Remembering history the way they wished it had been
Not On Our Watch! 
Defying the Washington Consensus, a majority of Americans favor investigation of alleged Bush Administration crimes.
Cuddly recollections of Gerald “Decent Man” Ford notwithstanding.
  Room For No View
 
Expectant neighbors of the exciting Bush/SMU-Library-To-Be are thrilled to learn that they’ll have a parking lot smack up against their houses, north across SMU Boulevard from the Library proper.
Responding to their outcries, George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation President Mark Langdale pledged to remain noncommittal:
 “We want to be responsive to their concerns to the extent that we can.’’Â
Fidel Makes A Stop, 1959Â 
One Nation, Duel Exhaust   
American’s strange compulsion to man-up presidents by linking them to motorcycles opens an exciting new chapter in Springfield, where somehow it was felt appropriate to display an Abraham Lincoln Harley Davidson.
This year has already seen the now sadly closed Art of The Chopper exhibit at the Clinton Library.
George W. Bush posed on a motorcycle for 
 the 2004 campaign,
for the traditional 
Harley factory tour,
and in Indonesia for some reason. 
Bush invited the Rolling Thunder cavalcade to the 
 White House and proudly donned the leather vest, joining their crusade to save America’s somehow still missing POWs through, um, riding motorcycles. 
But don’t worry, it’s not all choppers and babes.
Lest we lose this potential presidential teaching moment, the 2004 Bush bike features the Preamble to the Constitution on the tank, and the Lincoln bike features “replica shackles ‘representing the issue of slavery’).”
 Fun, Travel & Adventure 
Perhaps it’s the rum, or the heat of the tropics, but a New York Times travel writer presents a highly fanciful version of Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Grenada invasion in Sunday’s Travel section.
It’s only a few words in a piece largely devoted to current and future tourism facilities, but Ned Martel paints an image that has nothing to do with the invasion’s reality. Like the Reagan Administration, he makes it up.
“In 1983, American satellites peered down on Point Salines, the southwest corner of Grenada, and detected a newly paved lane toward the sea, plus some nearby armaments and fuel tanks. Cubans had arrived on the island, abetting some coup plotters who captured and then executed the prime minister, and the Reagan administration realized they were watching a hostile military base under construction, some 1,500 miles southeast of Miami. Point Salines was seen as a tiny pinprick in the American sphere of influence.”
Golly! 
Despite the would-be Missile Crisis imagery, the “newly paved lane” was an airport being openly constructed to boost tourism, the function it serves today.
“[N]earby armaments and fuel tanks”
– perhaps, but there were no military facilities at the airport site.
“Cubans had arrived on the island…”
– they had been there, openly, for years.
“…abetting some coup plotters who captured and then executed the prime minister.”
-Â Cuba denounced the overthrow and killing of Grenada’s revolutionary Prime Minister Maurice Bishop by left-wing members of Bishop’s government.
“the Reagan administration realized they were watching a hostile military base under construction, some 1,500 miles southeast of Miami. Point Salines was seen as a tiny pinprick in the American sphere of influence.”
– See above.
Martel misses a usual touch stone, the claim that arms for the red hordes of Central America were stockpiled on the island, a charge that lost some of its punch when people realized
“Grenada is three times further from the Central American isthmus than is Cuba itself “
This Reagan feel-good moment has become central to the Reagan image empire as Afghanistan doesn’t quite work out, celebrated in a recently opened Reagan Library children’s exhibit where the kids can experience an Urgent Fury all their own.
The beaches are nice.
