Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle’s website is one of the MSM’s most unhinged, hate-filled columnists. Today he earns his pay by railing against Laura Bush because she isn’t an obnoxious, left-wing elite bigmouth like Teresa Heinz Kerry and because she doesn’t believe, as Hillary Clinton did, that her role as First Lady gives her the prerogative to plan the massive government takeover of huge swaths of the private sector.

Here’s your daily allowance of bile:

Laura Bush, docile doormat

Behold, the ideal Republican wife: Prim, sexless, nearly useless, lets the men do the real thinkin’. Hot!

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

I fondly recall, just before the tragic Bush/Kerry presidential election, an impassioned discussion I had with a family friend, a conservative Catholic mother of four and grandmother of six, headstrong, outspoken, hilarious, a real no-BS matriarch of her big crazy messy family and clearly the wearer of the pants in her marriage and a woman whom I always liked for her wit and her outsized personality, despite her unfortunate choice of religious and political affiliation, a woman who, it turned out in our discussion, absolutely hated — hated — John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Remember her? Controversial. Fiery. A little weird, prickly, unpredictable. Also: headstrong and outspoken and didn’t take any crap from any men, no matter how powerful.

Heinz is also rather amazing, in terms of sheer accomplishment and self-made acumen: world traveled, highly educated, spoke multiple languages (she was an interpreter for the United Nations, early on), took over the philanthropic arm of the Heinz empire when her husband died unexpectedly, almost ran for senate, raised her enormously accomplished, well-adjusted sons to adulthood by herself, and so on. I thought she was great.

And my friend hated her. And why? Well, ironically enough, for most of the reasons I list above. Apparently, Heinz had too much personality. She was too strong, too in your face, too fearless and outspoken, something was “just not right about that woman.” All this, of course, made Heinz into “a total bitch.”

(And yes, this completely echoes the right’s hatred of Hillary Clinton during the Bill Clinton years and up through today, because she dared to be the opposite of meek and quiet, dared to try and actually do something progressive and radical as first lady. Yes, she botched it badly, overshot her abilities and overestimated her powers to revolutionize health care. But the real problem was how badly she underestimated the violent, inbred misogyny and anti-feminism of the old-boys network in Washington).

I was equal parts appalled and amused. And not only because my brash, blunt friend and Heinz obviously had far more in common, personality- and attitude- wise, than she cared to acknowledge. No, I was stunned because my friend far preferred, as the perfect counter to Heinz, as a role model and a woman and the ideal presidential wife, one tepid, timid, thoroughly useless Laura Bush.

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Wait, what? You mean docile, prudish, former librarian Laura Bush, she of the nonexistent inspiration and dull-as-dishwater personality? Yes indeed, that Laura Bush. Here was my friend, brash and funny and who spoke her mind without the slightest reservation, and who could drink and think and opine with the strongest of men, and yet she admired this … limp wallflower? I didn’t get it. I still don’t completely get it, to this very day.

All of this comes to mind as I see, skirting across the newswires, a handful of generic photos and sidebar stories of Laura Bush out on tour recently with her twin Styrofoam peanut daughters, Jenna and Barbara, promoting a new children’s book they all apparently, and yeah right, wrote together and isn’t that sweet.

There is Laura, looking exactly as she has looked for the past eight insufferable years. Prim, a bit glassy, reserved, her hair some sort of ironclad helmet of awkward architecture, the very epitome of nice, meek, domestic Republican female, not making the slightest wave and hoping no one really notices because, well, she’s just a woman…

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