In the wake of First Lady Laura Bush’s numerous inappropriate remarks of sexual double entendre at her husband’s expense delivered at this week’s press conference, Michael Peroutka offers this rich insight:

In his historically instructive book, Myths in Stone: Religious Dimensions of Washington D.C. (University of California Press, 2001), Jeffrey F. Meyer, a professor of religion at the University of North Carolina, says this about President George Washington’s concern about ceremony and domestic behavior:

“[He] sensed that everything he did was significant. From the procedures to be observed in high government rituals down to questions of domestic etiquette — how the president should relate to leading citizens and to ordinary citizens, what kind of house he should occupy, and what clothes he should wear. All of these issues, he realized, were expressive of the status of the president. He understood that all these items would, to use contemporary jargon, ‘make a statement.’”