Where Did The Time Go? 
Part of the entertainment value of thumb-suckers musing over the Bush Administration’s “Legacy” is who asks the questions. It’s our old friends and perpetual whipping boys, The Media!
A part of society which for the most part went unquestioningly into battle in Iraq, and which let Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford go to their graves as demigods, is in charge of the searching questions in the last months.
And don’t think Bush’s people aren’t watching. Dick Cheney’s Lincoln/Truman lonely visionary talking points have been consistent over time, with Gerald Ford thrown in on occasion. The most recent example came in a follow up to his “So?” interview dismissing popular opinion over the war. Cheney claims that nice things said during Ford’s funeral week justify the Nixon pardon, which also means Iraq will look great in three decades.
“…he demonstrated, I think, great courage and great foresight, and the country was better off for what Jerry Ford did that day. And 30 years later, everybody recognized it…And I have the same strong conviction the issues we’re dealing with today — the global war on terror, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq — that all of the tough calls the president has had to make, that 30 years from now it will be clear that he made the right decisions, and that the effort we mounted was the right one, and that if we had listened to the polls, we would have gotten it wrong.”
Destiny’s Darlings 
Dallas is only beginning to come to a reckoning on the true costs of the George W. Bush Presidential Library.
The Dallas Morning News brings us a roll-call of soon-to-be dead retail, doomed when the Park Plaza Shopping Center is flattened to make room for Bush and the world of swank he brings to Southern Methodist University.
A culinary landmark of sorts will go with the closure of La Madeleine’s original location, filling America’s need for vaguely, plausibly “hearty” French food since 1982. Another landmark under threat is Pokey O’s 
cookie/ice-cream parlour, whose web site holds out hope of a franchise near you, someday.
Another tenant facing eviction is the Dallas Flower Mart. 
Now we may never know what the place looked like.
Be sure to send their “Greater Glory” 
arrangement to those about to die that the Bush Library might live.
Game Face 
Yet another holiday is wholly incorporated into the universal White House calendar.
The Clinton Library glommed onto the White House Easter Egg Roll, but holding it’s event a week earlier.
Giving us the disturbing image of Presidential Heads on Sticks.
But Clinton is merely following the proud tradition of other past Presidents who can’t let go of that
South Lawn feeling. 
In Crawford a “Western White House Easter Egg Roll” 
appropriating the event name appears to be a Bush fan effort, gathering tough Texans indoors this year and last.
Today’s actual event at the White House featured, as always in recent years. the most pointless of a pointless category:
Brace Yourself for Disappointment, Lad 
Canadian pol Bob “He Too Has Known Disappointment”Rae takes us back to our Nation’s Capitol in the fifties. Dick Cheney’s Fortress of Solitude at the Naval Observatory was decades away, and Vice Presidents walked amongst us.
Or at least resided. Rae says he served as Nixon’s paperboy, and his Christmas tip amounted to ten shiny pennies.
Ready [Or Not] 
Excited panting about missile defense, Star Wars, or for true believers “President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative,” will likely climax today, the 25th anniversary of Reagan’s speech unveiling the concept. 
The breathing is already labored in the wake of the February US shoot-down of a falling spy satellite over the Pacific.
Investors Business Daily whipped itself into a frenzy over the recent Dick Cheney speech teeing off Hillary Clinton’s 3AM-Your-Children-May-Die commercial. 
The King of Mirthless Laughter charmed us all with his Darth Vader self depreciation, and said wistfully:
” the best tool we can leave to a future commander in chief is a weapon of defense to blow that missile out of the sky.”
In the Reagan manner, IBD took that dream, sprinkled it with pixie dust, and pronounced deal done!
“We don’t know who might pick up that 3 a.m. phone call, but 25 years ago Ronald Reagan made sure that if it’s about an incoming ballistic missile, the order will be: “Shoot it down.”..Today we can…Last month, the Aegis missile cruiser USS Lake Erie succeeded in shooting down a dying U.S. spy satellite, the National Reconnaissance Office’s NROL-21 Radarsat, before it could strike the earth with its deadly hydrazine fuel tank nearly full. It could just as easily shoot down an incoming nuclear warhead… thanks to Reagan, the next president will be able to give the order, in Cheney’s words, to “blow that missile out of the sky.” Happy anniversary, Ronnie.”
In the February shoot-down the actual “risk” posed by the falling satellite was overstated, leading many to conclude something else was going on. Critics pointed to “…the near impossibility that the hydrazine tank would survive the 50 g-forces acting on it during reentry, putting the probability of killing someone on Earth below 0.01 percent–NASA’s baseline standard. In the absence of a credible rationale, suspicions of ulterior motives abound. Mainly, many believe that the shoot-down was a disguised demonstration of the U.S. missile defense system’s ASAT capability.”
The shoot-down didn’t tell us much about hitting missiles, but may show how we can take war to space.
“…taking out a crippled satellite and destroying an attacking ballistic missile are not the same thing. Most importantly, the satellite’s trajectory was known in great detail and it could not maneuver under its own power. That’s not the case for enemy ballistic missiles, which have unknown trajectories for large portions of their flights …[and] are likely to be able to maneuver themselves midcourse and release decoys to confuse the missile-defense interceptors. … Navy personnel were able to choose the location and timing of the intercept.. The satellite was also several times larger than a ballistic missile would have been and was therefore easier to see”
Let’s have Reagan Legacy Casper Weinberger Jr. bring us back to magic time:
“It took that great visionary, the true man with the white horse, that symbol of Twentieth Century strength and goodness, the ultimate cowboy of the Lord, Ronald Reagan, to bring it down from the heavens for us and fight right up to his death to make it a reality.”
Hi-Yo, Silver! 
