Is George Bush, 93, REALLY a sex pest?
A BAHAMAS hotel has opened the first plus-sized luxury resort. Sun loungers at Club 18-30 Stone are 3ft wide, the kingsize beds reinforced with steel frames and the doors widened. Just pity the poor EasyJet passengers who have to sit next to these porkers.
CAn former President George Bush really be a serial sex offender — in his 90s? That’s the extraordinary claim now being made in these febrile days of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
The latest — and third — Bush ‘victim’ to come forward is American novelist Christina Baker Kline.
In 2014, she posed for an official photograph with the wheelchairbound ex-president at a literary event. ‘President Bush put his arm around me, low on my back,’ Kline wrote. Then he ‘squeezed my butt, hard’.
‘ I wasn’t traumatised. But it shouldn’t have happened.’
She hopes that by coming forward she will ‘begin to effect change’.
Her story echoes that of actress Jordana Grolnick, who claims Bush squeezed her bottom in 2016. Actress Heather Lind was the first to speak out on Tuesday, saying she was groped by Bush while posing for a photograph in 2014. ‘I just thought, whatever, he’s a dirty old man.’
His spokesman says: ‘At 93, President Bush has been confined to a wheelchair for roughly five years, so his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures. On occasion he has patted the women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner.
‘Some have seen it as innocent, others clearly view it as inappropri- ate. To anyone he has offended, he apologises most sincerely.’ Surely that should be the end of it.
One can’t help thinking if the ‘pest’ wasn’t a former President, these claims wouldn’t have been made.
While, of course, it is offensive for a man to touch a woman in this way, haven’t things got way out of proportion? When the #MeToo campaign began, encouraging women to detail their experiences of sexual harassment, it was after claims of rape and sexual assaults by film mogul Weinstein.
They were right to speak out. But now you can’t turn on a talk radio show without hearing the pitiful tale of some woman claiming she’s been traumatised for life after a man made a pass at her.
Shouldn’t such incidents have been dealt with by a fierce and humiliating reprimand at the time? By lumping every leer and lurch in the same catch-all basket as rape, we diminish the suffering of genuine victims.
By portraying a nonagenarian in a wheelchair as some kind of serial sex beast, Bush’s ‘victims’ — and the sisterhood — look frankly ridiculous.