The Battle for the Soul of SMU and Why You Should Care

[bring_em_home_bush]

Some of you may have read my previous posts about the objections by a large number of the faculty to the building of the Bush Library, Museum, and Institute at Southern Methodist University. Perhaps it seems like a small flap over an unimportant matter in a red state city. I am here to respectfully request you to think again.

Why you should care about the Bush Institute at SMU:

1. Why not Bush's actual alma maters, Yale or Harvard? Why SMU? Because Cheney and a small, arrogant local elite of Bush's biggest backers believe they can do whatever they want in University Park and Dallas, even though the whole of Dallas County voted for Democrat Chris Bell for governor and threw out 41 of 42 Republican judges.

2. The contents of the Library will be off limits to genuine scholars for decades, while the Institute will provide yet another semi-respectable sinecure for the likes of Dinesh D'Souza to blame liberals and the left for all the ills in the world. Stanford sure as hell doesn’t brag about Hoover, but Hoover leeches off Stanford’s reputation with every article that mentions its name.

3. They believe they will fortify themselves in this bunker and rewrite history to glorify Bush and Cheney. I hope we will never, ever let them forget that we know what the Bush Institute really is.

How you can help:

Kick and recommend, please!

Sign this petition: http://www.protectsmu.org. As you will see, it's being freeped and drives the rightwingers into a frenzy, because self-identified Christians are signing it and making devastating comments about this maladministration. You don't have to be a Methodist or a Christian to sign. Please sign, and pass it on – surely 50,000 sigs is not an unreasonable goal?

Here’s another petition to "Protect SMU From The "Leftist Bush-Hate Kooks" Opposing The Bush Presidental Library Being @ SMU": http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/SupportSMUBushLibrary/index.html. Now, I’m not saying you should trash it or anything, though, especially because the cowardly owner will certainly erase any unfavorable comments.

In closing, do any web experts here know why you cannot find The Bush Library Blog, http://bushlibraryblog.wordpress.com, by googling Bush Library or Bush Library SMU?

Thank you for reading this.

[bring_em_home_bush]

1. okay, here's an article from Slate just posted today

George Bush Goes to CollegeShould SMU accept his presidential library?
By David Greenberg
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2007, at 11:40 AM ET

Universities champion unbiased inquiry. Presidential libraries often include museums that exalt their honorees with selective versions of history. The two have never meshed well. Duke University, where Richard Nixon attended law school (and broke into the dean's office to see his grades), spurned efforts to build his library there. Ronald Reagan's people wanted to locate his repository-cum-shrine at Stanford University but got a chilly response. Plans to house the Kennedy Library at Harvard ran aground in the mid-1970s.

Now, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, the alma mater to Laura Welch Bush, is in an uproar over its bid to become the permanent home of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Three times in three weeks the faculty has met to debate the subject. According to the campus paper, professors complained loudly, some not wishing to yoke the university's reputation to a president they considered shameful, others rejecting the plans to host a Bush Foundation-run institute that would fund pro-Bush research. But the university president, R. Gerald Turner, has remained unbowed. Whatever individual professors may think of Bush, he and his supporters say, any archives of presidential documents would be a boon for SMU.

So, who's right?

http://www.slate.com/id/2158699

[BOSSHOG]

2. The proposal - A Classic tribute to "conservatism"

I applaud those at SMU not wanting such a garbage scow to be built in their midst. A library is where one goes to learn and be enlightened and do research and exercise one's intellectual curiousity; and yet bush and his fellow "conservatives" want to keep the vast majority of facts about his administration's actions secret for years and years and years. And they want to keep them secret because they know they are criminal and anti-constitutional in nature. Yes, a building in tribute to a "conservative" monster. A tribute to ignorance and arrogance. A tribute to "conservative pride. A tribute to lies, to military desertion, to drug abuse, to corporate crime. And yet not one bone tossed to education. More power to SMU to keep the trash out of their neighborhood.

[bring_em_home_bush]

3. and a future base for further attacks on liberals and the left

under the guise of respectable scholarship. Thanks for reading, Bosshog.

[Catherine Vincent]

4. I'll kick this.

And recommend.

[bring_em_home_bush]

5. great

thank you, cat_girl25.

[Catherine Vincent]

6. No prob.

:hi:

[tanyev]

7. My good friend Rev. Sun Myung Moon signed the pro-library

petition and said that he was going to donate millions and George promised to name a wing after him. They've deleted it! The nerve.

:evilgrin:

[EFerrari]

8. You got it. K&R

:kick:

[BlooInBloo]

9. I heard a few weeks ago that SMU had already rejected it.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

10. I'm insulted by the idea of a Bush library period.

It's insulting to literacy.