Laura Bush Poisoning Claim Unlikely, Homeland Security Expert Says

Were George W. Bush and Laura Bush poisoned at a 2007 European conference of world leaders as Mrs. Bush asserts in her new memoir? Maybe not.

In the new book, "Spoken from the Heart," Mrs. Bush said that she and the president were poisoned while attending a G8 summit in Germany, but now, a former top aide says that's unlikely.

According to Frances Townsend, Bush's own Homeland Security adviser, there was "no indication" that the president and his wife consumed intentionally poisoned food.

"The truth was ultimately we didn't really believe there was a basis to think they were poisoned, but you can understand - you would have thought us not competent if we hadn't considered the possibility and looked at it," Townsend said in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

But the former First Lady painted a grim picture of the incident in her book:

"[O]ne of our military aides had difficulty walking and a White House staffer lost all hearing in one ear. Exceedingly alarmed, the Secret Service went on full alert, combing the resort for potential poisons."

According to Townsend, doctors who treated the delegation, "believed it was just a virus, a local virus."

Despite the final prognosis of the doctors, Mrs. Bush still didn't seem entirely convinced in her memoir, writing: "We never learned if any other delegations became ill, or if ours, mysteriously, was the only one."

Comments

[ESerafina42]

12:58 AM on 05/02/2010

Looks like Laura's been "pallin' around with" paranoid right-wingers too much. Mrs. Bush, do you believe that President Obama was born in the US?

[BambooHarvester]

12:02 AM on 05/02/2010

no such luck

[jafsie]

11:30 PM on 05/01/2010

Just look at the photo. She is so stoned.

[RitaS]

10:50 PM on 05/01/2010

Hey, maybe it's Laura's attempt to garner ANY sympathy for her pathetic excuse of a husband let alone his gross miss-handling of the US Govt....

[ksker]

08:58 PM on 05/01/2010

Ya know we’ve all been leaving little Laura out of our politics. I guess because she’s so “special”. But now that she’s written (?) this book I think it time to say out loud. She looks like the poster-child for the “Stepford Wives” Ya know, like the picture on your drivers license.

[a true texan]

07:50 PM on 05/01/2010

Okay all you liberals, enough already. W left office well over a year ago, and our country has been on the downhill slide ever since. If you keep your lips closed long enough and your eyes and ears open, you might learn something-----but I doubt it.

You elected Mr. Stumblefoot, Foot in Mouth, so move forward if you can since Obama is taking the whole country down with his actions beginning from they day he took office.

Maybe if you got a life, you would be better off than spending all your time slamming W and Laura.

[KathyTS]

08:41 PM on 05/01/2010

If you are truly "a true texan," why don't you just secede and leave the rest of us alone--to continue studying and revering Thomas Jefferson--without your whiny defense of the Moron and the Zombie?

[HDR]

10:33 PM on 05/01/2010

Are you drunk, again?! "On the downhill slide ever since"? That would imply that all was rosey and shiny when that Textard (and he ain't even a Texan!) left office. Like this oilspill, Obama has to spend most, if not all of his time cleaning up after him. So he has to enact desperate measures for desperate times. National bancruptcy (who cuts taxes when you've declared two wars!), Deregulation of everything! It's just easier to ask you to name one benefit from Bush's 8 yrs. And you can't say "leaving office."

[HDR]

07:48 PM on 05/01/2010

God! Just look at the 1000 yard stare from these two on the main page. A testament to nature that bipedal motion was mastered by their offspring.

[SeenItBefore]

07:35 PM on 05/01/2010

Laura says things like this when her medications are late and she slips out of the thorazine induced haze and waxes psychotic.

[imfedup]

06:56 PM on 05/01/2010

I didn't know the Bushes were in the Olympics . . .

[bibimimi]

05:28 PM on 05/01/2010

They were hyper-vigilant about George, even fearing his excrement would fall into the wrong hands. This was same summit where Bush said 'Russia's big, so's China' in conversation with Tony Blair while he whacked down a dinner roll, chewing with his mouth open. Poisoned? Hardly. Plastered? Surely.

[jafsie]

11:35 PM on 05/01/2010

Fanned? Oh, yeah!

[RJB Boston]

04:23 PM on 05/01/2010

if you're gonna bother with poisoning someone you dont stop short

[JoeMar]

04:15 PM on 05/01/2010

She should go back to being a robot.

[Bowen Man]

04:07 PM on 05/01/2010

She confused reality with her daydream.

And the book was entitled "Spoken from the Heart?" Seems like a heartless family to me.

[mybostonjack]

03:12 PM on 05/01/2010

Sounds like something Dick Cheney would do. But then again, he was the real president...

[birddogs]

01:42 PM on 05/01/2010

Laura Bush's new book. When it tops the NYT Bestseller list, thanks to huge NeoCon mass buying, will it be listed as Fiction or Fantasy?