What Five Hundred Million Dollars Will Buy in the Bush Library

This is not a headline from The Onion, it's from The New York Daily News, which reports exclusively this morning that fundraisers have announced a campaign to raise half a billion dollars for the library, which is to be located at SMU in Dallas. They'll try to get the first 250 million dollars from "megadonations" of ten to twenty million dollars each to honor the accomplishments of our 43rd President.

(Those giving megadonations are of course called "megadonors." Leave it to the Bush people to invent a new term for fat cats, while steadfastly maintaining their ignorance of an old term, "civil war," when it comes to Iraq. But I digress.)

Megadonors, according to the article, (now headlined here at the Huffingtonpost) include captains of industry (the ones whose assets are not frozen while they serve jail time, I guess), Arab nations (it's the least they can do after all Bush has done for them) and "wealthy heiresses."

Five hundred million dollars would buy a lot of books, but since the President gave up public reading after that unpleasant incident with The Pet Goat, there will have to be other ways the money will be spent.

Of course there will be a "think tank." Maybe that's where all the bitter neocons from the Project for a New American Century will go to write papers about how Bush screwed up their war and crushed their dreams.

I'm going to suggest the Karl Rove Center for the Study of Free and Fair Elections, and of course, there's got to be The Dick Cheney Institute for Constitutional Rights. And a Donald Rumsfeld "Known Unknown" research library. (Do you think it will be under-staffed and under-supplied?)

Maybe there'll be room on the public grounds for the Iraq Adventure Garden, a pool made of quicksand, oil and blood.

And how about a cakewalk in the museum cafeteria? No pretzels, though; they're a choke hazard.

I could go on and on (and you're welcome to if you like) but if I think about this much more I'll start to remember how much body armor a half billion dollars could have bought, or how many breakfasts for Head Start kids.

And after all the relentlessly bad news of the past week, I think my head would explode. So help yourselves to naming rights for the George Walker Bush Five Hundred Million Dollar Presidential Library.

Shelley Lewis is author of Naked Republicans, A Full-Frontal Exposure of Right-wing Hypocrisy and Greed.