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Freedom’s Ferment 

James Traub’s New York Times Magazine piece this Sunday on the Bush Library & Freedom Institute is Nostradamus-like in scope, explaining the past even as it for-tells our dark Bushie future.

Traub reviews the failed efforts by Southern Methodist University faculty and others to stop Bush from planting his autonomous institute on the SMU campus and giving the University no say in its direction or governance. The Institute will be a stand alone entity vaguely associated with the Bush Library, but controlled by the Bush Foundation. Other presidential branding opportunities have at least made gestures towards academic sensibilities, but SMU’s President Gerald Turner makes the Bush people sound rather desperate that they could get a hearing in a real academic setting;

“They wanted to make sure that all points of view, including their own point of view, have a chance to be expressed.”

Bush crony Donald Evans says its all about donor relations:

“If I’m going to ask someone to be supportive of this with their generous contribution…I need to able to tell them that I will be fully responsible to them.”

At one point the University community was told that the Bush Institute would be housed in a separate building, but the latest plans show essentially one building. But Bush Foundation President Mark Langdale  describes them invitingly as “jammed together like town houses.”

How will the Bush Institute fill its days?  Traub quotes Bush Administration fixture Elliot “Mr. Kennelworth” Abrams, apparently seasoned by his “controversial tenure in the Reagan administration” enthusing over the “embattled” and “dissident” figures Bush claims to identify with.

  Natan Sharansky is one such em-battler,  but he appears comfortably ensconced in his own institute in Israel.  Another em-battler endlessly mentioned here and elsewhere is Vaclav Havel, who Bush longs to com over and write something, anything.  Why-ever he would leave his comfortable Prague retirement or his own Presidential Library for Dallas is unclear.

“The Bush circle has done so much damage to every institution they’ve touched, it would be naive not to worry about the damage they could do to SMU.”

You Think?    

James Traub is to explore George W. Bush’s Fantastic Freedom Institute to be at Southern Methodist University in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, and National Treasure Greg Mitchell has the disgruntled money quote in a Huffington Post teaser.

Almost* April In de Paris 

One president was shot wearing a suit he tailored, and another was buried in one. Now Georges de Paris feels it’s time for Barack Obama to get shovel ready too.

Ronald Reagan almost died in a de Paris suit, and Gerald Ford,  formerly “our most athletic President” rode his last mile wearing one.

The legendary Washington tailor and renowned hair farmer tells Vanity Fair  Obama is letting down the team wearing casual clothing, and doesn’t much care for his fancy clothes neither.

““The suits President Obama has is not quality.”

A new chapter in Tony Blair’s Bush’s Poodle career is revealed, as de Paris claims the former prime minister ordered up a duplicate of a Bush suit de Paris was making.  Tragically he is silent on the only Bush fashion question to have ever troubled Americans:

    What the hell was that thing on his upper back?  

*March 30,1981

Code Of Silence  

An Obama nominee’s shocking mockery of Ronald Reagan may torpedo his nomination.  Dennis Hayes is up for deputy secretary of Interior, but soldier of the Reagan Revolution John McCain claims to take great offense at some five year old musings   somehow tying Reagan to cowboy mythology.

Hayes wrote of the legendary man of the west,

“a rugged, gun-toting individualist who fiercely guards every man’s right to drill, mine, log, or do whatever he damn well pleases on the land…Like Ronald Reagan before him, President Bush has embraced the Western stereotype to the point of adopting some of its affectations—the boots, brush-clearing, and get-the-government-off-our-backs bravado.”

That’s it, end of mockery.

McCain pronounced himself unhappy, as well he should, being a product of the DC suburbs parachuted into the wilds of Arizona with only native guile and his wife’s money to support him.

For christ’s sake, Hayes is a chemical and utility lobbyist.

Last Subject Of Scoundrels 

Richard Nixon continues to attract the criminal element of the authorial class.

   Conrad Black pumped out his Nixon bio just before going to the slammer for corporate skimming. And now we are to have a return engagement by Jonathan Aitken, author of Nixon: A Life.

The years since he wrote on Nixon have been harsh for Aitken, who thanks to British libel law was jailed for perjury.  The biographer/fan hopes to cash in on the Nixon Centenary Wave in 2013.

Aitken may have a clear field for the anniversary.  If he serves his entire sentence Black will still be in prison when the glorious day arrives.