Just as the world was mourning the passing of Gilligan we have received word that Thurston Howell III and his wife Lovey are alive and well and flying somewhere about a mile over the rest of the country.

Speaking to American Public Media’s Marketplace yesterday, former First Lady Barbara Bush opined that the people who had been relocated from New Orleans to the Houston Astrodome were better off now.

“So many of the people here, you know, were underpriveleged anyway,” she said, “so this is working very well for them.”

Hey, I always dreamed of trading in my crappy apartment for a bigger place — why not the Astrodome?

Though GWB sent mom and dad out in hopes of putting a friendlier face on his administration’s inept handling of the Katrina disaster, their tone-deaf publicity tour is turning into something of a fiasco. Monday night, speaking to Larry King on CNN, the former President Bush — known as “Poppy” to those in the family, due to all the opium he smoked at Yale — said that he had spent plenty of time on the ground in Mississippi with Republican governor (and former GOP chief) Haley Barbour and that the word Iraq hadn’t come up once!

“Now where does that story come from?” he asked but refused to name names — except for one. “I’ve already said enough. Mr. Sulzberger will be calling in.”

So that’s who’s behind all this negative publicity: the publisher of the New York Times! Should have known. Pinch may not have the Punch that his father did but he can obviously still bend the whole media world to his twisted vision. The elder Bush may be kinder and gentler than his son — and heaven knows his wife is genteel — but first and foremost, they are gentiles.