Laura Bush fiddles while Iraq burns

How nice to know that Laura Bush is hoping to turn her performance of scripted jokes at the Washington correspondents’ dinner into a legacy [“Bright Star Indeed,” by Robin Abcarian, May 7]. A legacy of what? Bad taste? Call me old-fashioned, but I find it demeaning and vulgar for the first lady to make jokes about the vice president’s wife and male strippers in any context.

Worse yet, in the face of 1,600 soldiers dead in Iraq, along with tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, a collapsing economy at home and 40 million Americans without health insurance, her quip about how Bushie and his cronies like to “tear things down” went beyond matters of taste. It showed an unconscionable lack of awareness, compassion and sensitivity to the real problems we face as a nation under her husband’s watch. A legacy indeed.

Michele Greene

Los Angeles

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Regarding Laura Bush’s off-color jokes (which included, among other things, milking a male horse): If a liberal Democrat had delivered the same jokes, the religious right would be out in force saying the comments were a further example of the “moral decay” in our society and they would work to extract their pound of flesh by trying to destroy that person both professionally and personally.

I found the silence of the religious right deafening.

Terry Mills

Long Beach

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How will poor Laura Bush seal her place in history? Gosh, maybe as the woman who married a man who spends five times as much “defending” this nation as he does educating it. But that point will surely be left out of speeches she gives while on her $150-million rebuilding-of-gang-communities tour.

If she saw teachers at Kinko’s copying pages from the single book given them to teach these kids, maybe then she’d get a clue about how to secure her coveted legacy by actually doing something and not dragging a press corps around to manufacture a legacy that’s as thin and contrived as the paper it’s printed in.

Markus Flanagan

Westlake Village

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Not to be a killjoy, but I can’t help but wonder if budding comedian Laura Bush and her husband, “Mr. Excitement,” would be having such gosh darn fun, yukking it up with all their pals, if it were their “high-spirited 22-year-old twin girls” living, fighting and dying in Iraq with the over 100 or so children, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters who were senselessly slaughtered that week alone.

Scott Barry

West Hollywood