Copyright © 2008-2009 Timothy Horrigan
|
|
|
[July
28-August 2, 2010] If you are
looking for info on Chelsea Clinton's
wedding, I moved it to another page. There is plenty of info, it just is on another page. You can find that page at:
If
you are wondering about the relative cost of the two weddings: no one
knows for sure. The Bush-Hager wedding cost the families about
$100,000 but that doesn't include the huge cost of locking down
several counties in east-central Texas for three days. However,
those security costs were mostly incurred because a sitting President
(the bride's father) and a sitting Secretary of State (Condoleeza
Rice, who was a family friend) were in attendance, along with other
family members and dignitaries. Most of those security costs would
have been incurred even if Condi had merely dropped by the ranch to
visit and cut some brush with the President and the First Family.
The Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding will cost the families an estimated
$2,000,000, or more: this is a bigger wedding and this bride is
using a rented venue. The taxpayers will be shelling out some
bucks for security on July 31, 2010, but less than in May 2008.
The mother of the bride is a sitting Secretary of State (as well as
an ex-First Lady.) The father of the bride is an ex-President,
but an ex-President's security cocoon is much smaller than a sitting
President's. President
Obama and the First Lady are not coming to the wedding.
[August
30, 2009]
Jenna Bush now has a new job, as a correspondent on the NBC Today Show. You can read more on my main Bush Twins page, whose URL is:
[July
21-23, 2009]
On the afternoon of July 20, 2009, my
website started getting about 10,000 extra visitors per
day, almost all of them landing on this page which you are reading.
The surge of hits continued on July 21 and then abruptly subsided on
July 22. For some reason, I got 23,874 hits (according to Google
Analytics) from Yahoo!
on the keyphrase "Jenna
Bush's Wedding." My other search engine traffic was normal
(insofar as you can ever describe search engine traffic as "normal")
aside from a slightly excessive number of Google
hits on the phrase "Bob
Ducharme Ex-Husbands." (Bob Ducharme, by the way, has only
been married once, to his current and lovely wife Jennifer: the
"Ex-Husbands" were a band he was in back in the early
1980s.)
The sudden upsurge in hits didn't seem
to be caused by the July 20 announcement that Jenna is chairing the
new Unicef
Next Generation Steering Committee, whose motto is "Be a
her0 for zer0!". (Barbara Bush is
also a member of this group.) It didn't even seem to be connected to
Ronald Kessler's fairly
sensational book entitled: In
the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the
Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect
See Also:
Ironically, Jenna & Barbara were actually trying to make news on July 22, but they did so without causing any extra traffic on my web site. Jenna appeared on Good Morning America on Wednesday July 22 for a mutually obsequious "softball" interview with Diane Sawyer. Sawyer stuck to the subject of the interview, which was UNICEF, although she did ask at the end about Jenna's parents. W. and Laura are not under arrest: they are living in Texas and enjoying life. The URL for the GMA segment (warning: the video will have ads attached to it —and it may vanish at any moment) is:
The next day, UNICEF issued a press release about Jenna's work and about her fundraising efforts:
[April
27, 2009]
Jenna Bush Hager has been keeping out of the news for the most part in recent months, although there was a brief ruckus in March 2009 in Baltimore when her Secret Service contingent's van was towed for numerous unpaid parking tickets. The mere fact that she even still had a Secret Service contingent was newsworthy. Adult children of ex-Presidents no longer get Secret Service protection— unless the current President orders it. It is unclear which President signed the order, Bush or Obama.
She and her new husband are marking a key point in their marriage on April 15th by filing their first joint tax return and their first anniversary is on May 10th.
The institution of marriage has been in the news a lot lately. My home state of New Hampshire (and its neighbor to the west, Vermont), has been considering making gay marriage legal. I am all for that, even though I personally am not planning on getting married anytime soon.
[January
20, 2009]
I am not sure why I am bothering to keep this page up. Jenna Bush was not very relevant when her father was President and she is even less relevant now. But there is some interest in her wedding anyway. And I seem to have become the definitive source for info on her wedding even though if you look at the rest of my web site (which very few of you will bother to do) you will see how ironic that is. I do still have another Bush Twins page, by the way, which leads to a few other relevant pages which are still up and running:
Copyright © 2008-2009 Timothy Horrigan
Jenna Bush's wedding day came at a time when Emperor Bush's subjects were short of bread (in every sense of the word "bread") and she refused to put on a circus (although the security precautions— and the wedding itself— were highly expensive.) The groom is one Henry Chase Hager, who seems like a decent enough fellow, even if he does use too much hairspray and even if he did work for Karl Rove for a long time.
Jenna is ostensibly a deeply private person: however, before and
after the wedding she crisscrossed the country promoting her own book
Ana's
Story: A Journey of Hope
It was a wedding of the sort which liberal couples often put on: strenuously casual, held at an gratuitously inconvenient venue (the President's ranch is in a remote area of South Central Texas and the Jenna in fact actually grew up in Austin), and it was be linked to irrelevant causes (in this case, wildflowers and literacy) which are supposed to be of special significance to the couple.
The literacy may seem ironic because Bush II is a man of limited book learnin'- but the bride and her mother are both elementary reading teachers.
The wildflowers were the theme of the wedding. Apparently, Laura Bush kept herself busy all these years by planting wildflowers on the ranch in Crawford. The dresses for the "house party" (i..e., what folks in the other 49 states would refer to as the "bridesmaids") are also wildflower-colored. (In Texas, the "bridesmaid" is what non-Texans would refer to by the term "maid of honor." Jenna's bridesmaid was the other twin, Barbara.) The designer Lela Rose released the following sketch of some of the house party dresses:
So, if you are looking for photos of Jenna Bush's bridesmaids' dresses, they do not exist. Well, the photos undoubtedly exist somewhere in the archives, but they haven't been declassified yet. Happily, there are plenty of declassified photos of Jenna's white embroidered organza wedding gown with matte beading by Oscar de la Renta:
The ceremony was held beside the pond at the Bush family ranch, which has since been put up for sale. The officiant was a longtime Bush family friend, Rev. Kirbyjon H. Caldwell of the Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston- who ironically is a Barack Obama supporter. The father-daughter dance at the reception was the old Joe Cocker song "You Are So Beautiful" performed by the Tyrone Smith Revue. The couples first dance was Taj Mahal's "Lovin' in My Baby's Eyes. " ("Tyrone "Super T" Smith heads a wedding band with a 70s funk and blues flavor to it.)
The weather was fine in Crawford, even though there were severe thunderstorms not far away in the Temple area (which is where most of the guests are staying.) The ceremony was performed in front of a limestone altar with a attached three-ton cross which Bush II designed himself. No word on whether he and Vice President Cheney would be using it for any ceremonials of a somewhat more esoteric nature at some point in the future. The reception was held under tents set up for the occasion.
|
The guests were bussed in from an undisclosed location:
Actually, it was not undisclosed. The rehearsal dinner actually and other pre-wedding day celebrations actually took place over 50 miles away in the pre-Civil War town of Salado,Texas at the Stagecoach Inn:
|
|
Here are my favorites from the released pictures. These are all official White House photos (although I tweaked the color settings, etc.) There are unlikely to be any unofficial photos because all cellphones and cameras were confiscated before the guests were allowed to go to the events. The guests were family and friends: the highest ranking politicians (aside from the two President George Bushes) were Jenna's Uncle Jeb and Henry's mentor Karl Rove. The officiant at the lakeside ceremony (held in front of a spooky limestone cross) was a minister from Houston named Pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell, who is an old family friend. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Here are a couple of pictures which have surfaced from the preparations for the wedding:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
You might also want to check out my main Bush Twins page: |
Although the liberal media like to paint young Republicans as stodgy and unfashionable. Henry and Jenna are way more hip than that boring old Chelsea Clinton— as proven by these next two pictures.
Here is Sir Henry in Boston with his ex-boss Karl Rove and other friends. The red Speedos represent the fact that the Republicans aren't counting any state as being "Blue"— not even the Bluest of all states, Massachusetts.
|
|
And here is Jenna with her close friend John Waters, the film-maker and author who is now her neighbor in Baltimore:
|
|
[July
31, 2010] Another Presidential Daughter Gets Married! Jenna Bush Hager's and Laura Welch Bush's May 28, 2008 appearance on the Ellen Show
Michael Jones's July 19, 2010 Gayrights.Change.Org blog posting (about Hillary's refusal to endorse gay marriage, in spite of her generally good record on LGBT issues.)
See also:
Jenna Bush's June 2010 NBC Today Show reportage from Yellowstone National Park
|
|
|
You might also want to check out my main Bush Twins page: |
|
|
