The echos of Tim [who?] Pawlenty’s heartfelt tribute to Ulysses S. Grant had barely faded when eager young Republican cubs sprang forth to re-seal Grant’s Tomb.
Small but perfectly formed North Carolina Representative Patrick McHenry has introduced legislation to banish Grant from his perch on the $50 bill, replacing him with a fellow all the kids love, Ronald Reagan.
The circle jerk of history is proven in McHenry’s press release. Why must Grant go? He’s much less popular than Reagan, Historians Say.
Plausible, but which historians? Here we fall down an especially twisted conservative rat hole.
McHenry cites a 2005 survey of historians done for the honest brokers of the Wall Street Journal opinion operation, performed by the law prof author of “Wills, Trusts, and Estates, 7th edition” on behalf of the focus of evil in the modern judiciary, the Federalist Society. The Journal guy involved devotes much of his accompanying article to reassuring the faithful that while George W. Bush rated only average, his big bets might still pay off!
Given the sponsors you won’t be surprised to learn that the undisclosed historians panel was corrected for the “far left tilt” of the academy, stacking equal numbers of liberal and conservative historians.
Who knows. We don’t get to see the list, but the stage dressing screams that the fix is in.
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George W. Bush has shown his sensitive side to gathering of the faithful, while interested observers puzzled over an exciting new Bush mystery:
Where did they hide the papers this time?
The former President repeated claims he’ll stay above the political fray, while saying former President Carter had “made my life miserable.”
The Bush administration alumni gathered in Washington just as yet another old rock turned over. One piece of information gained from the Justice Department investigation of John Yoo’s torture memos was the exciting news that many of Yoo’s emails from the period were unavailable.
Apparently because they were deleted.
My Successor Deserves My Documents 
Washington veterans exchanged quiet smiles, minds drifting back to the Bush administration’s sprint to the exits, little heeding such niceties as complying with federal record keeping laws. Years of litigation later we learned that some 22 millions emails had gone missing, recoverable only at vast expense.
Choire Sicha spoke for the Nation, asking plaintively “How Many Years Will It Take Us To Get John Yoo’s Emails?”
Watch This Space!
Awakened from their slumbers by patriot/seer Glen Beck, conservatives across America rush to join the antic showman in tossing Teddy Roosevelt over the side.
Until now, who knew that TR’s hysterically masculine crackpot vision of a white man’s world had some problems? Evidently not Jonah Goldberg.
Wonkette peers under the hood of Teddy’s utopia:
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Bringing Back Barack 
Driven from the streets of Jakarta, the boy-statue of Barack Obama has found a home at Obama’s childhood school, or as Fox viewers know, his madrassa.
The Awesome Power Of Social Media® mobilized Indonesian citizen or some kind of outrage at public space being used to honor Obama, with motivations ranging from disapproval of him to disapproval of his wars. Despite the latter, American Obama haters joined the fun, although their racist infested site no longer appears on Facebook.
Obama may see the statue on a March visit to Indonesia.
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It was a gathering of the conservative faithful at CPAC this past weekend, and the search for novel political analogies reached strange new heights.
Among the oddities was Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, whose doomed Presidential campaign took its first tentative steps off the cliff by reminding the assembled Neo-Confederates 
of a past glorius Republican office holder, U.S. Grant.
Somehow today’s conservative struggle resembles Grant’s grinding Civil War victories over the South, his scandel infested administration, or his occasional lunges towards protecting blacks and Republicans from the Klan in the South. Which is unclear, but Pawlenty has his own upbeat, crackpot version:
“We’re on the side of limited government. And, like Grant, we fight.“
But perhaps not win. Pawlenty came in fourth in CPAC’s presidential straw poll.
Also up for CPAC recycling, Margeret Thatcher, AKA The Iron Lady. Indiana Representative Mike Pence, straw poll fifth place holder, put America’s striking coal miners and Trotskyist local office holders on notice by evoking everyone’s favorite Churchill in drag. Just wait till that North Sea oil saves our ass!
A Romantic View Of History 
Pence also entertained the crowd with a musty Ronald Reagan yarn, one where Reagan encountered a magic pipe-fitter. This proto Joe The Plumber begged Reagan to save tax cuts for the rich, so guys like him could be hired by them. Pence has trotted out the tale of this wondrous encounter at least twice going back to 2005.
CPAC turned to Glen Beck for insane historical tales with a grain of truth.
Peeing all over John McCain’s myth of a muscular progressive Republican past, Beck rightly called Teddy Roosevelt an interventionist.
But calling Roosevelt a socialist is as insane as labeling Obama one.
Unable to stage signing the “Mount Vernon Statement” at, um, Mount Vernon, massed conservatives held their event instead at the swanky Collingwood Library & Museum, a former dinner theatre venue on property 
once owned by George Washington and now available for wedding rentals.
Mount Vernon wouldn’t let them hold a political event on its grounds, so the free marketeers turned to their weapon of choice, and hired a hall.
Fox did its ungrammatical best to hang onto that fresh Founding Fathers smell:
The New Nation/new grammar enthusiasm got the better of the Statement-os as well. Their classy yellow fake parchmentie web page recalls “selfevident truths.”
Further bizarre historical analogies came in the Statement-os comparison of themselves to the signers of the Sharon Statement, a storied conservative event held at William F. Buckley’s Connecticut estate sixty years ago. What mileage they achieve from Eisenhower era ties to a dead pot-smoking Iraq war opponent is unclear.
No Pillars To Post 
The State of Georgia offers this rib-tickler:
Union soldiers died from friendly fire while capturing Jefferson Davis! 
]]>“An ironic tale from the Civil War is told at Jefferson Davis Memorial Historic Site in Fitzgerald. A month after the war’s end, Confederate President Davis and a few remaining men were camped in south Georgia to continue their fight for the “lost cause.” At dawn, they were surrounded by two independent Union troops who began unknowingly firing at each other. Two Union cavalrymen died in the skirmish and Davis was taken prisoner. .. On Presidents Day, rangers will offer guided tours to all visitors. “
Spirited efforts continue to normalize Confederate President Jefferson Davis and graft him onto real Presidents Day, but now cracker apologists have raised their sights:
they are going after Black History Month.
Rickey Pittman has cranked out two soft-core black/Confederate books, and has managed to get into school Black History Month programs to promote them.
“Jim Limber Davis: A Black Orphan In The Confederate White House” 
is about the literal poster child of Rebel apologists: surely Jefferson Davis couldn’t be all bad if he “adopted” an African American orphan? 
And “Stonewall Jackson’s Black Sunday School” 
seeks to show how dedicated the famed Confederate general was to the spiritual life of the people whose enslavement he fought to preserve.
Past Forgetting, For Kids! 
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Lame rhyming: it’s not just for brown people anymore!
From the frozen wastes of New Hampshire come fresh new voices of reaction-with a beat!
Yes, Dartmouth has yet again spawned new conservatives, but this time the youngsters are lifting their voices in song, turning that rap music into a weapon for good, not just ho/gangster celebratin’.
The hearty stew that is contemporary conservatism is a murky mix, and would-be hipster reactionaries are doing their part to further confusion.
Reagan youth yearns to enjoy somewhat contemporary rap music with all their friends, while reinforcing belief in all that is right and true.
Now they don’t have to choose!
“You can be straight, you were born this way“ 
Thanks to the stern visaged “Young Cons,” today’s youth can turn the former music of the oppressed into hymns of complacency. As we learn from the “Young Cons Anthem” [Actual title!]:
“Three things taught me conservative love: Jesus, Ronald Reagan and Atlas Shrugged“
These mopes haven’t embraced your more lively versions of that rap. Theirs is more of your drone-y slowpoke rap, where you can make out every syllable because their E-Nun-Ci-A-Tion is about the only energy shown.
But their message is perhaps best absorbed in lyric form, ’cause their prose would stunt a generation:
Or, as others have said,
Gipper’s Delight: The Lads Visit “Fox & Friends” on Hooters Day! 
Ford’s Theatre reopened this year after a vast fundraising and re-do, and they are going all out to mark Presidents Day Week:
Ladies & Gentlemen, Mr. Mark Russell! 
Yes, the “comic” songster so lame that even PBS finally dropped him, tickling the ivories once more in Our Nation’s Capital.
Russell was cruelly mocked on The Simpsons “Mr. Lisa Goes To Washington”almost twenty years ago. He was parodied as the entertainment for Lisa’s DC award banquet, Brother Bart groaning throughout.
It was a dead-on parody of Russell’s ghastly tunes 
vaguely referencing politics without being in the slightest political. His own publicists boast that “He began knowing little about politics…”
The Russell case demonstrates perhaps the limits of satire. Long after they’ve been called out by anyone knowing anything, DC’s Unstoppables continue to roam the landscape, dropping triteness bombs.
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