Ellen DeGeneres has been criticized this week after footage from an NFL football game appeared to show her sharing a laugh with former president George W. Bush. At issue with the TV host’s jovial antics is the fact that Bush is considered by some on the left a war criminal who helped revitalize social conservatism at the federal level. The entire debacle is an important lesson in the drawbacks of assimilation politics.

DeGeneres addressed the controversy on her show, The Ellen Show, on Tuesday, telling the crowd she had been invited to a Dallas Cowboys game by Charlotte Jones, the daughter of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, whose public persona is so large even the Cowboys stadium is unofficially known as “Jerry World.” While there, she ended up sitting next to Bush.

“There were 100,000 people in this stadium — beautiful stadium, by the way, that Dallas has,” DeGeneres said on her show. “We get to sit in this very fancy suite because, you know, he owns the whole place, so his suite is fancy and he’s got fancy friends, and I don’t mean fancy like Real Housewife fancy, I mean, like, fancy.”

DeGeneres then played a video that showed Bush sitting next to her, making a surprised face that gave way to a smile. When it was over, she said, “Yeah! Fancy!”

“When we were invited, I was aware that I was going to be surrounded with people from very different views and beliefs,” DeGeneres said. “And I’m not talking about politics — I was rooting for [the Cowboys’ opponent] the Packers.”

“During the game, they showed a shot of George and me laughing together, and so people were upset,” she continued. “They thought, Why is a gay Hollywood liberal sitting next to a conservative Republican president? Didn’t even notice that I’m holding the brand-new iPhone 11.” DeGeneres then launched into a lecture about being nice to people with different viewpoints and showed a tweet saying that her meet-up with Bush gave someone “faith in America again.”

The son of a rich and powerful family, Bush skated through elite schools on his way to working in the family business and winning the presidency in an election that forced many to question the fundamental nature of our democracy. (Sound familiar?) Though it may seem naive or even cute in post-Trump retrospect, for much of Bush’s presidency, he was loathed by liberals, including (as DeGeneres hints at) many in Hollywood. The controversy surrounding the vote in Florida in 2000 — where his brother Jeb happened to be governor at the time — started his entire tenure off with questions about his election’s legitimacy.