponsible," the second concludes.
Yes, America's Worst Mother™ (a registered trademark of Jenna & NotJenna, Inc.)! So, I suggest that you check out (if you already haven't) Tales of ordinary drunkenness, one of TBogg's best ever retellings of one of Meghan's charming tales, about how her neighbors are all contemptible jerks, while she is a much better parent than you. This time she demonstrates her superiority by teaching the sprouts (Anomie, Chardonay, Miasma, and Blotto) that while it's good sport to mock the drunken neighbor as he dies of alcohol poisoning in the backyard, we should also have compassion on the comical foreign sot and not report him to his embassy. No, we should just use him as for fodder for our NRO column -- it's like publicly exposing his shame, except that nobody reads "Fever Swamp," so it's really not.
5:06:25 AM 
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