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Your Presidential Libraries Never Forget 

The world will little remember reaching for the remote, desperate to squelch George Pataki’s insulting reading of the Gettysburg address on the first 9/11 anniversary.

Some feared the vapid inanity of  2002’s commemorations could never be topped, but presidential libraries are doing their part.

Who Am I & Why Am I Here?  

Having apparently run out of things to say about either their nominal subjects or their periods, today’s presidential libraries seek to present themselves as founts of Everyhistory, places to mark any odd occasion with history slapped on.

And try , if possible, to include motorcycles.

At least four presidential libraries will mark the decade since 9/11, each in their own baffling manner.

The Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library is at least in the same state as one target…but after that the relation gets kind of strained.

They will be displaying a chunk of metal from the World Trade Center wreckage.  

We might have enjoyed a retrospective on our relationship with our gallant Saudi Arabian ally, beginning with FDR’s quiet 1945 interlude with King Saud.

 Bush senior’s Library will also feature World Trade Center metal,

and they’ve rounded up some local rescue workers.

No word if Bandar Bush will show up.

 The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum has subcontracted

to the Boy Scouts, who will be hanging about all day.

And yes, they do have a chunk of the World Trade Center.

The Nixon Library will go all out for the memories. Sixteen tons of World Trade Center steel will arrive in ceremony Monday, and be available for public gawking all week. 

Keeping Up With The Kardashian

Tuesday will feature Angie Kardashian, one of the lesser known Kardashians.   Her claim to fame is post-9/11 firehouse cooking, not self-porning.

Let us pray 9/11 souvenirs don’t become the latest presidential library must have object.  At least until they all get their Berlin Wall chunks squared away.

 

  The Reagan Library will be bursting with 9/11 goodness.  The Library will serve as a start point for Simi Valley’s “Freedom Walk,” Donald Rumsfeld‘s effort to mashup the initially popular Afghanistan war together with Iraq in a delightful Freedom Smoothie.

                                                                                                                 Freedom Handshakes? 

The program will feature a 9/11 emergency worker, and they’ve dug up a prize. Out of all the rescue workers on the scene on 9/11, they’ve chosen the Scientologist.

  His “controversial” church got a reputation at the disaster site of proselytizing and sneaking around barricades, but  New York Fireman John McCole was their man on the inside.  

   

 

With her proven record of cult attraction, did the Scientologists get to Nancy Reagan? 

 The Reagan Library never lets a marketing moment pass, as they demonstrated with their 9/11 commemoration page.

 

 You’ll come to honor the dead,  you’ll stay to purchase souvenir Air Force One replicas.

Family Matters 

In dog that didn’t bark news, we’ve had no sightings of an Obama administration Rodham brother equivalent.

Or a Neil Bush lookalike.

But such is the volume of loose cash sloshing about the world that some of it is still, still available to the dimmest bulb of an out of power family.

When former President George W. Bush celebrates his finest hour this September 11, thoughts will naturally turn to other members of the Bush clan in exile.

Shifty Uncle Prescott has passed, Jeb Bush remains out of reach, brother Martin remains in the obscurity of the DC suburbs*, but good old Neil Bush is still out there, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.  National treasure Ken Silverstein has a great roundup of Neil’s post-Keating hustles on Salon.

Silverstein offers some hope that the arc of history does bend towards justice, or at least shrinking margins for evil. He reports Bush’s compensation for doing not much may be declining over time.

“It’s getting tougher to be a fixer who can’t fix much.“

[For more Neil delights see also here, here, here, and here.]

*For a slightly 911-trutherish tour of  Marvin’s picaresque business career see here.

Who’s Crying Now?  

From his controversial campaign embrace of Reagan nostalgia onward, Barack Obama has set Fantasy Reagan as the standard to be measured against.  But he’s lacked the twinkling whimsy to pull off the big whoppers Reagan could do with half a brain, and the shamelessness of his handlers in putting them across.

But now, light from the East.

Obama was already three up on the Gipper in the coveted killing Qaddafi relatives category, hitting a son and three grandchildren. Reagan had to make to do with his sole Qaddafi hit, the adopted daughter killed when the US bombed Libya in 1986.

Now the rebel conquest of Tripoli threatens even that Reagan accomplishment.  The Irish Times reports from the wreckage that Hana Qaddafi may have never died, and had gone on to a career as a doctor.

The Reagan bomb run was storied in legend and song, featuring daring-do, plucky Maggie Thatcher as Churchill in drag, and the perfidious French.

But now all we may have gotten out of it was the Lockerbie bombing.

My Country, Writer Wrong  

Before they were [accused] felons….

Barry Landau, “America’s Presidential Historian,” remains in a Baltimore jail and a heap of trouble, accused of pinching presidential documents and ephemera from a Maryland archive.

Such trouble that his lawyer is directing attention to Landau’s alleged partner in crime, emphasising that Barry had none of the loot in his possession when arrested.

Barry Often Wrong 

We can all look forward to Landau’s credibility being tested at trial, the credibility of a man associated with McCarthy and Mafia mouthpiece Roy Cohn and  called a liar by a presidential special counsel, who claimed voicemail sniffer Rupert Murdoch inspired him  to write a book.  The veracity of a man who invents numbers and accounts for his “collections,” who this month shaved three years off a Woodrow Wilson visit to Iowa for a piece of CNN holiday fluff when he wasn’t filling space yammering on about flag desecration [against it!].

Barry sees what others can only imagine.

The”Presidential Historian” and dinner plate collector of the stars rushed to inform New York Post readers, and through them the world, that he alone spotted Tricia Nixon, daughter of  disgraced former President Richard Nixon among Macy’s  shoppers one day.  They, or at least Barry, recalled halcyon days of yore when Trish was married at the White House, an event memorialized in an Executive Mansion hallway, according to Barry.

Landau also shared the  good news that President Barack Obama recently placed a wreath at Nixon’s grave, a trick he managed without the White House or any news organ discovering it.

….in that, like Reagan, his apologists will now rush to credit him with something that didn’t happen on his watch.

  “I commend President Obama who has followed the vigilance of President Bush in bringing Bin Laden to justice “

The “Who Got  bin Laden” myth-making has already begun, with Republican House leaders reluctantly adding Obama to the Bush victory parade. 

Osama bin Laden: 

Your Washington Post reluctantly conceded that bin Laden died during Barack Obama’s presidency.     Homeland Security Committee Chair Peter King [Provisional IRA, New York] sees Bush’s empty bluster as the foundation of victory:  “President Bush deserves great credit for putting action behind those words.“And what words they were!  “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them!   The Twitter-sphere is awash in bizarre statements like  “Obama gets to enjoy the feeling of a (prior) cic’s victory.”    Forgotten in the wave of Bush Revisionism are Bush’s frenzied efforts to dot this particular “I” before leaving office.  And Obama’s weekend topping of the Gipper’s record by killing both a child and three of the strongman’s grandchildren.  Reagan only got one.*

*Subject to controversy as of August 2011