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Hallowed Be Thy Name

Having already made Ronald Reagan the equivalent of  Roman emperor, Republicans may go the next logical step and proclaim him a god.

A resolution proposed for the Republican National Committee Winter Meeting attempts to tie Republican candidates to a series of  ten conditions.  Reagan’s name is evoked five times in his role as prophet, role-model and seer, with pols instructed to agree or be gone.

Parties have a long history of demarcating the in and the out, with mixed outcomes.

Lenin laid down the law in the Communist International with “The Twenty One Conditions.”

  Results were mixed.  

Vanity Plot?               

Anxious to display something, anything which had touched the great man for the Lincoln Bicentennial, in 2007 the Kentucky Historical Society spent $19,000 on a pair of earrings which may, or may not, have belonged to Lincoln’s wife.

The earrings history is sketchy. Basically, it’s a letter from a guy who once owned them, saying he was sure they are the real deal, he just wasn’t sure how.

The scandel has allowed Illinois, Kentucky’s sworn enemy in the Lincoln-sphere, to sneer.

“‘That’s not much of a provenance,” said Thomas Schwartz, director of research at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois…It’s not enough that a collector has a hunch, especially if he can’t even provide the person that he purchased it from.“

We do know that Mary Todd Lincoln was a proven earring wearer.

The earrings may now join Kentucky’s other famously fake Lincoln artifact: the replica birthplace cabin which now graces Kentucky’s entry in the US Mint’s parade of state quarters.

Cabin Fever!   

You’ll Always Remember When You First Heard

Anniversaries not divisible by five never get the respect of their more numerically endowed brethren, but this year’s Kennedy assassination anniversary has had some high-points.

Chronicle Of A Death Foretold  

Your USAToday published a “where-did-it-end-up?” roundup of assassination related objects – planes, cars and oddities.  The items are dispersed to a sprawling collection of government and for-profit museums and collections, the private sector equivalent of the presidential library system – intrepid local hustlers, cranks and visionaries, following their dreams.

From Baylor University’s  Ruby’s slipper to Historic Auto Attractions‘ really creepy artifacts and diorama collection, the stuff is everywhere.

Baylor lost out to SMU on the George W. Bush Library, but they can keep their head up in Kennedy conspiracy theory archives.

Auto Attractions provides an alternative past of a sort – what if Jack Ruby had shot Steve Buscemi rather than Oswald?

        Grave Importance   

Fancy color sketches and models of the George W. Bush Presidential Library have been loosed upon an anxious world, and must be mined for clues.

Like, where will they bury him?

Assuming Bush follows the pharaoh-ic path of FDR, Truman, Ike, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and his father’s plan at College Station, he’ll have to be buried on site. If the “Texas Rose Garden” above is a little too outdoorsy, there is the Freedom Tractor Beam inside.

 

The careful viewer will note a presidential quote on the wall behind the generic assembled white folks.

It’s a line from Bush’s 2004 Republican Convention acceptance speech, in which he claimed we are summoned by a “calling from beyond the stars.“  Here on Earth Bush had begun the year attempting a call to greatness with a vague drumbeat for Mars exploration, then buried the exciting initiative by the time of his State of The Union address.

The convention speech itself was delivered with a spaceport motif. 

The Library grounds are touted as a Bush gift to the nation, or at least SMU, providing “numerous spaces for events and gatherings,” but don’t plan your protest rally just yet.

“… unlike the formal, tree-lined landscape of the main campus, this garden contains hills and draws and winding paths that conceal surveillance cameras and other security equipment.“

      

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.