I'll Ask Again; No Archie Comics?

(I was thinking of this post with the title, by the way.)

So George W. Bush and his fellow wingnuts are trying to (shake down campaign contributors) raise funds for a “presidential library”?

Considering this venture pertains to a man who once asked “Is Our Children Learning?,” that makes about as much sense as putting Dick Cheney in charge of UNICEF.

ThinkProgress, Morse at Media Needle and a few others have chimed in on this already, but I want to highlight this excerpt from an ad that appeared in the New York Times for “The George W. Bush Center For Freedom and Liberty.”

Update: Morse got me on the phony ad...good one; the story is legit, though.

“The Center’s core philosophy will be modeled on the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose observations on American democracy, were central to George W. Bush’s formative years as a scholar.”

I don’t know what is more hilarious, the fact that anyone would consider Dubya to be a scholar of anything except fraud and any other manner of duplicity or the appearance of such an obvious typo in this highly prominent ad.

But as long as some copywriter who obviously doesn’t know how to proofread his or her own work bothered to mention de Tocqueville in the same sentence as President Stupid Head, I think some clarification is in order (in particular this excerpt from the linked Wikipedia article)…

“(de Tocqueville was) a representative of the ‘liberal’ political tradition who recommended segregation between 'Arabs' and European colonists.”

Sweet Mother Of Ronnie Reagan! Dubya influenced by a “liberal”? And French too! And why is the part about segregation oddly appropriate for the political party that adopts a “southern strategy” every election cycle?

And here’s something else that Our Red State President should consider (author of the quote, “it was not always a given that the United States and America would have a close relationship”)…

To Tocqueville, America was set apart by its peculiar democratic mores. But, despite maintaining with Plato, More, Harrington, and Montesquieu that the balance of property determined the balance of power, Tocqueville argued that, as America showed, equitable property holdings did not ensure the rule of the best men. In fact, it did quite the opposite. The widespread, relatively equitable property ownership which distinguished America and determined its mores and values also explained why the American masses held elites in such contempt.

And if Dubya, by virtue of his last name, doesn't qualify as an "elite," then I don't know who does.

With the phrase “widespread, relatively equitable property ownership,” de Tocqueville was talking about the rise of an industrious and prosperous middle class, which is critical to a functioning democracy (and which has been under steady assault by Republicans and some Democrats in this country for at least the last 25 years).

Actually, I think Paul Ford of The Morning News envisioned what Bush’s “library” should look like in this article.

As for me, I have only one request; the library should contain a wing displaying the names of every single person who voted for Bush and Cheney in either 2000 or 2004 along with a photo exhibit of all Allied forces personnel killed or injured in the Iraq war along with all innocent Iraqi civilians who met the same fate (and make sure we don’t forget anyone tortured on orders from Bushco also).

Update: Indeed we should, Arianna.