Offer May Not Apply In Your Area!

The Clinton Administration and it’s fundament were much mocked for their “parsing” of facts. The current administration is more straightforward: they strive to keep facts from intruding on argument altogether.

In service of this noble cause they’ve gotten a federal judge to agree that the White House Office of Administration is not covered by the Freedom Of Information Act. This matters because the OA is at the center of the enduring mystery of the Bush Administration’s missing 5 million emails. Seemingly endless litigation has pried some information on the White House’s sabotage of adequate presidential paper preservation, but if the OA can’t be asked what documents it lost and when it lost them the picture may remain incomplete.

It Ain’t Fitting

Via the abrahamlincolnblog comes word of an Oregon Lincoln statue decapitation, now headless for the 5th time.

Ashland Oregon is the scene for this repeat crime, the latest of a string dating back to the 1950s.

Before They Were Stars

Fortunate son Michael Reagan feels dad is under-appreciated, so he’s off to Berlin to locate a proper setting to mark Ronald Reagan single handedly wrestling communism to the ground.

Michael is holding an event at the Cafe Einstein, despite the famed scientist’s notorious red ties.

It’s not like Ronald Reagan’s connection to Berlin has gone unnoticed – Berlin Wall chunks litter the Reagan landscape.
Washington’s Ronald Reagan Building

kk Dixon Illinois

Reagan Alma Mater Eureka College [one of two there]

Reagan Library Indoors

Reagan Library Outdoors

Reagan Ranch Center, Santa Barbara

Reagan On Wall Slab Aboard USS Ronald Reagan

The Red Phone Diaries

The Reagan Presidential Library has opened yet another theme-park like exhibit to complement it’s Air Force One display, taking groups of 5th and 6th graders back to the magical Reagan Era.

Students will get to play the President and his advisers in the Oval Office, officers in a military command center, and press briefers and the media in the White House Press Room.

Their mission: invade Grenada!

We are constantly told that Presidential Libraries grow more objective over time, as the death grip of the Ex, their family and their staff fades.

The Reagan Library is still very much the other way.

The Executive Director touts the new exhibit’s “unmatched creativity,” and they do take a bold approach to facts. Students will work at a simulated “Command Decision Center” from the USS Ronald Reagan, which while impressive brand loyalty is a total anachronism. The USS Reagan didn’t exist at the time of the invasion.

The Reagan Library’s description of the Grenada buildup leaves out the simultaneous Marine barracks disaster in Beirut, a story Grenada providentially removed from the headlines.

And not by accident. The Library’s John Lehane presents the Press Room mock-up as where “the White House related the scenario to the American public through the press,” which is sort of true. The press was forced to rely on Reagan Administration handouts because the Pentagon banned media from covering the invasion, overturning decades of cooperation.

Karl to Comment?

Amidst the dazzle of Dallas’s Bush Library-To-Be is an element of vindication seeking, that the immortal stain of the Kennedy assassination be lifted from the city.

Change Of Subject

Others aren’t sure a Bush Library will do the trick. The Dallas Observer‘s Jim Schutze points to the multiple investigations underway of Bush Administration’s war conduct, and the plausible result: war crimes indictments.

“I’m not really asking you to take a position one way or the other on whether any of it will stick. I’m just pointing out that if Southern Methodist University goes ahead …then all of this will stick right here…First we get the video of the people…bringing war crimes allegations against Bush and his key aides. Then we cut to Dallas for the reaction shot… Karl Rove, chief warden of the think tank, pooh-poohing war crimes. We are about to become the world capital of war crimes pooh-poohing.”

Leaving Dallas hoping for forgetfulness.

“If your only source of information on all this were the Morning News, you might come away thinking the main question is how valuable Bush will be to local tourism. Better than the Wax Museum? Better than the Kennedy assassination? We earn our tourists the hard way. Soon enough, the News tells its readers, all the quibbles about George Bush’s policies will pass into that bland miasma we never really paid much attention to in the first place—i.e., history.”