Flip, meet Flop

In an unprecedented move, book/daddy officially recants our position concerning the creation of the Bush Presidential Library at SMU: We are now for it. We were against it because, unlike just about every other commentator on the topic, including the happy Bush-boosters down at the Dallas Morning News' editorial offices, book/daddy will actually have to live near the damned thing. The certain-to-be blight-ish design (whatever it will be), the number of conservative think-tankers book/daddy will inevitably run into buying up all the lobster bisque at the foodstore while loudly defending Bush tax policies: For these reasons alone, book/daddy felt we must make a principled stand agin it. Even if we thought the bloody thing was going to get built anyway. Half a billion dollars, Dallas' Republican loyalty and SMU's hunger for any sort of national limelight is a combination hard to defeat.

But now book/daddy feels it is only right to accept our Change of Mind. We now support the Bush Presidential Library wholeheartedy.

Take heart, dear reader, let us explain. This monumental change came about only because of recent events. First, the voters of Highland Park agreed to sell to SMU a tiny strip of park land near the proposed site, the last parcel SMU needed for Total Domination of the Area. It's revealing to witness how much more foresight and planning and strong-arming-the-will-of-the-people has gone into this than, say, Bush's Iraq invasion. Conclusion: Next war, we let SMU fight it.

But this means that Highland Parkers, normally devout NIMBY folk, seem to have no idea what traffic and parking are going to be like with a presidential library and think thank-propaganda facility-memory hole being built on a residential street (Mockingbird) that frequently is so small it has no left turn lane.

So book/daddy figures The Idiots Deserve It.

Secondly, in light of the recent revelation that the Bush administration is such a twistedly secretive, guilt-ridden, cockamamie outfit that late one night, Alberto Gonzalez tried to get a drugged, hospitalized John Ashcroft to sign off on a surveillance program he'd already condemned as illegal, book/daddy feels any Bush presidential library will be a resource for professional historians and journalists for decades. It'll be a major make-work project for research clerks: uncovering what will certainly be ever more tales of scandal, law-breaking and incompetence.

And who says trickle-down economics don't work?