Even the Obits are Going Against Bush

Buzz Davis laughed a good hard laugh.

"Oh, I would have loved to know that lady!" exclaimed the Stoughton activist and former Dane County supervisor.

Davis was talking about Sally Baron, who passed away Monday in Stoughton at age 71. Baron did not make a lot of news in her lifetime - she was busy working and raising six kids - but she went out with a message that warmed the hearts of Davis and a lot of other small-town Wisconsin progressives.

No one should slip the mortal coil without raging one last time against the dying of the light. And so Sally Baron did.

"Memorials in her honor can be made to any organization working for the removal of President Bush," reads Baron's obituary in today's editions of The Capital Times.

When I read that line, which her family decided to include in the obituary, I didn't need to see another word to be sure that Sally Baron was a native Wisconsinite rooted in the working-class progressive politics of this state.

And so she was.
[...]

No wonder, then, that Sally Baron bristled at the sight of George W. Bush. The wife of a miner who was injured in a pit accident, she raised six kids in a world our inherited and selected president could never imagine. Sally Baron's kids say she did not like the way Bush smirked when he spoke. Considering that he did not even win the most votes in the 2000 election, her thinking went, he could have been more humble.

Even before the recent scandal over Bush's State of the Union address, Baron also thought Bush had trouble telling the truth. Baron's daughter, Maureen Bettilyon, says her mother "thought he was a liar." "She'd always watch CNN, C-SPAN, and you know, she'd just swear at the TV and say, 'OH, Bush, he's such a whistle ass!' She'd get so mad," recalled Bettilyon.
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Whistle ass. I love it.