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.
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:
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.
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.
The Nixon Foundation kicks off the mad Fathers Day rush with the “perfect” gift for the rage bear you love: Dick “Dick” Morris’s “Take Back America.” Hours from now Morris himself takes the stage at the Nixon Library, and as of yesterday tickets were still available!
Its a return engagement with History for Morris, who makes the Nixon a regular stop on his book flogging excursions. The cousin of former Nancy Reagan walker Roy Cohn is currently pushing one of three titles he’s managed to get out of the still somewhat fresh Obama administration, seamlessly moving to a new host from his Clinton period as a “bird that lives by eating ticks off the rhino’s back.”
MTH Electric Trains has launched a series of HO model trains commemorating an obscure tribute to former President H.W. Bush.
In 2005 the Union Pacific Railroad appears to have had time and rolling stock on its hands, so the company painted up one of their engines to vaguely resemble Air Force One’s color scheme, and slapped Bush’s name on it. It served as the highpoint of a railroad exhibit mounted by Bush’s Presidential Library, with as little apparent connection to his presidency as the Clinton Library’s ill-fated “Art of the Chopper” fiasco.
Why the Union Pacific’s interest in Bush family sucking up? UP CEO Richard K. Davidson served on a Homeland Security infrastructure advisory board, presumably working to assure that security didn’t get in the way of tons of toxins riding the rails. He served the Bushes in other ways as well, bundling for Junior and receiving a Kennedy Center board post.
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