Bush library
This New York Daily News piece on Bush’s Presidential Library shows its orientation toward the future:
Eager to begin refurbishing his tattered legacy, the President hopes to raise $500 million to build his library and a think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. […]The legacy-polishing centerpiece is an institute, which several Bush insiders called the Institute for Democracy. Patterned after Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Bush's institute will hire conservative scholars and "give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President's policies," one Bush insider said.
Shelly Lewis comments at HuffPo:
Of course there will be a "think tank." Maybe that's where all the bitter neocons from the Project for a New American Century will go to write papers about how Bush screwed up their war and crushed their dreams.I'm going to suggest the Karl Rove Center for the Study of Free and Fair Elections, and of course, there's got to be The Dick Cheney Institute for Constitutional Rights. And a Donald Rumsfeld "Known Unknown" research library. (Do you think it will be under-staffed and under-supplied?)
Maybe there'll be room on the public grounds for the Iraq Adventure Garden, a pool made of quicksand, oil and blood.
And how about a cakewalk in the museum cafeteria? No pretzels, though; they're a choke hazard.
I could go on and on (and you're welcome to if you like) but if I think about this much more I'll start to remember how much body armor a half billion dollars could have bought, or how many breakfasts for Head Start kids.
I like the sound of “legacy-polishing,” but gold-leafing Bush’s miserable failure of a presidency won’t be easy.