It’s not every day that First Lady Laura Bush moos on camera. But that’s exactly what George W.’s wife did last week on CBS’s The Early Show, when she kicked off something called the Early Readers Club, a weekly summertime series intended to inspire parents to tear their brood away from the evil idiot box during school vacation and teach them the good ol’ fashioned art of reading.

The first storytelling session took place at the White House and featured Mrs. Bush reading from Deborah Bruss’s Book! Book! Book!, an illustrated tale of a bunch of bored barnyard animals trying to find something to do. (Surprise, they end up at the library!) Mrs. Bush’s audience, 10 or so fidgety, nicely dressed kids who were the handpicked sons and daughters of White House employees, mostly stared blankly while the first lady bah-bahed flatly and oinked like a barbiturate-addicted pig (see for yourself at www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/24/earlyshow/leisure/books/main560156.shtml). Then, after a pointless cameo from Barney the dog, CBS aired a closing spot encouraging viewers to get books not from their local libraries, but from Jeff Bezos’s indie-bookstore-murdering Amazon.com.

But what’s even worse is that the staffer who originally bought Book! Book! Book! from Egan’s store actually returned the copy after the show. And she didn’t ask for store credit — she wanted a full refund. " I’m the person who ran [the staffer’s] charge card, " says Egan. " And I hope that I was actually smiling when I did it, but my little insides were aquiver. " Egan says she doesn’t understand why a pro-literacy initiative couldn’t find something else to do with the book rather than ask for its money back. " It was fairly disappointing; I assumed that they probably would’ve donated it to a library. "