Friday In A Hall With George             

Former President Bill Clinton’s joint appearance with his despised [ if not quite as much as before] successor has not gone unnoticed.

Bill and George Show helps rehabilitate Bush

And:

Bill Clinton: A Disgraceful George W Bush Enabler

A thoughtful George W. Bush once said his successor “deserves my silence.” Would that his predecessor felt the same.

Turning The Page, Civil War Edition

                   “The day after, the President’s wreath lies in a heap to the side of the Confederate monument.”      

The organizer of an historians’ petition asking President Obama to stop coddling racist traitors and their defenders offers an after-action report: it’s sort of a step forward, two steps back.

James W. Loewen’s petition challenged Obama to kill off a beloved tradition dating back to Woodrow Wilson’s crypto-confederate administration: the annual dispatch of a wreath to Arlington Cemetery’s Confederate War Memorial.

Obama fudged, continuing to honor a straightforward defense of the Southern Cause which denies it had anything to do with slavery, but now yoking it with Washington’s African American Civil War Memorial. The President seems to have lifted the idea from a Washington Post op/ed by University of Pittsburgh art historian Kirk Savage.

The classic role of the Washington Post op/ed pages is identified by Loewen: thoughtfully dismissing and refuting arguments that have never appeared in the paper.

“The Post never did a story about our petition but did print Savage’s op-ed opposing it. “

Loewen explains why two wreathes are not better than none:

“Why.. should the President privilege this monument over every single monument to United States troops in the Civil War?…Unlike his predecessors from Wilson to W, Obama eventually followed Savage’s idea and sent two wreaths, one to the Confederate monument, one to the African American monument.  Doing so was certainly a significant advance over former practice.  However, dual wreaths implicitly equate service for the Union and service against it.  They also implicitly equate war fought to maintain and extend slavery with war eventually fought (admittedly, not at first) to end slavery.  Surely both sides are not of equal moral value. “

INTRODUCTION TO THE ROTUNDA

      When you walk into the Presidential Museum and Leadership Library, the first thing you should see is the rotunda and what is exhibited there.

Odessa Texas’s Presidential Museum threatens to close July 1, despite being on track to attract some 3,650 visitors this year. They have somehow managed to survive for 45 years, given a boost when the semi-local Bushs stumbled to the top.

The museum is an exciting confection of early Bush    home replication, the vaguely presidentialy related, and misinformation.

       “We have some very rare, interesting items for our visitors to see. An example is the registration desk used by President Eisenhower when he was commander of the European forces during WWII. The museum acquired this piece in the 1960’s and it serves to illustrate the unique collection we have, it is not all about buttons and posters.“

The museum’s web page is a melange of odd choices and factual errors.  Their timeline for the 1860s and 1870s finds no space to mention either Lincoln’s election or assassination, but the Chicago Fire gets a mention.

Prize oddity comes when they sound the alarm in the 20th Century:
AREA 7:
DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II

AMERICAN SOCIALISM: WHAT HAPPENED?

  “Not satisfied with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and its initial work/relief programs, left-wing politicians Louisiana’s Huey Long and California’s Father Coughlin advocated radical changes to the American system-tax the rich to provide welfare for the poor.”

What ever are they saying here?

  Long is usually viewed as a populist and/or fascist, rarely as a man of the left.

 Father Coughlin was a Detroit based fascist, although the Townsend Movement for old people’s pensions started in California.

Richard Nixon: His Shameful New Roll

Remember when Barack Obama shocked America,  demeaning his high office-to-be by producing a President-Elect logo which traduced the sacred presidential seal?

The feigned outrage was briefly energetic, and then the circus moved on.

Let’s all brace ourselves for new outbursts, as the Nixon Library Foundation has found an exciting new use for the emblem.

Anthony Clark’s dogged explorations of  presidential libraries’ seamy underbellies are documented on his prezlibs blog. Clark reports the Nixon Library Foundation announced White House seal toilet paper, then apparently thought better of it.

” I’d love to link directly to it, but sometime in the last five days the product was removed from the Nixon Foundation’s web site. Here is where the item in question used to appear on the Nixon Library online store. You’ll notice that the main product area is blank.“

We Choose To Sell Out       

Further East, even in whoring for commerce the Kennedy Library as always out-swanks Nixon, signing up the late president to flog watches.

    Hey Sailor!           

Homophobe Poster Girl and Fox News Channel Fake Blonde Of Tomorrow Carrie Prejean is to join Ronald Reagan scion Michael Reagan in solidifying the USS Ronald Reagan’s place in right-wing imagery.

The family-friendly duo are to visit the floating icon, where Prejean will no doubt feel at ease thanks to the US military’s abhorrence of “opposite marriage.”