And if I die today
She'll be the Happy Mourner
Laughing graveside
Wearing her naugties like a jewel
The Happy Mourner
Has a right to bitch
-- adapted from Tori Amos' "Happy Phantom" off the CD Little Earthquakes.
Who knows what goes through the head of Big Babs Bush?
Seriously. Maybe she's remembering a funny from her fart jokes book? Maybe she's boozed up from a pre-funeral tailgate party? Maybe she's just the cruel person she's always come off as?
Who the hell knows what goes through her alleged "beautiful mind"?
On the eve of the illegal war, Big Babs declared, on the March 18, 2003 episode of Good Morning America, "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"
It's not relevant? 3,000-plus Americans aren't revelant. 655,000-plus Iraqis aren't relevant. And, apparently, neither was former president Gerald Ford.
At his January 2, 2007 funeral in DC, Big Babs was all grins and giggles. Writing in The Washington Post, Peter Baker noted, "Betty Ford, 88, endured the fifth straight day of official ceremony with grief playing out on her face . . ."
No grief on Big Babs face in the photo taken by Stephen Crowley for the January 3rd front page of The New York Times. While Lynne Cheney looked glum, Laura Bush looked on the verge of tears, Hillary and Bill Clinton looked glum, Chelsea Clinton, Condi Rice and Jimmy Carter wore serious expressions, Big Babs was beaming like she was about to stop her son from escorting a grieving Betty Ford long enough to ask the former First Lady to pull her finger.
Big Babs was never known for observing social norms but who knew she'd play gleeful at a funeral? Maybe she was thinking, "Heh-heh, he didn't get on the Reagan ticket in 1980 after all!"
Or maybe it's just that she's, as she once infamously said of Geraldine Ferraro, a . . . Well we "can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich."
Whatever it is, who would want her at their funeral? Thankfully, being born in 1925, she should be gone long before most of us.
