Fun Bunch 
Michael Wiseman in The Washington Post asks an interesting question as the Bushies leave Washington: who gets their stuff?
There’s a lot of it.
“In February 2001, the Bush administration began an extraordinary portraiture deployment across all levels and locations of government. It’s time to call those troops home.”
Wiseman’s Post piece focuses on the personality cult photo homage assembled outside her office by Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao. She has accumulated 130 photos in this one area of the sizable Labor Department building. Thirty-nine of them feature Chao solo, twenty more with President Bush and other administration greats, and fourteen Chao-less of Bush solo or with minions.
An Air About Her 
Chao has been there since the beginning, the only Cabinet Secretary to survive the entire Bush era. When she’s not giving dental technicians incurable lung disease Chao is half of a Washington Fun Couple with beloved Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, currently masquerading as the defender of the taxpayer against an Obama economic stimulus and killer of the auto loan.
Now that the Bush people are leaving, what to do with these iconic images of has-been hacks?
“The Bush-bunch icons are public property. I suggest that all of them be auctioned to souvenir hunters. The money raised might be used, in part, to restore the lights in the Roosevelt Memorial or to repair a Metro escalator or two. “
Or perhaps to repay taxpayers for their $14 million dollars spent in part on the Elaine Chao Auditorium at the University of Louisville’s Mitch McConnell Center.
Laying It On With A Trowel 
Our glorious tradition of Presidential Libraries was of course launched by Franklin Roosevelt, who famously parked the first one in his yard, and had himself buried there to complete the pharaoh-fication.
 
The special localness of these little bits o’ greatness scattered over the landscape are celebrated by America’s leading purveyor of thoughtful presidential historian mush, David McCullough:
” it is valuable for anyone trying to understand the life of a particular president should come to the place that produced that human being, where his memory is part of the story of that place.“
Stirring words, except Reagan’s location is an accident of real estate after Stanford, where he had no ties, turned him down. Nixon crawled back to Yorba Linda after numerous rejections elsewhere, and Bush Sr is in College Station for ideological congruity, not any local ties.
The great tradition is coming to its logical end at the FDR Library, where the seventy-five year old structure’s roof leaks, the wiring is shot, and damp threatens the Roosevelt papers. A $17 million fix is requested.
Just why this collection of randomly sited mini-archives must be maintained and expanded into perpetuity even as they are pilfered from within is unclear.
Pearls Without Price  
While the Bush Legacy Project floats fanciful interpretations of the Administrations history as the days draw nigh, in Dallas they are dropping some of the masks.
Recall all that Dallas economic development the George W. Bush Library was to “spark” [when it wasn’t erasing the immortal stain of the Kennedy assassination] in its gritty, big city Dallas locale?
Well, you ain’t gonna see it.
Just in time for the legacy edifice, Dallas has launched a Tax Increment Financing [TIF] district to suck up any money development around the Bush Library might generate for local taxing bodies.
Mr. President has bored you before with this, but pay attention.
TIFs are magic governments. They take a stretch of land, and proclaim that the value of all future development doesn’t get taxed for schools, sewers or police. The money flows instead to the TIF, which spend it on local amenities, which increases the value of the development, but that’s not going to pay taxes either.
The Bush Library will anchor the North end of a “string of urban pearls” along mass transit.
Feel The Future 
The Dallas Business Journal thoughtfully explains how You will benefit, somehow, someday:
“Cities use TIFs to stimulate development by allowing developers in specific areas to reinvest new property tax dollars spurred by the TIF to fund infrastructure improvements in the zone, instead of having the additional dollars go into the city’s general fund. When the TIF lapses, the city benefits from a more valuable tax base.“
As Sage of Prescott Hollow George W. President Bush frequently reminds us, by then we’ll be dead.
All this urban glamour will unfold in an area blighted as “an older, industrial area, circa 1950s,†and in thirty years they can do it all over again.
Exit Laughing   
The hour approaches, when George W. Bush turns into a pumpkin and all his presidential papers are supposed to be whisked to the National Archives.
The New York Times reports much whistling past the graveyard by Archives.
Despite a Bush record of non-cooperation with the Archives, fifty times the Clinton Administration’s electronic document volume, and a breezy Bush slovenliness about preserving email, the Archives told the Times it has “a high level of confidence†it can swallow the beast and cough up the results for future inquiries.
Veteran document troller and national treasure Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive says the National Archives is delusional.
“Their confidence is inexplicableâ€
The Washington Post reported earlier that whatever is to unfold has already started:
“The ingestion of Bush data has just begun,” said Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper, adding that she is unsure how smoothly it has gone.
Back ‘N Flat!     
Long hinted, now we know: it’s back to Dallas for the George W. Bushs! The featureless plains of Texas and it’s sprawl will be graced by both home, ranch and Presidential Library after Bush’s retirement.
Never Call Retreat  
The then former President will join two other Sons of Texas who returned after troubled Washington tenures.
 One shipped back to Texas was Education Secretary Rod Paige, who faced allegations of faking Houston graduation rates before going to Washington, and who spent Department funds on illegal propaganda for “No Child Left Behind.”
 And proud Dallasian Alphonso Jackson served as Housing & Urban Development Secretary until his favoritism and pay for play faux pas brought him low.
