Good morning, Miss Bush! Now that Jenna is a teacher, she can tell dad it's `nuclear'
By Beth Teitell
Thursday, December 16, 2004
While I'm happy that half-a-twinset Jenna Bush is taking a nice teaching job in Washington, D.C., helping low-income students, bladda, bladda, I am a skosh concerned for the little ones.
What, exactly, is she going to teach? I sure hope it's not public speaking. Or how to achieve a natural-looking tan off-season. Or - yikes! English. What if Bushspeak is hereditary? ``Hi kids! Let me introducialize myself.''
Maybe she could do a good job with math, using word problems drawn from her own experience:
``If John Kerry had
been elected and fullfilled his pledge to raise the minimum wage to $7 an hour
over the next several years, and my father keeps it at $5.15 an hour over the
same period of time, and your mother works three jobs a day for a total of 87
hours a week, how much more food and medicine would you have been able to afford
under a President Kerry than a President Bush?''
Or, ``If I have three margaritas and I throw back two, how many do I still have left to swig?'' And, for extra credit: ``Does that number change if I'm underage and I've managed to shake my Secret Service agents?''
Speaking of Secret Service agents, will they be lurking outside her classroom (armed with hall passes in case they're stopped by the principal), or will they make themselves useful and act as teacher's aides, feeding Jenna answers to the students' questions, via a transmitter ``concealed'' in the back of her black lace bustier?
You know, agents could be hired specifically with Jenna's new job in mind: the ideal candidate is in excellent physical shape, has uncorrected vision no worse than 20/60, binocular, correctable to 20/20, is willing to take a bullet (or a spitball), and shows a familiarity with Lemony Snicket.
Although the White House was mum on details, The Washington Post reported that Jenna applied to work at the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, which serves low-income students. I wonder what ``low-income'' means to someone in her social strata. Students whose parents don't have their own planes?
As news of Jenna's hire spread across America the jokes started coming in - bring the teacher an apple martini, etc. And the cynics had their say. ``You know she's just doing this for her resume, so when she runs for office she'll have some public service on her record,'' one woman told me.
At the kids' expense - how unfair. And that's not the worst of it. I shudder to think of her disciplinary methods:
``Joey, this is a picture of Karl Rove. Do you want me to have to call him about you? I thought not.''
