Laura Bush is a murderer.
 

In snopes.com the story is headlined:
Claim: While a teenager, future First Lady Laura Bush caused the death of a classmate in a car accident.
Status: True

http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/laura.asp

But if you look at the details of the case as described in this article and elsewhere, it seems very likely that she had every intention of killing the victim, making this not just an accident, but a cold blooded murder. What do you guys think?

What do I think? I think that the term "very likely" is a hell of a stretch. I think that you have a 17 year old girl driving a car with another 17 year old girl. (Probably a lot of jacking around.) I see a 17 year old boy driving a Corvair. (Unsafe At Any Speed?) What I see is a bad accident. To buy into anything other than that, with what we have, is just pointless muck raking. Cold blooded murder? I very highly doubt it.

I must bring this up the next time someone mentions Chappaquiddick.

The two deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. However, it does deserve mention that Mrs. Bush does not hold elected office as Kennedy does and, moreover, did not gain and retain that office despite having killed someone. Moreover, Kennedy made the decision to abandon his victim to die, while Mrs. Bush's accident seems to have been precisely that: an accident through and through. An idiotic accident, true; but I know people who have done even dumber things than that and not realized it until the act was completed: fortunately, neither they nor anyone else were killed by such things.* Accidentally killing someone in a car wreck is bad, yes: but knowingly abandoning an unconscious, injured individual in a sinking car and not reporting the accident is manslaughter at least by any standard, and the attempt to cover up the act could (in some jurasdictions) support a Murder-3 charge.

*Just how easy it is for 17-year-olds to do really stupid things in cars by accident is illustrated by a friend from High School who destroyed his first car a few weeks after he got it. In our town, there was a hill, at the bottom of which was a railroad track. The track had a raised bed; for obvious reasons, this was known to locals as the "ski jump." About three weeks after my friend got his first car he (who had moved to town about a year before) was headed down that hill with his girlfriend, and forgot about the railroad track at the bottom of the hill. The hill wasn't very steep, so he didn't ram the car into the railroad-bed...instead, he hit the bump at about 40 or so, and pancaked the landing, which destroyed the suspension on his old Chevvy. He told the cops, his parents, and me that he simply never saw the railbed and had forgotten it was there; "blanked out" was the phrase he used. Granted, it's not the same as running a stop-sign and killing someone, but it does illustrate how easy it is for someone to be distracted or "blanked" and miss something that -should- be glaringly obvious.

You go Pan, please!

It's all a conspiracy. Michael Douglas is alive and well. In fact, he's made a few decent movies!

Very few. :rolleyes:

Oh...wait...I got him mixed up with Kurt Russel again. I don't know why I always do that.

Here are some of the reasons why I thought this was a murder, not an accident.

snopes article says:
Here is what I think: Head to head collision coming at same speed might be roughly equally damaging for both cars but in cases of collision to the side, most of energy is transferred to the car being struck. The aspiring killer may reasonably assume that the damage to herself would be minor. My question would be, how much were Laura Bush and her friend hurt? My guess is that they were not hurt much, if at all. Another question would be, were Laura Welch and her friend wearing seatbelt? My guess is that they were.

Another issue raised was:
The aspiring murderer may greatly increase the chance of successful collision by placing obstruction at the intersection so that the victim has to slow down or stop. This may have been done by the accomplice waving down the victim's car as the driver and the car accelerated toward the intersection, or merely placing objects such as rocks or tree branches on the road.

Since we are in Paranoid forum, I'd might as well go all out crazy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mrsbush-20060206.jpg

Doesn't she look a bit, well, reptilian?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizard_People

I hardly think that this falls into the same venue as Chappaquiddick. What do they have at all in common? Unless it's...a car. And someone died. That's really about it.

This whole thing is very far fetched. Consider the skill required for the driver of one car to intersect with another car, when both cars are travelling at right angles, each going about 50 mph. Does a 17 year old girl have that skill? Now, granted, Laura is the brains of the family, but c'mon.

Is there any reason, whatsoever, to suspect that this happened? Other than the fact that she is married to G.W. Bush? How far are we willing to reach? Is it not possible that Michael Douglas was placed in that intersection by the "Shadow Government"? Could he not have been distracted by the "black helicopters"? It's just as reasonable.

Tiny little things:
Our First Lady, a killer?
Wanton, it's absurd.

Having no doubt that the privileged get away with stuff all the time...

1) not saying she did it on purpose.

2) Kennedy didn't mean to kill either, it was a drunken accident he tried very poorly to cover up.

They both have a lot in common, as I see it. Both were ACCIDENTS, both killed, both were young and are changed people now. I could go on, but I think I made my point agree or disagree that is how I personally see it, it is my opinion and that is all, just as everyone else has theirs.

I don't consider Laura evil for this, nor do I see Ted K., as evil. They both, I am sure, have lived with the guilt and horror of their mistake every day of their life in some way. I am not God and I am not to judge them for those ancient historic events. I can only judge them on what I see now and the people they are now.

Both have been tremendous advocates for important issues and both have demonstrated to me very commendable attributes and very poor attributes, but overall, politics aside, spouses aside...... I have a lot of respect for both Laura and Teddy K. and I feel this nation owes them both gratitude for their accomplishments... not anger or hate or nastiness for those discrepencies of youth that they have made up for and paid for.

Is there anyone here who wants to be judged solely for one event in their life where they made a mistake? I wouldn't. I'm sure though people will argue how wrong I am for saying this.... to them, I say go fuck yourself, it's my opinion and I'm very content with how I feel about it. Just as you have your opinions and you hopefully are comfortable with them and would tell me to fuck off if I tried to tell you how wrong you are and try to change your mind through partisan or self righteous or innuendoes given by others who have something to gain.

I don't need a Limbaugh or Franken or Moore or O'Reilly to tell me how to think on an issue or about a person. Hopefully, most people are intelligent enough to come up with their own opinions and ideas based on their own experiences, pasts and lives.

<br>The OP relies on Snopes, eh?<br><br><IMG SRC="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/snopes.png">

Even Snopes itself warns against false authority. I strongly suspect that a few lawyers have paid visits to the Snopes office over the years; the most glaring example is the Little Mermaid video cover. They take the most half-assed excuse I've ever heard and repeat what the artist told them as truth when saying otherwise could have gotten him in a lot of trouble. Sure, not all of the legend is true (he wasn't about to be fired,) but concluding that if he denied intentionally drawing an obscene image on a kids' video he must be telling the truth is foolish. There are a few others on the site that stick out as having been done at lawsuit-point, but I don't remember them off the top of my head.