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The bobbleheads sure are doing their part in the Bush Magical Legacy Rehabilitation Tour. First we have the mysterious "Miss me yet?" billboard, then Tweety "Doesn't he look yummy in a flight suit?" Matthews asks if the nation will feel "nostalgia" for Bush with his memoir coming out, and every time you turn around there's a Bushie or a Cheney promoting the failed policies that saw Bush leave office with a record disapproval rating. Talk about a disconnect--or maybe it's just willful misinformation. There are no Americans wishing back for the days of the Bush presidency, for crissakes. We're still scarred from it, why would Americans want to open those wounds again?

Whichever way you want to categorize it, there is nothing more ludicrous and absent of facts than Kathleen Parker insisting that Bush has acted "nobly" since leaving office.

Is that right?

So is criticizing his successor not once, but twice--even after saying that the new Commander-in-Chief "deserved his silence", noble? Don't forget one was when he went to a foreign country--his speech in Calgary, Canada--and took thinly veiled swipes at Obama, saying that the two month old presidency harkened back to Hoover?

Is saying that Jimmy Carter "made his life miserable" noble?

Bush's post-presidency life has been fairly low-profile, especially in comparison to his ever-present and compulsively vocal vice president. He's made a few paid speeches, wrote his memoirs (which garnered him a comparatively small advance--perhaps a better indicator of how much Bush is expected to be missed by the American people) and worked on his fundraising for his library housed at SMU, whose primary purpose appears to be to rehab his legacy, much to the consternation of the staff there:

Their objections stem from the fear that the Bush center will act like a private think tank for neoconservative ideologues. “They get the cover of a university without having to play by its rules,” says Benjamin Johnson, an associate professor of history whose Bush Library Blog detailed the controversy at its height, between 2007 and 2008. The plans for the Bush institute sailed through S.M.U.’s administration, however, with the help of people like Ray Hunt, the oilman and longtime Bush supporter and friend, who is on the university’s board of trustees.

“We’re not going to have any of the usual controls over teaching and research hires and reviews,” complains Johnson. “My concerns have actually been heightened by the collapse of the Bush administration because it seems to me he and his circle are intent on rehabilitating him, and he is held in such disrepute by so many people across the country and the planet. I’m afraid this is going to be the main vehicle by which they try and rehabilitate their reputation.”

And by no measure, Kathleen Parker, can that be considered a noble effort.

Scott Horton: The story of how constitutional scholar, Erwin Chemerinsky, was hired, then fired by the University of California at Irvine, reveals that he was the target of a quiet political vendetta of a kind now practiced with increasing frequency and effect.

Norwegianity: Leftover links...

Middle Earth Journal: Alan Greenspan's memoir is critical of Bush

Talk To Action: 9/11/07- Convicted terrorist released from federal prison

Law Blog: Retired judge, Michael Mukasey, is rumored to be the leading candidate to replace Gonzo

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Collingwood's, The Great Endarkenment, Fallenmonk, Singularity

The Washington Post ran a lengthy item today — on its front page, no less — on Barack Obama’s admitted experimentation with drugs as a teenager.

Long before the national media spotlight began to shine on every twist and turn of his life’s journey, Barack Obama had this to say about himself: “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. . . . I got high [to] push questions of who I was out of my mind.”

The Democratic senator from Illinois and likely presidential candidate offered the confession in a memoir written 11 years ago, not long after he graduated from law school and well before he contemplated life on the national stage. [...]

Obama’s revelations were not an issue during his Senate campaign two years ago. But now his open narrative of early, bad choices, including drug use starting in high school and ending in college, as well as his tortured search for racial identity, are sure to receive new scrutiny.

They are? Why, exactly, are they “sure to receive new scrutiny”? Because bored political reporters say so?

It's an old story that seems to have no political relevance at all. The Post suggests that the drug issue might become important, and then quotes experts from both sides of the aisle saying it won’t be important at all.

Welcome to The Silly Season.

James Frey's nonfiction memoir called "A Million Little Pieces," is a lie.

A reader writes:

FAKE IT TO MAKE IT

I read his book
Coming off a crack run
Holed up in a master suite
With marijuana
And a mad woman

It was just the kind of tripe
To take my mind off
My reality

Its only appeal
Was in the idea
That AA
Could be avoided

I could dig that
Having been to meetings
Long before
He’d heard of them
And having my own misgivings
With the program

But they were nothing
Compared to the questions
I had about his story

It sounded
Like a clear case
Of overkill
To the seasoned ears
Of someone
Who’d seen sobriety

And lost it
While living a life
Not nearly as adventurous

I could see how the uninitiated
Could find it intriguing

How it could titillate

And now it turns out
That even addled
My alarm bells
Were onto something

And the intuition
Of a REAL alcoholic
Was on target

When I saw him
As the shit-sucking
Sycophant
I’d suspected

From the very first line

Sure sounds like a swiftboating of Arianna to me.

Richard Bradley:

"Well, maybe NBC knows something I don't--but I doubt it. (Full discloure: I know Arianna a little and blog for her website--not that I get paid for it.) After all, consider the source of that charge: a ten-year-old memoir by Republican political consultant Ed Rollins which has been discredited by one of its own ghostwriters...read on"

In a land far, far away...Tim would have Arianna on his show and answer a few qustions for a change.