Administration -- A Library Worthy Of The Bush Legacy

February 27, 2008

by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, and Benjamin Armbruster

ADMINISTRATION

A Library Worthy Of The Bush Legacy

In Nov. 2006, President Bush launched "an eye-popping, half-billion-dollar drive" to raise funds for his presidential library. That campaign finally paid off last week when officials at Southern Methodist University (SMU) announced that the Dallas-based university will be home to Bush's $200 million library -- despite protests from faculty, administrators, and staff. The library facility will also contain an institute that will sponsor programs designed to "promote the vision of the president" and "celebrate" Bush's presidency. University of Louisville Professor Benjamin Hufbauer, an art historian who has studied presidential libraries, said the model agreed to at SMU was "totally different" from the approaches at other universities with presidential libraries. The institute that is part of the complex "has a partisan agenda -- that's very significant," he said, adding, "academics everywhere should be concerned about this" because it "goes against the idea of dispassionate inquiry." Dr. Susanne Johnson, an associate professor at SMU, explained, "The whole purpose of a library is for unfettered, unbiased, critically reflective academic inquiry into the administration of a given presidency. It's not to cheer-lead for a particular president. It's not to be groupies."

BUSH'S THINK TANK: When asked about his post-presidency plans in January 2006, Bush said, "I'd like to leave behind a legacy -- or a think tank, a place for people to talk about freedom and liberty and the [Alexis] DeTocqueville model of what DeTocqueville saw in America." (Ironically, the French philosopher DeTocqueville wrote, "I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.") A Bush insider confessed that the mission of the institute will be to hire conservative scholars and "give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President's policies." Bush's institute has rankled the university's faculty because it will be independent of SMU's academic governance. In the run-up to the formal agreement between SMU and the Bush foundation, critics "suggested making the institute completely separate from SMU or bringing it under SMU's control." The final agreement "does neither," however, because "Bush's representatives had made clear to SMU" that the library and the institute were "to be a package."

THE MARK OF ROVE: Compounding fears that the institute will trade academic scholarship for partisan praise of Bush, Mark Langdale -- president of the Bush library foundation -- said recently that former Bush political advisor Karl Rove is advising the project in "an informal capacity." Langdale said Rove is "a critical resource about what happened in the administration, and he has a lot of good ideas about programming and positioning." Rove has already set out on a course to whitewash Bush's legacy, arguing in recent months that it was Congress -- not the President -- who rushed into the Iraq war. Many aspects of the "programming and positioning" that the Bush library will feature have raised serious concerns. For one, the institute has made an arrangement with SMU to ensure that the academic faculty will not serve as a counterbalance against the partisan mission of the library. Additionally, SMU's sole representative on the institute's board will be solely chosen by Bush's foundation. Dr. Johnson said that clause "abdicates all power" to the Bush foundation, allowing it to "cherry-pick representatives from SMU to fit their ideological purposes" while reducing faculty representation "to something that's meaningless."

A CENSORED LIBRARY: An executive order Bush signed in 2001, "which gives presidents and their families more control over presidential papers, could result in material being censored" from the library. The order gives Bush -- as well as former presidents -- "the right to veto requests to open any presidential records" and to take "an indefinite amount of time to ponder any requests." One historian called Bush's order a "disaster for history." Referring to the executive order, Rev. William McElvaney -- professor emeritus at SMU's theology school -- asked, "What self-respecting university would accept a censored library?" "From the very get-go its purpose is to rationalize and promote programs and policies of a certain presidency rather than do a strictly analytical, critical assessment of it," Dr. Johnson said. "It's going to create an ethos where the students who are more progressive in terms of religion and politics will feel even further silenced and invisible than they already feel." She added, "We all know very well that this institute -- which has no lines of accountability to the faculty -- is about getting some scholars lined up to put window dressing on the presidency of George Bush.

ETHICS -- 60 MINUTES FEATURE PROMPTS SIEGELMAN LAWYERS TO CALL FOR SPECIAL PROSECUTOR: Last Sunday, CBS News's 60 Minutes ran an expose on the Bush administration's political persecution of Alabama's incarcerated former Democratic governor Don Siegelman, linking former Bush adviser Karl Rove to the case. In the 60 Minutes story, a key government witness involved in sending Siegelman to jail, former aide Nick Bailey, revealed that he was told to write out his testimony in order to "get his story straight." Vince Kilborn, a lawyer for the former Democratic governor, "said the defense was never told" that Bailey was instructed to write out his written testimony and has called on the Justice Department for a special prosecutor to investigate. Bailey said "prosecutors met with him about 70 times" and "they had him regularly write out his testimony because they were frustrated with his recollection of events." Kilborn said that the "written notes, if they existed, could have damaged the credibility of Bailey's story, but no such notes were turned over to the defense, as would have been required by law."

ADMINISTRATION -- EFFORTS TO RECOVER MISSING WHITE HOUSE E-MAILS HALTED: House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) announced yesterday that the Republican National Committee (RNC) had informed his committee that "it has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House e-mails from backup tapes containing past RNC e-mail records." The announcement contradicts the RNC's previous stance "that it was attempting to restore e-mails from 2001 to 2003, when the RNC had a policy of purging all e-mails, including those to and from White House officials, after 30 days." The Bush administration has acknowledged that many White House officials, including Karl Rove, used RNC e-mail accounts to conduct government business, overlooking rules that such e-mails be sent though official government channels only. A former White House technology manager testified yesterday that the Bush administration's e-mail system "was primitive and the risk that data would be lost was high," even though two federal laws require electronic messages to be preserved. During the hearing, Waxman said that the result of the missing e-mails is "a potentially enormous gap in the historical record" and that "we may never know what [Rove] wrote about the build-up to the Iraq war."

ENERGY -- RECORD OIL PRICES HELP FUEL ECONOMIC DOWNTURN: Yesterday, crude oil reached $102 a barrel, a record high, as trading was spurred by "jitters before OPEC's crude production meeting next week." Those high prices are reaching consumers at the pump, where gasoline "could approach $4 a gallon by spring." "The effect of high oil prices today could be the difference between having a recession and not having a recession," said Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff. Americans face skyrocketing prices at the pump even as oil companies such as ExxonMobil reaped record profits last year. The House is expected to vote on a renewable tax package -- perhaps as early as today -- that would "eliminate roughly $18 billion" in tax breaks for Big Oil "and use the savings to fund tax credits and other incentives for renewable energy." In December, conservatives stripped a similar tax package from the 2007 energy bill after Bush threatened a veto.

"After promising last year to search its computers for tens of thousands of e-mails sent by White House officials," the Republican National Committee said "it no longer plans to retrieve the communications by restoring computer backup tapes." The decision makes it more likely those e-mails "will never be recovered," said lawmakers and public records advocates.

Army Chief of Staff George Casey "told a Senate panel he would not embrace" going back to longer tours, "even if President Bush decided to suspend troop reductions." "The Army is under serious strain from years of war-fighting, he testified, and must reduce the length of combat tours as soon as possible," said Casey.

"Liberal House Democrats are pushing for a closed session to discuss the legal underpinnings of President Bush's intelligence surveillance program," believing that "the more members know about it, the less likely they will be to support Bush's wish to make it permanent."

"Congressional leaders yesterday gathered support for aggressive changes to bankruptcy laws that would help troubled homeowners, even as the Bush administration threatened to veto the plan and emphasized its opposition to any program that would risk tax dollars."

The Marine Corps has ordered a civilian scientist to stop work on a report that alleged "gross mismanagement" of the "program to quickly field Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles," which resulted in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of Marines in Iraq. "It's gotten beyond its initial purpose," a Marine spokesperson said.

The euro hit "a record high of $1.5057 in early European trading on Wednesday as sentiment increased that the U.S. Federal Reserve would continue its rate cut campaign."

Three Democratic governors told Congress yesterday that an August directive by the Bush administration "has made it virtually impossible for them to expand health insurance coverage to more moderate-income children." "A few states have gone to court attempting to void" the directive and now the governors are asking "lawmakers to intervene."

"The coal industry is on the political offensive" for the 2008 elections. Industry group Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, which has already "paid $5 million to CNN to co-sponsor at least six presidential debates, plans "to spend some $40 million this year." "That's more than double its spending in 2007."

And finally: Huffington Post catches right-wing pundit Ann Coulter chewing Nicotine before going on-air for an interview. When someone offered her a second piece, she turned it down, noting that she didn't need it unless "you can chop it up so I can snort it. That would help." Watch it here.

The House "is expected to approve a measure that would eliminate roughly $18 billion in tax incentives for oil and gas companies, and use the savings to fund tax credits and other incentives for renewable energy."

VIRGINIA: Gov. Tim Kaine (D) is set to announce "a proposal aimed at regulating high-risk mortgage lenders and stemming the surge of foreclosures."

ALASKA: An Alaskan village sues two dozen oil, power, and coal companies, "claiming that the large amounts of greenhouse gases they emit contribute to global warming that threatens the community's existence."

ECONOMY: "Twenty-one states, including several of the nation's largest, face a combined budget shortfall of at least $36 billion for 2009."

THINK PROGRESS: CNN's Glenn Beck: "Rick Santorum is a Winston Churchill."

FAITHFUL AMERICA: Faith in Public Life is calling on the networks to "start asking both parties' voters the same questions about faith."

MEDIA MATTERS: The Washington Times uses a defense "industry executive" to represent the views of the military.

HOT POTATO MASH: Former White House adviser Karl Rove videotaped holding a "free Don Siegelman" banner.

"Many Hispanics, as a matter of fact, you know what culture they are assimilating to? -- the rap culture, the crime culture, anti-cops, all the rest of it."
-- Right-wing pundit Pat Buchanan, 8/22/06

VERSUS

"Fears that immigration leads to rising crime rates are unjustified, says a California study released Monday. 'In California, as in the rest of the nation, immigrants...have extremely low rates of criminal activity,' said Kristin Butcher, a co-author of the report."
-- Monterey County Herald (CA), 2/26/08

Think Progress

A Library Worthy Of The Bush Legacy

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