Accidental Blogger

George W. Bush plans to raise mega bucks for his presidential library.  The target amount is a whopping 500 million dollars.  This kind of money will surely not go towards buying multiple copies of My Pet Goat. More likely, it is meant for re-writing history. For the right price, you can buy the right historian to polish up a tattered and tarnished legacy. But can a whole fleet of dedicated scribes put this Humpty Dumpty of a presidency back together? I don’t know. The faintest ink is more permanent than the longest memory. Perhaps a way ought to be found to preserve all liberal blogs of the past five years in a parallel archive.  They contain the eye witness account of Bush’s terrible regime and can act as a counterpoint to whatever lies the Bush library plans to propagate for posterity.

WASHINGTON – He may be a certified lame duck now, but President Bush and his truest believers are about to launch their final campaign – an eye-popping, half-billion-dollar drive for the Bush presidential library.

Eager to begin refurbishing his tattered legacy, the President hopes to raise $500 million to build his library and a think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Bush lived in Dallas until he was elected governor of Texas in 1995.

Bush sources with direct knowledge of library plans told the Daily News that SMU and Bush fund-raisers hope to get half of the half billion from what they call "megadonations" of $10 million to $20 million a pop.

Bush loyalists have already identified wealthy heiresses, Arab nations and captains of industry as potential "mega" donors and are pressing for a formal site announcement – now expected early in the new year.

"It’s a stretch," said another source briefed on the plans. "It’s so much bigger than anything that’s been tried before. But the more you have, the more influence [on history] you can exert."

The half-billion target is double what Bush raised for his 2004 reelection and dwarfs the funding of other presidential libraries. But Bush partisans are determined to have a massive pile of endowment cash to spread the gospel of a presidency that for now gets poor marks from many scholars and a majority of Americans.

The legacy-polishing centerpiece is an institute, which several Bush insiders called the Institute for Democracy. Patterned after Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Bush’s institute will hire conservative scholars and "give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President’s policies," one Bush insider said.

It remains to be seen whether Bush’s low standing in the polls and his rejection by voters in the midterm elections will make it harder to raise funds.  There’s another major inducement for potential donors: Their names aren’t required to be made public.

Arianna Huffington has a humorous take on Bush’s elaborate and expensive attempt at misrepresenting his failed and reviled presidency. Half a billion dollars for a white wash? How much does it cost to tar and feather?