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“Bush was stress-free, akin to being on an exotic vacation, and it was good seeing him unperturbed given that Americans witness his frequent anger and confusion in the tense Washington environment.”

GULF NEWS

Entry Level

The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s “You Too Can Design the Bush Library” contest may be starved for entry’s.

The current issue reminds readers of the February 1 deadline, while seeking to reassure “reluctant” actual architects who they speculate don’t want to be associate with potential nut-ball visitors

The Diamonds & Despots Tour

President Bush’s tour of our many gallant Middle Eastern allies has drawn to a close, with a Hosni Mubarak Sharm El

Sheik grip ‘n grin.

It’s been an orgy of photo-ops and gifts, items that will someday find their home at Bush’s Fantastic Freedom Institute

And if the pattern of at least the last two Presidents repeats, Saudi, UAE and Kuwaiti money will help build Bush’s temple to himself.

That’s My Bush

Legacy Building

“In no way should our initiative be seen as a personality cult.”

It’s always reassuring when Russian politicians begin their pitch that way.

Vlad Putin fans are pulling themselves together, bereft at his looming departure from the Russian Presidency, if not from power. The answer for keeping a polish on his ever shining star? A western import classic, the Presidential Library. If the bill passes, and it’s larded up with Putin allies, Putin, Yeltsin, and their successors will get state funded visitor centers of grandeur to commemorate their fab-ness.

As sponsor Mikhail Starshinov told Reuters, “State leaders are immortalised in one form or another in many civilised countries.”

How Was I to Know?

Portfolio runs an excerpt from John Rosen’s The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, focused on colorful 70s corporate bandit Robert Vesco.

Vesco’s currently doing the last years of a 13 year sentence in Cuba, jailed on murky charges after years of gilded exile in socialism’s southern redoubt.

But once he was somebody, with the SEC investigation of his activities to prove it. Leading to the scene where Vesco’s bag men deliver wads of cash to Richard Nixon’s chief re-election fundraiser Maurice Stans.

“Here were three upright members of the Greatest Generation, one carrying a briefcase stuffed with $200,000 in $100 bills. No one present likely harbored any delusions that the cash was being delivered—anonymously and past the lawful date—because Vesco had such passionate beliefs about détente or wage and price controls.”