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To Equatorial Guinea, where the Dark Continent meets the Deep Blue Sea, and oil floats the ruling family to a higher realm.

A spectacularly corrupt kleptocracy has evolved this West African island and some coast into a tropical gangster parody.

Think Of It As A Name Tag  

President-Till-The-Cows-Come-Home Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has presided for three decades since killing his uncle, the previous dictator, and now the New York Times reports that a swanky bit of Malibu may be forever E.G.

Strongman scion and heir apparent Teodoro Nguema Obiang spends much of his time in a multimillion dollar mansion in this suburb of the stars, despite US laws that nominally bar corrupt foreigners from our shores. 

Equatorial Guinea has been in an expansive mood lately.   The regime recently sprang a mercenary jailed in a murky coup attempt, freeing an unhappy Simon Mann to pursue his claim that Son Of The Iron Lady Mark Thatcher helped the plot.

President Obiang, shown here gathering strength from the martyred Che Guevara,    has friends throughout the world. 

The regime’s website practices a level of delicious shamelessness, posting headlines like  “DEMOCRACY AT ITS PEAK IN EQUATORIAL GUINEA” and leaving them up despite mockery.

  A vast presidential mansion is being built, and even better,  a presidential library! 

Where did this big idea come from?

Equatorial Guinea has had a storied relationship with one American who has promiscuously spread himself over our nation’s Presidential Library universe.

World Beater

Joe L. Allbritton is a cartoonish exaggeration of Washington incestuousness, serving on boards for the Kennedy Center, the Lyndon Johnson, Reagan and George H.W. Bush Presidential Libraries, and a failed effort to bring George W. Bush’s to Baylor University.

Alblbritton financed his service to former greats’ memories through his ownership of Washington’s Riggs Bank, a daisy chain of power ensnaring Russian spies,  Saudi princes, a Bush uncle, General Pinochet and the Obiang family.

For hiding Obiang and Pinochet millions Allbritton lost the bank.  Riggs paid $39 million in US civil and criminal penalties, $8 million in Spain.  Allbritton and his son personally paid one million dollars to Pinochet torture victims.

Cause For Alarm 

A group of academics have petitioned President Obama to end a beloved presidential tradition dating back to Liberal Idol Woodrow Wilson: sending a wreath each year to a Confederate war memorial in Arlington.

 

The legacy of the man who segregated Washington DC lives on in this sacred annual remembrance, only shifted from Jefferson Davis’s birthday to Memorial Day by the first President Bush.

And not just any cracker monument.

“The speeches at its ground-breaking and dedication defended and held up as glorious the Confederacy and the ideas behind it and stated that the monument was to these ideals as well as the dead. It was also intended as a symbol of white nationalism, portrayed in opposition to the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction, and a celebration of the re-establishment of white supremacy in the former slave states by former Confederate soldiers.“

The monument is a relic of lost cause-ism, reading in part:

“The power of numbers and the longest guns cannot destroy principle nor obliterate truth.”

Straw for Last Gaspers to grab hold of:  the distinguished professors whose names are enrolled on the petition to the President include old pal Bill Ayers!

Calling Card

Bush biographer Bill Minutaglio takes to Newsweek’s never too rich and too thin pages to update us on the former president’s goings on, and he appears to have a rather open schedule.    “Bush has always been friendly,” Minutaglio comments, and the Ex is going out of his way to show it.

The local college kid who sold many Bush neighbors “Welcome Home George & Laura” signs found himself besieged by Bush phone calls, and a 14 year-old commanded 90 minutes of Bush’s time for a frank exchange of ideas.

Things are more mixed further from Preston Hollow. Bush got a big welcome when he first returned to Midland as ex-president.  Even a Bush minion was amazed:

“They turned out 30,000 people here,” says his longtime Texas accountant, Bob McCleskey. “And that’s without giving out food and beer.“

But an effort by a hometown state legislator to congratulate Bush on his torture achievements was stopped by

heroic state representative Lon Burman.

Gas Goes South 

Not content with sparking America’s new tea-bagging sensation, CNBC Loser Laureate Rick Santelli takes his angry prophecy to Texas next week, speaking at the George H. W. Bush Library’s storied “Economic Leadership Forum.”

The Bush Library has apparently recovered from Chuck Norris’s stirring “McLane Leadership in Business Award” visit.

A Stretch 

The Houston Press’s Richard Connelly directs our gaze to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, where the Living Legend ex-president prepares to honor one of our nation’s heroes.

Bush is to present the super-swanky “McLane Leadership in Business Award” to the ever rugged Chuck Norris.

Just what contributions  Mr. Norris made to commerce is unclear in the press release, but he has recently floated his possible candidacy for “President of Texas.”

And who needs an excuse to slap up an Invasion USA poster, with the chopper-menaced* Capitol Dome! *Not seen in actual film!