Getting Hoovered

rumsfeld.jpg the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

A dispute with Stanford faculty and students over Donald Rumsfeld appointment as a Hoover Institute Fellow is reminding Southern Methodist University of what may be in store for them when/if President Bush’s Fantastic Freedom Institute opens on campus paired with the prospective Bush Library.

Opponents lack the two/thirds majority needed in the Stanford undergraduate senate to condemn the Rumsfeld slot, but faculty grumbling continues., according to the Dallas Morning News.

hoover-on-trial-for-murder.JPG   The Hoover does what it likes despite nominally being part of Stanford, but at SMU…

“…while it’s unknown exactly what the relationship between the university and library will be, there is general agreement that the library’s policy institute will be more independent than the Hoover Institution.”

The News quotes Southern Methodist Anthropology Professor David Freidel as to what fantastic freedom is all about:

“If it’s entirely independent of us yet part of us,” he said, “the implication is that it can represent us in any way it wants to.”

Even The Liberal New Republic

 

Even the liberal New Republic can get their Father of the New Deal facts wrong. The magazine’s architecture critic stumbled in a recent on-line salute to the fine fellow George Bush has hired to design his Presidential Library with “fantastic freedom institute” annex. Sarah Williams Goldhagen writes that”The first president to be honored with this by now de rigueur monument to posterity and the information glut of this Information Age is, of all the unlikely candidates, Herbert Hoover.”

Hoover served before FDR, but his Presidential Library came from a “You can do that?” moment after Roosevelt started his own Pharaohization in 1939. roosevelt-laying-corner-stone.jpg

Hoover’s didn’t open till 1962. hoover-library-dedication.jpg

Rust Never Sleeps

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Nixon Foundation Executive Director John H. Taylor has issued a stirring call to the faithful, those who might feel a little lost in world gone mad and Nixon Library gone federal.

And yes, Nixon still didn’t do it.

“So newly available documents and tapes weren’t enough for some scholars and reporters as the new Nixon Library prepared to open its doors. They required an act of public expiation and sanctification, namely the smiting of the beast of the old Nixon Library Watergate gallery, that last lonely place where the lingering possibility flickered of a malfunctioning Uher 5000.”

And then it gets weird:

“…the Nixon Library has finally been washed clean – the price President Nixon’s family and friends needed to pay before his Library could finally be admitted to the fraternity honoring all the paragons of high achievement and moral purity represented in the Presidential library system, which starts with Herbert Hoover and goes through Bill Clinton. ”

What’s he got against Hoover?

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