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RE: BUSH LIBRARY

To the FBvian: if you think our country's most incurious leader will provide SMU academic prestige, well, great. I don't.

We're gonna have to jump the rest. So please bear in mind that the views expressed come from a person who will probably vote for John McCain in 2008.

As for the Clinton library, those stats are encouraging for Dallas. But even Dallasites must admit Clinton, for all his faults, was a president who balanced the budget and oversaw an economic boom during years of peace. What can you say of Bush? And to what extent will that hurt his library's bottom line? Tim's point is well taken: because of the way history will judge Bush, people will always find interest in the library. But what sort of people, aside from the scholars? How many citizens, just like you and me, FBvian, will want to learn more about his corrosion of civil liberties, the botched pre-war intelligence, the awful war itself, the torture, the renditions, Valerie Plame, the national debt, the debt he will seemingly never repay to Big Oil...?

Indeed, if the library succeeds, in my view, it will be because enough people 75 years from now view Bush as I do today, as America's worst president. As such, the library will be a freak show, a place to learn more about a very troubling time in American history.

And, again, doesn't Dallas already have that?

Paul Kix · December 21, 2006 07:40 PM