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Instead, we can focus on how come all the fancy Decision Points® Theatre interactivity doesn’t give us a “choice” on the real question: stopping the Florida recount.

 

 Like a very fancy high school.

Back In Black?   

Salute to hardest working man in show business David Weigel, for spotting Michael Reagan’s latest cry for help.

Hopefully having exhausted the old “New Reagan” mine, the Ronald Reagan semi-scion’s increasingly desperate attention seeking has led him to tap new veins of comic gold, riffing off the Bill Clinton/First Black President meme.

Writing for Tiger Beat of the rhythm-less The Conservative Teen , the Toni Morrison of strained analogies digs deep.

Boldly so, considering President Reagan’s colorful past.

Michael Reagan is known for these fanciful histories, having previously analogised Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein.

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.

McNaughton’s Group  

Special thanks to the eagle eyes at Wonkette, who’ve spotted a big one.

Extraordinarily cheezeball artist Jon McNaughton has brought forth a gathering of greats, as the ghosts of presidents past hover around sullen, stand-offish looking Barack Obama, variously annoyed or aghast at his literal TRAMPLING ON THE CONSTITUTION!

McNaughton is the kind of crank who rambles along in incoherent Founderspeak for numbered paragraphs, passive aggressively concluding:

“The information is historical. If it is not familiar to you – Google it.“

Cramming all these figures into the frame seems to have skewed McNaughton’s perspective.  Small but perfectly formed James Madison is so upset at Obama’s boot-heel to our liberties that he’s bent over pleading, but appears to be almost Obama’s height.   The Forgotten Man is a giant seated on a toy town bench. Such is the occasion that Franklin Roosevelt walks.

McNaughton’s painting doesn’t leave much to chance, featuring ominous clouds, flags at half staff, and an accompanying video lush with  piano chords of doom.

 House Proud

A belated salute to the Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott, who July 4th shared with readers his meditations on America and the world’s obsession with replicating homes of the great and the good, or at least George Washington.  

Mount Vernon, soon to host another superfluous “Presidential Library,” holds first place in the nation’s architectural imagination, or lack thereof.  Kennicott spotlights the many sad recreations of the Big House,  and Lydia Mattice Brandt’s research into America’s mysterious practice of making foreigners and school children troop through replicas at half a dozen World’s Fairs and exhibitions.

We Might Be Giants    
Current star practitioner of this architectural ghost walking is Alan Greenberg, whose accomplishments include a toy house Mount Vernon for future Chief Executives with excess family cash, and a “flagship” store for the always strenuously patriotic Tommy Hilfiger.

Ronald Reagan exhibited some of these morbid symptoms, enjoying work at a replica of George Washington’s desk before he was president even of the Screen Actors Guild.

It’s not only the Great House.

       Kentucky proudly hosts a fake Abraham Lincoln boyhood cabin, now replicated on coins.

And an Okinawa businessman’s strange fakery compulsions could only be satisfied with a recreation of Bill Clinton’s boyhood home.

On Okinawa.