Print
Some times seemingly innocuous documents can reveal a great deal about someone or some thing. For example, take a will. In it may lie the key to intimate secrets about someone’s life such as the mistress no one knew about. For the George W. Bush Administration the most revealing recent document is the guest list for the state dinner with Queen Elizabeth.
Everyone has already read about the Bush family gaffes at the dinner, the ones that make any public event a kind of surprise theater of the absurd, for you never know when one of the Bushes is going to perform the equivalent of shedding its leaves in public. At the Queen’s dinner, as usual Dubya had his tongue and his facts twisted, blurting out 17– before catching himself from making a blunder that would have ranked right up there with top ones in American history.
Then Mother Bush told the Queen that Dubya was the black sheep of the family and asked if she had any black sheep in the royal family? The London tabloids must have laughed so hard you could hear it over here. However, the Queen was not amused, replying, “None of your business.” That line, BTW, crops up all the time in the tabloids.
While the gaffes provided the media with something to write about and run on YouTube as well as lubricating the keyboards of the legions of anti-Bush bloggers, the real story lies elsewhere–in the guest list. Those names contained more than a few surprises that say a great deal about this administration.
Let’s start with one category of guests–people from sports. Why sports figures needed to attend a white tie dinner with the Queen is an interesting question, but even more interesting is the people the Bush Administration chose to have dinner with the Queen.
Heading the list was white America’s favorite athlete, Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning and wife Ashley Manning. Why Manning? I suppose his team did win the Super Bowl, so why not his coach, Tony Dungy?
But why football? In the Queen’s country football is played with your feet and a round ball. What is called American football is disdained by the rabid fans of various British soccer clubs. Inviting an American footballer amounts to a cultural snub or at best, ignorance.
The White House could have invited one of the United State’s women soccer players such as Mia Hamm–whom I am sure is more familiar to the Queen than Peyton Manning (Imagine the Queen’s staff having to explain this one.) Another choice would have been all-time Wimbledon winner Martina Navratilova, but she is openly gay and Bush would not have wanted to provoke Jerry Falwell to deliver yet another sermon on depravity at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The second sports figure was Arnold Palmer and wife Kathleen. Now Arnie is one of America’s best loved sports figures, but way past his prime. Hasn’t the president heard of Tiger? Or what about all time greatest player Jack Nicklaus, who chose to play his final round at St. Andrews?
There also was jockey Calvin Borel, who had just won the Kentucky Derby with the Queen looking on. That perhaps explained his presence, but the entire royal family is partial to a different kind of riding.
The final inexplicable sports figure was broadcaster Jim Nance. Nance did the play-by-play for the Super Bowl and since Manning was there why not the broadcaster? He also did the Final Four–an event that I am sure is at the top of the Queen’s must-see list.
Missing, of course, was any person of color. How you could not have at least one person of color when your invitation list includes sports figures is about as racially myopic as you can get. In two of the three areas Bush chose to cover (the Super Bowl winner and golf) a black man was the winning coach and another black man is probably the greatest golfer ever.
It also says something about the Bush White House that sports figures outnumbered those in the arts. Itzhak Perlman and his wife were there along with accompanist Rohan De Silva mainly because he was the featured entertainment. Marta Domingo, wife of tenor Placido was there. The only other arts/intellectual figures were Sir Martin Gilbert, who is the official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill, and National Gallery of Art director Earl A. Powell III. Again no people of color.
The list of television folks included David Gregory of NBC, “The View” host Elizabeth Hasselbeck, and Robin Roberts of ABC. Richard Wolffe of Newsweek and Reuter’s White House correspondent Steven Holland represented the print media. In their Washington Post story “Who Went to Dinner at the White House–and Why,” Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts describe Hasselbeck as:
Token Republican on “The View.”
As for Wolffe, the former Oxford graduate had written an article on April 3 titled, “A Turncoat in Team Bush’s Midst.” The title says all you need to know about what was not exactly a flattering portrait of Matthew Dowd, who recently has been extremely critical of the administration’s handling of Iraq.
Outnumbering anyone other than staff and cabinet members were Republican fat cats. After all, this is the administration that cut taxes for the wealthy, so why not add dinner with the Queen to their perks. From the list it appears dinner with Queen Elizabeth went for about a quarter of a million dollars or so in campaign contributions.
According to Argetsinger and Roberts the fat cats were dominated by Texas oil executives including:
Lee Bass: Fort Worth oil billionaire, Yale alumnus, raised at least $300,000 for Bush’s two presidential campaigns.
Richard Kinder: Former president of Enron; gave $250,000 to Bush’s second inauguration.
John Marion: Former chairman of Sotheby’s North America, married to Fort Worth oil heiress Anne Windfohr.
Charles Moncrief: Texas oilman, raised at least $100,000 for Bush’s 2004 reelection.
Joseph O’Donnell: Bush pal since his days at Harvard Business School, raised at least $300,000 for Bush’s two presidential campaigns.
Ray Hunt: Billionaire Texan oilman, serves on president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and Halliburton’s board of directors.
This list should provide a real confidence boost for Americans trying to deal with the recent steep rise in gas prices.
The ringers included plumbing billionaire Herbert Kohler, California interior designer Katherine Boyd, and Arizona auto dealer James Click, all of whom raised at least $300,000 for Bush’s campaigns. But the name that must have jumped out at everyone was Dallas oil and gas billionaire T. Boone Pickens, long a controversial figure in national politics. His most recent notorious escapade was to serve as the main backer for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. He handed them $2.5 million to run their smear campaign against John Kerry.
Of course the GOP House and Senate leadership was there along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Missing was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who declined to attend. The predominance of fat cats oil tycoons over Congressional representation should raise a few eyebrows.
So what does the list add up to? First, there is a slap at people of color who were not well-represented at all. Second, the White House may have committed a cultural faux pas by inviting the wrong kind of footballer. Third, the large number of Texas oil tycoons present sends a negative signal to a nation wondering why the price of gasoline keeps going up.
Most notably, the list sent strong signals that this embattled president whose approval ratings continue to slip intends to play hardball with the Democrats. Deliberately inviting the chief financier of a notorious series of negative campaign ads could not have won George W. Bush any friends among the Democrats. The only way to interpret this deliberate provocations is as in-your-face confrontationism America does not need at this critical time. This guest list is full of the fingerprints of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.
For the rest of the world, the list projected an all-too-familiar image of this country. It showed us as insular (football not soccer), narrow-minded (a notable lack of artists and intellectuals), and obsessively partisan. Meanwhile, we try to convince Iraqi Shiite leaders to be nice to the Sunnis and vice versa.
If John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan alive today to host such an affair, you can bet the guest list would have been different. You can also bet there would not have been any talk about “black sheep” and “17–.” The Bush White House spectacle would have appalled them as much as it probably appalled the Queen.
When the evening was over you had to have wondered if the Queen thought that the jet that flew her across the Atlantic had taken a wrong turn and landed on the moon. Or maybe the escort that had taken her from the airport had driven to the Clampett’s mansion instead of the White House.
For America and the American people the entire affair amounts to a national embarrassment. But then this administration has never shied from embarrassing themselves. What it portends for the future is not encouraging. The Era of Bad Feelings even managed to inject itself into a state dinner.
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
