Remember, Remember The Eleventh Of September 
The George W. Bush Presidential Library has no building yet, but in our up to the minute virtual world they’ve begun filling the Internets with thoughtful reminders of the glorious Bush Era.
The Library website has an exciting 9-11 look-back slide-show, 
  featuring our hero on the phone,
videoconferencing, 
and 
 staring urgently.
All of our old friends are there:
Tony Blair,
   Hamid Karzai,
even good old Pervez Musharraf. 
And never forget: we invaded for the children! 
I’d forgotten former New York Governor 
  George Pataki was with Bush on the rubble mound
in NYPD drag, anticipating the butch look 
Bush would sport the next seven years.
 Starr Turn Over 
Thomas Starr King is credited with keeping the Golden State loyal to the Union during the Civil War.
A statue expelled from the United States Capitol by Reagan cultists has come home to California.
Thomas Starr King mobilized Californians in the Civil War, squashing secessionist moves in Southern California. His statue graced the halls of Congress for decades, until an especially sleazy Congressman spotted opportunity.
Each state gets two Capitol statues, and there has not been a lot of turnover. But Congress amended the rules in 2003, allowing states to change out existing statues for other local greats.
By some coincidence, the only flips so far have brought us Eisenhower, Ford and Reagan.
Hey Look! It’s Folks In 19th Century Garb!  
California has now dedicated Reagan’s victim in a Sacramento ceremony marred by the now apparently mandatory presence of reenactors.
Better would have been a tableau featuring Representative Ken Calvert, sponsor of the Reagan insertion. Calvert’s colorful past includes police finding him in his car in a pants down situation, Laffer Curve exposed, with a woman not his wife.
Ken Calvert & His Prey 
Lights Out, Nobody Home 
 America was awash with InfectiousOptimism®, as an avuncular Ronald Reagan rolled towards 1984’s crushing of Walter Mondale. Reagan was campaigning in Hammonton New Jersey, when he felt a song coming on…
“America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts…It rests in a message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen.“
 Bored In The USA 
It was the start of a classic GOP trope*, rope in the youngsters by referencing that rock music. It was also the beginning of musicians asking the Republicans to please stop.
Reagan labored under the misconception that Springsteen shared his cornball vision, and even better, cultural seer and future enemy of denim-clad youth George Will was the fount of this error.
 Hammonton was apparently so thrilled with Reagan’s visit the town ignored the event’s fallout, and plunked down a monument to the legendary day.
The years have not been kind to the stone.
 A recent visitor writes:
“When I visited this late afternoon, the landscape was kind of dull and the light in front of the rock was broken and off its mount. I found a blog where citizens are debating whether it should be repaired and if so where would the money come from.“
*Attempted again in the 2008 campaign, and for Springsteen, twenty-five years on some of the faithful continue tirelessly beating the same horse.
                               
Now Paperless To Serve You Better! 
Faced with demands not to destroy White House emails and account for several million which had gone missing, the Bush Administration ran out the clock. The Bush White House variously claimed there wasn’t a problem, to be working on the problem, and unsure that there was a problem.
Then they all turned into pumpkins and scurried out of town along with the Archivist of the United States, leaving the National Archives and Obama Administration to clean up the mess.
We now learn that some 22 million missing emails have been found, with prospects of more in the woods. But whatever is now found goes into the catacombs of Archives’ Presidential Library system, with all the slow delights that promises. And leaving Bush free to roam about presenting sunny memories unsullied by actual facts.
The Washington Post turns for missing papers perspective to “Scott Stanzel, a former Bush White House spokesman”
Scotty is just so weary of the whole thing, and blames litigators the Committee for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington:
“CREW ‘has consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard [information technology] issues. Their misleading statements about our work demonstrates their continued anti-Bush agenda, nearly a year after a new president was sworn in.“
Bias perhaps demonstrated by being not impressed with Scotty’s own role in the saga, offering vague assurances and misdirection until it became someone else’s problem.
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 
  featuring our hero on the phone,
 staring urgently.
Tony Blair,
   Hamid Karzai,
  George Pataki was with Bush on the rubble mound