Conservative Christians Not Laughing at First Lady's Comedy Act (BARF ALERT!)

First Lady Laura Bush may have stolen the show with her surprise comedy routine at this weekend's White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, but her jokes and one-liners have made her no new friends among conservative Christians. In an official statement, one 'pro-family' advocacy group warned that Mrs. Bush's jokes at the President's expense were in violation of the Biblical command that wives respect their husbands.

WASHINGTON, DC—The First Lady may have stolen the show with her surprise comedy routine at the 91st White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, but not everyone appreciated her jokes and one-liners poking fun at President Bush. At least one organization of conservative Christians quickly lashed out at Mrs. Bush's performance, warning that her remarks at the President's expense were a public refutation of the Biblical command that wives should respect their husbands.

According to an official statement released over the weekend by the Coalition for Traditional Values, an organization that seeks a more flexible relationship between church and state, Mrs. Bush's jokes at her husband's expense amounted to a public emasculation of the President. Pastor Roy DeLong, the statement's author and chair of the group, warns that the First Lady's performance comes at a time when the Mr. Bush's "manliness is already under attack."

As a believer, President Bush is no doubt familiar with the passage from Ephesians that says 'Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands, as unto the Lord,'" says Mr. DeLong. "That means that just as Christ is the head of the church, the husband is the head of the wife. That is not the

Mrs. Bush interrupted a speech being given by her husband at the annual dinner, remarking that "I have a few things I want to say for a change." She then proceeded to mock his performance, both public ("if you really want to end tyranny in the world, you're going to have to stay up later") and private, noting that by nine o'clock, Mr. Bush, whom she referred to as "Mr. Excitement," is typically sound asleep.

"One of the Proverbs says that 'a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband, but she that maketh him ashamed is as rottenness in his bones," notes Mr. DeLong. "I bet President Bush is feeling pretty rotten today."

The rebuke to the First Lady's stand-up act comes on the heels of mounting concern about the President's image. Last week, Mr. Bush was seen holding hands with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Then the President raised eyebrows anew when he asked a crowd of supporters in Galveston, TX if they celebrated Splash Day, an annual gay pride event in that state, best known for attracting tens of thousands of buff men, wearing little more than suntan oil.

Even some members of Mr. Bush's famously loyal party looked askance at his recommendation during a speech on the nation's energy needs last week, when he encouraged Americans to consider driving hybrid vehicles, widely believed to be 'gay' cars.

While the Coalition for Traditional Values was the first conservative advocacy group to jump on the First Lady's comments, more criticism is expected. In her remarks, Mrs. Bush likened herself to a desperate housewife, a reference to the hit show on ABC, noting that she watches the show with Lynne Cheney, wife of the Vice President.

"Desperate Housewives" has come under heavy fire from pro-family groups, including the American Decency Association, which has called for a boycott of ABC for airing the "degraded" show. Last fall, Mrs. Cheney asked the federal government to step in to protect the nation's children from the "Desperate Housewives."

White House Letter: Joke writer to the stars of Washington politics
Elisabeth Bumiller
MONDAY, MAY 2, 2005

WASHINGTON When Laura Bush wise-cracked at the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner on Saturday night that she was a "desperate housewife" married to a man who was sound asleep by 9 p.m., a slight, worried man stood in the wings hanging on to every line. As well he might, since he had written most of them for the first lady's inaugural act as a stand-up comic.

Judging from the laughter at her words - "George's answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chain saw, which I think is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well" - Landon Parvin, joke writer to the political stars, could relax.

Bush not only made fun of her husband (and Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) but also of her mother-in-law, the former first lady Barbara Bush, whom she likened to Don Corleone in "The Godfather."

She described time spent at her in-laws' summer home in Maine like this: "First prize, three days' vacation with the Bush family. Second prize, 10 days."

Parvin, who normally writes jokes for the president, also wrote jokes and presidential speeches for Ronald Reagan and is remembered in Washington for the lyrics to "Secondhand Clothes," the song that Nancy Reagan performed at the 1982 correspondents' dinner lampooning her taste in designers.

Although Parvin was loath to speak about how he cooked up one-liners for the current first lady - "I shouldn't be talking, I like being my little mole-ish self" - he did speak before and after the dinner about presidential stand-up comedy in general.

"In the scheme of things, it's not important," Parvin said. "But everybody wants to do well. Someone said humor is like standing up naked in front of an audience, then turning around and saying, 'What do you think?"'

The one advantage that he has in writing for presidents, he said, is that it's easier to get a laugh. "I noticed it first with Reagan," Parvin said. "Reagan would come into the East Room, and he would have a little throwaway line, and it would get a laugh, and it wouldn't have gotten a laugh with most people. What it did was break the tension. It's the unexpected, I guess. People don't expect presidents to be funny."

In Bush's case, her routine was her husband's idea. Tradition calls for the president to deliver one-liners to the 2,500 White House correspondents and guests at the Gridiron dinner in the Washington Hilton ballroom, but Bush has now done that three times. His wife agreed to step in, then sat down with Parvin and Susan Whitson, her press secretary, to work on ideas.

Playing off "Desperate Housewives," the racy hit U.S. television show, was a natural, even though Whitson said in a brief interview after the dinner that Bush had never actually seen it. Whitson said the first lady had heard about the characters and plot from her twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, who are fans, and was planning to watch the entire first season on a DVD she has at home.

Once Parvin finished his script, Bush had several days of rehearsals, including one shortly before the dinner. She went on right after dessert, as the president was at the lectern launching into his worst jokes from the 2004 campaign.

Laura Bush suddenly got up and "interrupted" her husband, saying "not that old joke, not again." Then she added, as the audience laughed: "I've been attending these dinners for years and just quietly sitting there. I've got a few things I want to say for a change." Whitson said that while the president was in on the setup, he did not know what his wife would say, and he reacted mostly by guffawing with a bright red face.

Parvin, who said writing a speech about the Iran-contra scandal was a lot easier than writing jokes, termed self-deprecating humor essential for presidents. As a joke writer, he said, his most important task is to meld personality and topicality.

"First of all, you get the person's character in your head," he said. "But a lot depends on what's going on at the time. It's just a feeling that's in the air. So you take that feeling and distill it down to lines that reflect the perception of that person's character."

Parvin, 56, writes for Republicans but also for Democrats whom he likes, such as Bill Clinton's friend Vernon Jordan and Robert Strauss, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He is the son of a University of Illinois accountant and says that he was a well-liked but unfunny misfit growing up. In 1981, he was writing for the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm when he got a job as a Reagan speechwriter.

He now writes serious speeches for politicians and executives from his home in Fredericksburg, Virginia, but is called in every year to do Bush's routines for four Washington events: the Gridiron; the Alfalfa Club; a radio and television correspondents' dinner; and the White House press dinner. Bush, he said, "works on the script, and practices, and takes it seriously." Parvin (and the president) have had one recent bomb, however: Bush's joke at the radio and television dinner last year that "those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere" as a slide showed the president rummaging under the Oval Office furniture.

Parvin, who said his job is to remain in the background, begged off having his picture taken.

"Just say I look like a withered Brad Pitt," he said.

E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com

Actually, looking at everything on the Swift Report site, they appear to be made up.

Read the article at the link areafiftyone provided above (here). It says, in part:

In the wide-ranging talk, Mr. Bush touched on such seemingly disparate topics as the excessive use of lighting in gay dance clubs, the misperception that the Toyota Prius is a 'gay' car, and the need to roll back regulations that are keeping the nuclear power industry tied up in knots.

Someone's doing satire.

Other stories today on The Swift Report include "Fox Poll Shows Delay Not Most Unpopular Man in America", "After Britney, Americans Divided on which GOP Starlet Likely to Conceive Next", and "Home School U? More Students Being Home Schooled through College Years"

I also note that the Swift report has another "letter" from The Coalition for Traditional Values. On this one, DeLong is just a signatory of another group-- the "Baptist Leadership Coucil". A Google search on Roy DeLong" and "Baptist Leadership Council" does not inspire confidence that there is such a person with such a group.

Looking at some of the other names, I cannot find any evidence that they even exist. For example, "Lewis Sheldrick" is the signer for the Coaltion of Traditional Values. A google search on Lewis Sheldrick results in no hits beyond the Swift Report and two other (left) blogs.

So yeah, I think someone is doing a hoax.

I looked at the web page for this "Coalition for Traditional Values" and did not see any such official statement.

http://www.traditionalvalues.org/

Also, the chairman of this organization is NOT Roy DeLong.

Rev. Louis P. Sheldon is the Chairman and founder of Traditional Values Coalition. Rev. Sheldon grew up in Washington D.C. and studied History at Michigan State University. He received his Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1960 and served for 25 years as an ordained minister.

I wonder if this article has any validity?

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