Sucking up

A front-page story appeared in today's Dallas Morning News about the Bush presidential library that -- in all likelihood -- will be built just across Central Expressway from my house. The Morning News has already gone on record in an editorial hailing the Bush library as a future turning point for Dallas as an intellectual and scholarly center. Don't laugh -- it could happen. Maybe. LBJ was hardly beloved when his library opened in Austin, and it has proved to be a fat importer of money, events and authors. Not that it exactly "turned Austin around" as a university town, but you get the picture.

For its part, today's lengthy feature never mentions a) the library's estimated half-billion dollar price tag, by far the costliest presidential library in history and b) the fact that much of the money, according to the Daily News will go to building a conservative think tank, which characteristic of this secretive, punitive administration, will be dedicated, not to open scholarly research but to refurbishing Bush's place in history.

What's more, in the Morning News, a little feature sidebar on President Bush's "Key Actions" mentions a number of his more "controversial" accomplishments -- the kinds of things that the think tank is going to have to clean up, nice and shiny. But the sidebar uses such benign-sounding phrases as "protected the U.S. homeland against further terrorist attacks after 9/11," "enlarged the powers of the presidency," "authorized the surveillance of overseas telephone calls of terror suspects" and "established prisons for terror suspects in Europe and Guantanamo Bay."

Somewhere in those phrases are squeezed: Abu Ghraib, illegal renditions, the "cherry picking" of intelligence until our espionage services rebelled, torture, the Padilla case (so cynically and badly handled by the Bush justice department a conservative judge blew up at them), the opening of mail without a warrant, the stonewalling of Congressional inquiries into all of this, the failure to catch Osama bin Laden or any new terrorist cell in America, the abuse of "presidential signing statements" to undercut any law Bush disagrees with and the fact that the overseas telephone surveillance was pretty much wholesale, not targeted at specific suspects. Oh yes, and the cynical ballooning of the federal deficit.

At this rate, I don't see why we'll need that conservative think tank to whitewash the Bush legacy.