Invisible Man 
The timeless aura of Plain Speakin’ & Brisk Walking Harry Truman claims another victim.
The 2008 campaign has already featured John Mccain wistfully recalling halcyon days when Truman strolled the capitol, accompanied by a single Secret Service agent.
Barack Obama has topped that on a visit to the Independence shrine, imagining Truman did it with no security.
“The thing that I envy most about Truman was that when he was in the White House, he could go out and take a walk. He could put on that fedora and take a stroll, without someone following himâ€
Obama had better watch his back. While he hit the Truman Memorial Building, and Truman’s home, Obama skipped the Truman Library, making the Library Board Chairman all huffy.
Trumanesque or Trumanish? 
Get Me Central 
Thrilling new tapes from the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library are released, showing his intense identification with Israel.
All well and good, but tales of American presidents and the plucky Jewish State are beginning to get mushy. We’ve had Harry Truman’s recognition of Israel commemorated, a hideous Kennedy memorial defaces the Jerusalem 
landscape, and Johnson’s Jewish ties are being extended back to his first term in Congress.
With some unfortunate photo placement.
The effect of all this is to extend the current US role as Israeli’s godfather back in time, burying the whole period when France provided nuclear technology and most of their conventional weapons, and of Czechoslovakia’s arms during the War of Independence.
The anachronistic centrality we are seeing starts is beginning to resemble the hemp cultists 
counting past presidents who grew the crop.
Honor Roll 
Brussels journall takes the time to go where the streets have no name, or at least not ones it approves of. Thanks to the ceaseless proliferation of web-based tools they offer what can only be hoped is the definitive survey of
Belgian Streets Named after US Presidents
Road-map to the Stars 
Why-ever they might feel this way is unaddressed, although Donald Rumsfeld‘s thoughtful intervention overturning Belgium’s war crimes law recently can’t have helped.
Witness for the Prosecution 
The impetuous youth of Long Island’s Ward Melville High School are taking Harry Truman to trial, charged with crimes against humanity for the Hiroshima bombing.
Joseph Stalin is among the witnesses summoned from beyond to make the case against Ol’ Harry.
The defense bizarrely offers intimidating the Russians as part of Truman’s bomb drop alibi, usually a point offered by Truman critics. [Or un-slick Truman apologists like this Enola Gay pilot-related site.]
Crime Seen 
Where Did The Time Go? 
Part of the entertainment value of thumb-suckers musing over the Bush Administration’s “Legacy” is who asks the questions. It’s our old friends and perpetual whipping boys, The Media!
A part of society which for the most part went unquestioningly into battle in Iraq, and which let Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford go to their graves as demigods, is in charge of the searching questions in the last months.
And don’t think Bush’s people aren’t watching. Dick Cheney’s Lincoln/Truman lonely visionary talking points have been consistent over time, with Gerald Ford thrown in on occasion. The most recent example came in a follow up to his “So?” interview dismissing popular opinion over the war. Cheney claims that nice things said during Ford’s funeral week justify the Nixon pardon, which also means Iraq will look great in three decades.
“…he demonstrated, I think, great courage and great foresight, and the country was better off for what Jerry Ford did that day. And 30 years later, everybody recognized it…And I have the same strong conviction the issues we’re dealing with today — the global war on terror, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq — that all of the tough calls the president has had to make, that 30 years from now it will be clear that he made the right decisions, and that the effort we mounted was the right one, and that if we had listened to the polls, we would have gotten it wrong.”
Destiny’s Darlings 
