I want to wish everyone Happy Holidays (Bill O'Reilly can bite me) and extend my sincere congratulations to California, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut and (as of this week) New Jersey for having your heads screwed on straight and your priorities in order. Congratulations!
See you folks next week.
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.Then this appeared on Think Progress about two weeks later:
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.
"You can't ask people in Dallas for $20 million until they can be sure the library won't be in Waco," one Bush source noted.
The rest of the cash will come from donors willing to pony up $25,000 to $5 million.
"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.
"I'll be dead when they get it right." – President Bush, on how his legacy will be viewed, according to a "recent visitor" to the White House who says Bush is "still resolutely defiant, convinced history will ultimately vindicate him."Yeah, especially when you stack the deck.
It's fitting that Eisenhower should have pioneered the tradition of all-purpose holiday messages. They typified his belief that, as he once put it, "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is. With us, of course, it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion that all men are created equal." His statement expressed the paradox of America's emerging religious disposition in the 1950s. In many ways, religion was resurgent in public life, with prayer breakfasts, "In God We Trust" added to paper currency, and the words "under God" inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance. Simultaneously, however, the Holocaust had made the merits (indeed the necessity) of religious toleration all the more compelling. Most Protestants, moreover, had come to realize that immigration had permanently transformed the American populace and that for comity to prevail in daily life, diverse creeds would have to coexist. Hence, this was also the golden age of the "interfaith" movement and the spread of that insipid public-relations neologism Judeo-Christian (a phrase that crystallizes the conflation of Christmas and Hanukkah).
Will Herberg's classic Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955) captured the detente achieved among America's three leading religions. The book examined the Eisenhower Era condition of "pervasive secularism amid mounting religiosity." Herberg concluded that Americans (not unlike Ike) placed a high value not so much on God as on religion itself. "One's particular religion is, of course, to be cherished and loyally adhered to," he wrote, "but it is not felt to be something that one 'flaunts' in the face of people of other faiths." Most Americans in the 1950s believed in God, yet insisted that their beliefs didn't impinge much on their politics or business affairs. And, as Herberg noted, "what is secularism but the practice of the absence of God in affairs of life?" The same mix of private faith and public accommodation—precisely what irritates today's Christianists—prevails today.
The interfaith, tolerant spirit, ascendant in the 1920s, had by the '50s become synonymous with what Herberg called "the American Way of Life." In the decades since, we have expanded the Protestant-Catholic-Jew troika to include Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and others (although not without some ugly resistance). And, certain terms of the compact have been renegotiated, as when the Supreme Court concluded that prayer doesn't belong in public schools—though, in keeping with Herberg's analysis, a moment of silence has remained constitutionally kosher. Overall, the understandings reached by the 1950s have remained an American consensus. Indeed, far from a war on Christmas, this consensus should be seen as a socially useful, ideologically justifiable, and highly agreeable truce.
It has already won top honors from the American Film Institute, the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. That's quite a feat for a movie that hasn't gotten one tenth the publicity of Flags of Our Fathers, which was filmed by Eastwood back-to-back with Letters. They serve as companion pieces to tell the story of one battle from both sides, and both have their share of inspiring patriotism as well as heartbreaking disillusionment.
My fear is that when people start talking about Oscar, right-wingers will accuse Eastwood of denigrating troops currently in the field as well as bolstering the enemy we now face (or some such nonsense to that effect). The disadvantage right wingers have at playing this kind of game is that their targets are not always so easily swayed or hit.
They came after Spielberg last year for daring to tell both sides of the story in Munich. Palestinians sympathetic? Perish the thought. Old Steven might just convince some people out there that these are real people with motivations that are not as simply defined as "pure evil". When they lashed out at Spielberg, he didn't bat an eye and gave them as good as he got. My admiration for the man went from seeing him as a great director to seeing him as a great human being.