History Lessons at the Bush Library
April 17th, 2007 at 5:39 am
The scandal that started when a few U.S. attorneys were unceremoniously sacked has slowly but surely worked its way to Texas. As the progression goes, people started asking questions about why those attorneys were fired. To get answers they requested some emails from the U.S. Attorney General’s office. As evidence emerged of White House political tampering with what is supposedly an independent office, the curious parties asked to see emails from Karl Rove and other Bush Administration officials. Then it turned out that — surprise! — those emails were inappropriately being sent through accounts owned and operated by the Republican National Committee. And — surprise again! — Rove may have personally deleted his emails from right around the 2004 election, in obvious violation of the Presidential Records Act. It didn’t take long for the smart folks at SMU to realize that kind of record scrubbing might put a damper on the Bush Library that the university’s leadership covets.
The same people involved in the email fiasco are also working closely on the presidential library and Bush Institute, a partisan think tank to be run separately from the college that has drawn suspicion and opposition from SMU faculty. The Bush Library Blog states it plainly: “These are the good folks who will be running the Bush Institute, and presumably continuing to do all that they can to keep these and other public records away from the scrutiny of scholars and journalists in the future.” In many ways, it only reaffirms the fears of faculty members that politics would pose as academics, concerns that spawned an online petition and can be viewed in exhaustive detail at the BLB.
Over the course of the past few weeks, the blog has compiled a scattering of examples of the Bush family’s attitude toward historical records. You’ll be shocked to learn that it’s hardly encouraging. There’s the Bush-as-Truman analogy that the administration pursues with signature obliviousness. There’s W.’s favorite historian, as reported in New Republic: “It seems that Bush looks to historians as he looks to his advisers: to be told he’s doing just fine. But to hear that message, he’s had to scrape around for a fifth-rate Rudyard Kipling mocked by almost all serious historians and soaked in slaughter.” And then there’s the disturbing parallels between George H. W. Bush’s library and policy institute at Texas A&M University. Concerns there a decade ago that faculty opinions could be stifled under pressure from Bushies turned out to be true (if later denounced after the fact).
The fallout from this scandal probably isn’t the kind of trickle-down Bush and Co. hoped for in his second term. But we can at least hope that, when all the closed-door wrangling between Bush’s buddies and the president of SMU is resolved, this vital documentary evidence of Karl Rove’s incredible sideburns and massive flop-top figures prominently in the record. (Skip to the 3:55 mark or so to see Rove. Thanks to this commenter for the tip.)
April 25th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
“FaLSIFIED ArMY KiLLINGS ExPOSED”
Initial Army reports about Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch -
Reminiscent of George W’s military records stench!
Hubert Wilson
Google: “SECRETs SPOKEn, Secrets Broken” and just follow the trail! The SMU administration may be in for an unpleasant archival surpise?