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Lasting Impressions 

The departing administration’s list of presidential  gifts from foreigners is itself a delight, revealing some gifters’ self images, or at least how they’d like to be seen.

Famed Bush poodle Tony Blair presented the President with a classic dog whistle, a Wedgwood bowl inscribed with the words ‘‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’.’  This was a slogan of the 18th Century British abolitionist movement organized by Christian evangelical heartthrob William Wilberforce, engraved by Wedgwood at the time on bowls. medallions and tchotskies to promote the cause.

It’s an almost too perfect replication of the two men’s publicly presented self image, believing Christians setting out to do right in the world for the benighted swarthies, a reminder of sunlit days when caring whites could run the abolitionist movement before all those colored people got involved.

Bonus Fun Fact:  Wedgwood ended the year filing for bankruptcy.

Won’t You Be Mine? 

No product moving opportunity is missed by the Nixon Library Foundation, whose latest email invites us to associate Richard Nixon and romance, with the sparkling addition of the right’s scariest  harridan.

Love Hurts   

Charm Only Goes So Far 

Further exploration of history’s hole for George W. Bush, with Stanley Fish’s claim Bush’s infectious charm will win in the end disputed by America’s greatest living Warren G. Harding reputationist.

Phillip Payne’s  Dead Last: The Public Memory of Warren G. Harding’s Scandalous Legacy  won’t come out till the last last days of Bush, but Payne is got his licks in before the current President leaves.

“Nostalgic discussions of  the good ol’ days of good ol’ W will surely become discussions of why Katrina wasn’t really Bush’s fault, why preemptive war  worked, why the Freedom Agenda was a noble idea, and so forth and so on.  Otherwise Bush’s ultimate fate is obscurity.”