From The Economist...

In addition to an excellent review of a book written by the uncle of a dear friend of mine, The Economist gives us an absolutely horrifying glimpse of the future: the George W. Bush Presidential Library. You thought we would be done with this man after 2008? Think again:

Housing the George W. Bush presidential library and museum will bring SMU money and attention. But Mr Bush's plans for managing his legacy have ignited a fierce debate about what SMU may have to sacrifice in return. The president hopes to raise $500m for the project. This would make it the most expensive presidential library ever, $335m more costly than Bill Clinton's in Little Rock. For Mr Bush wants to build, alongside the library and museum, an institute devoted to promoting his policies and ideas.

Some members of the faculty think this a bit dodgy. In an op-ed article in the Daily Campus last November, two professors at SMU's Perkins School of Theology wondered bitterly whether housing the library would force the school into a queasy alliance with “a legacy of massive violence, destruction, and death brought about by the Bush presidency.”

It may;...

There's much to admire in this otherwise vomitous article, from the SMU professors' up-yours, to The Economist's lovely -- for once -- editorializing in a "news" article. While it's a great tribute to our capitalist system that anyone who can scrounge together twice as much money as you see here can start a think tank that propagates his or her ideas, it's an even greater aspect of capitalism that we the consumers don't have to put up with it if we don't want to. At this point, anyone who cares for the safety of their children would prefer a world where George Bush's "policies and "ideas" die out with his presidency. I imagine SMU could kindly turn down his offer to build such an institute. Anything that can be done to pressure them into such a move would, in my mind, be commendable.