Is Shrub the white Idi Amin?

Jim Schutze at The Dallas Observer

In an otherwise thoughtful defense of bringing the George W. Bush presidential center to SMU, Matthew Wilson, an associate professor of political science at SMU, said of the center, "...it will explore and advance policy proposals on issues of interest to President Bush."

...Wilson went on to cite immigration reform, expanded free trade and global democratization as themes of the Bush presidency that will be of interest to scholars in the years to come.

I don't think so. Let me ask this bluntly: How much scholarly or general interest is there in Idi Amin's monetary policy? Long before anybody can get to the administrative details, history must address the butchery issue.

Is the Iraq war of a fabric with the American history of warfare? Or does the fact that we initiated a war against a nation that had not attacked us place the Iraq war in a dark category of its own?...

These bombs that kill 150 human beings at a time, that send children flying from apartments and litter the pavement with burned skulls: What if the conclusion of history is that these events would not have taken place if George W. Bush had not decided to launch this war?

Schutze also points out that contrary to the reason for the concept of a presidential library to allow scholarly study of presidential positions and papers, Bush has erected a stone wall around his presidential papers and those of Bush senior.

The people I have talked to on the SMU faculty are asking things that have nothing to do with a thumbs-up thumbs-down vote on George W. Bush but everything to do with scholarship. Will the Iraqi scholar who comes to Dallas seeking answers find a real repository of documents useful to his study or a stone wall, a kind of chain-mail fist in the face of scholarship?

The first, most difficult piece of this is Presidential Order 13233, which effectively reverses the presumption underlying the 1978 Presidential Records Act of a basic public right of access. In asserting a contrary right of permanent privilege, George W. Bush pointedly expanded the reach of this new privilege to include the entire Bush dynasty—his father's papers not only as president, for example, but as vice president.

It's an outrageous reach. Scholars and archivists around the country are beginning to suggest that SMU makes a whore of itself if it accepts the presidential center without first insisting that 13233 be vacated.

I think the bush Library should be in one of the ravines there at Crawford.