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……although in practice the Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation likes to break little children’s hearts.

The cool kids will also be hanging this Nixonian wisdom on the tree.  

Oh, Don’t Get Up

A monument to Confederate denial is rising again in Biloxi Mississippi, with 90% of the cost paid by federal and state taxpayers.

Cracker bitter-enders have rebuilt Beauvoir, Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s home destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and are now working on the accompanying “presidential library,” completely destroyed by the storm.

Things To Come: Enough Pillars? 

The complex is run by the Mississippi branch of the Sons of Confederate War Veterans.  The Sons are a coven of cranks determined to put across their claim that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, which has taken them into the nether worlds of  Lost Cause-ist racists, Black Confederate fetishists, and “heritage” activists who enjoy presenting creepy readings of history with much winking and nudging

“We note with interest the revelation that Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has slave owners in his ancestry. This news demonstrates an interesting irony with respect to contemporary multi-cultural American politics...For candidate Obama, the news is perhaps more complex since his African roots may link him to African tribes that traded their brothers and sisters into slavery.“

  Obtuse Apologists

When Bugs Cry   

Indonesians of all ages turn out to see a splendid new statue commemorating Barack Obama’s brief childhood sojourn in the capitol Jakarta.
The BBC has locals hero worshiping Barack In Bronze, but the Jakarta Globe talked to a less happy resident.

Raditya Ayu speaks for youth:

“I think people should make a statue of someone if that person has done something for the people. And I don’t think Obama has done anything for Indonesia. …I think they should have erected a statue of SBY [Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono] here, or even a statue of Michael Jackson. If you travel to a place where there is no TV, I’m sure you will find that people will still know him [Jackson]. He is really great.”

Pre-Presidential knees in representational art have proud precedence of course in the Michigan Boy Scouts stirring tribute to local Eagle Gerry Ford.

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!