"Hi, hello, yes, welcome to Texas . . . just please try not to, you know, get your poor-people smell all over everything."

I may not have ever thought George Bush Sr. was a terrific president, but I do think he's a nice guy -- I really admire the work he's done with Clinton on disaster relief for the southeast Asian tsunami and now Hurricane Katrina. He's certainly too nice to be saddled with this disgusting shrew of a wife:

NEW YORK -- Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, "This is working very well for them."

The former First Lady's remarks were aired this evening on National Public Radio's "Marketplace" program.

Then she added: "What I?m hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this [she chuckles slightly] is working very well for them."

Yeah, those "underprivileged" people had homes and livelihoods, and now they get to eat free MREs and sleep on the 50-yard-line of the Astrodome. This is working out frickin' great.

And as Atrios points out, there's an additional, subtler outrage to the quote -- ol' Barb thinks it's "sort of scary" that all these people want to stay in Texas. Why? Because they're all poor? Or because they're all raping, pillaging black looters?

Really, it never ceases to amaze me how liberals are the ones saddled with the "elitist" label when conservatives have attitudes like this. First you had the very heads of FEMA and Homeland Security blaming the hurricane victims for not getting the hell out soon enough, as if not having a car or the ability to otherwise get around is just a freakish deformity in modern America, and now you've got Barbara Bush marveling at how, despite having their lives blown apart by an act of God, these hurricane refugees are actually makin' out like bandits. And then you've got these fine Americans (who scrambled out from under a rock overturned by Corrente) whose outright hatred for, to say nothing of complete lack of understanding of, people who live in their own country simply defies belief. (I especially like the guy who says "it seems to be almost exclusively black people who are doing the looting" and "I just feel sorry for any white people left in that city," and then says he may be one of thse "closet racists." Dude, if you're a closet racist, then Richard Simmons is a closet homo. Just saying.)

Contrast these folks to these members of Philadelphia's homeless community, who -- despite being lazy, drunks who are perfectly capable of contributing to society but just refuse to do so, to hear the conservatives tell it -- are reaching into their tattered pockets and giving of what little they have left to help Katrina's victims. Who's really the drag on society here?