Jenna Bush’s Untelevised Wedding: Love and Politics

President and Mrs. George W. Bush request the honor of your presence at …

What? I’m not going to be there in quaint Crawford, TX when First Twin Jenna floats down the aisle with good old whassisname? (When it’s Prince William’s wedding, then we’ll bother to learn the spouse’s name, okay?)

There’d better be a really good explanation for this, uh, “oversight.” Like, “The Secret Service couldn’t deliver your invitation cuz they were too busy sweeping the wedding cake for explosives”-good.

After all, I’m practically family.

Way back in elementary school, I learned that George Washington was the father of our country. Which makes this president … what? My stepdad? Actually, I prefer to think of us more like cousins—the superclose kind, before busy careers, spouses, and one of us always having to keep the nuclear launch codes secret from the other inevitably created some distance.

So naturally, it hurts to be excluded. Making things even worse, TV’s not on the guest list either.

That’s right, this is one White House wedding we won’t get to watch on our flatscreens and in our jelly donut-stained jammies. It’s not even a White House wedding, technically speaking. As twenty-five-year-old Jenna recently explained, the Bush ranch in Crawford feels more homey than the government-issue Washington mansion her parents moved into after she’d already started college.

I’ve got no beef with that. She’s a grown woman, fully entitled to her own vision of her special day. And oh my, can those days be special! I went to one wedding with a circus theme and another held aboard a dry-docked ocean liner-turned-souvenir shop in the amusement park where the couple met. Trust me, once you’ve been piped onto the poop deck by an usher in a sailor suit or watched the newlyweds drive away in a tiny clown car, you know it could be a whole lot worse than a wildflower-bedecked tent in dusty Crawford.

But to purposely exlude the rest of the extended family—all 303 million of us fellow Americans—from happily “attending” via TV? Now I’m having a cow!