“They say” that former first lady Barbara Pierce Bush, who died in mid-April, smoked cigarettes. Well, she reached adulthood when smoking was common, indeed expected. She also represented many values that universally were revered in this country once upon a time, but
I confess to a distracted moment at Mass the day after Barbara Bush died. I was at an afternoon Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, and Bill Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, Paul Begala, was in my peripheral vision. The first