In Nov. 2006, President Bush launched “an eye-popping, half-billion-dollar drive for the Bush presidential library. That campaign finally paid off last week when officials at Southern Methodist University announced that the Dallas-based university will be home to Bush’s $200 million library — despite protests from faculty, administrators and staff.

However, the George W. Bush Presidential Center will come with a catch. It “will also feature an institute — independent of academic governance of the university — to sponsor research and programs designed to promote the vision of the president” and “celebrate” Bush’s presidency. One university professor said that “[a]cademics everywhere should be concerned about this” adding that it “goes against the idea of dispassionate inquiry”:

Benjamin Hufbauer, an associate professor of art history at the University of Louisville and author of Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory (University Press of Kansas), said that the model agreed to at SMU was “totally different” from the approaches at other universities with presidential libraries. The institute that is part of the complex “has a partisan agenda — that’s very significant,” he said.

“Academics everywhere should be concerned about this. Clearly this goes against the idea of dispassionate inquiry, of looking at things on the basis of fact and merit. If it’s ideological, that’s opposed to the mission of a university,” Hufbauer said.

Unfortunately, the caveats to Bush’s library don’t end there. The executive order Bush signed in 2001 “which gives presidents and their families more control over presidential papers, could result in material being censored.”

Referring to the executive order, Rev. William McElvaney — professor emeritus of preaching and worship at SMU’s theology school — asked: “What self-respecting university would accept a censored library?” Susanne Johnson, an associate professor of Christian education at SMU, said the point of a presidential library is to reflect, academically, on the presidency, “not to cheer-lead for a particular president”:

“The whole purpose of a library is for unfettered, unbiased, critically reflective academic inquiry into the administration of a given presidency. It’s not to cheer-lead for a particular president. It’s not to be groupies,” she said. “We all know very well that this institute — which has no lines of accountability to the faculty — is about getting some scholars lined up to put window dressing on the presidency of George Bush.”

While it seems Bush is not interested allowing his presidential library to explore the truth about his administration, at least he is showing consistency.

UPDATE: d at LGM has more.

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On CTV’s Question Period yesterday, Centcom chief Adm. William Fallon claimed that “we’re not nearly as bad as some would have you believe in Afghanistan.” Though he acknowledged that there has been a “huge upsurge in horrible things that go on in Afghanistan,” Fallon said he’s not fazed by the increase because it pales in comparison to Iraq:

I look at Iraq and what I’ve been dealing with over there, and there’s no comparison in the magnitude of the number of events and so forth.

Watch it:

First off, it seems that when Hillary Clinton was a practicing lawyer she took a job as a court-appointed attorney for an indigent client and she sought to advance her client’s interests zealously. Newsday wants us to find that sleazy, but it’s the nature of the American legal system. It would have been irresponsible for her to do otherwise.

Second, a photo surfaced of Barack Obama wearing some funny-looking (to American eyes) clothing while on a trip to Africa. This led to a bewildering series of charges and countercharges from the Obama and Clinton campaigns, even though the whole thing was likely trumped up out of little or nothing by Matt Drudge to drive traffic.

Jack Cloonan, who spent 25 years as an FBI special agent and interrogated members of al Qaeda, recently told Foreign Policy that he has “been hard pressed to find a situation where anybody” can say “that they’ve ever encountered the ticking bomb scenario” when interrogating terrorists. He said it is a “red herring” and “[i]n the real world it doesn’t happen.” Cloonan added that the Israelis, “who have been doing this for a long time,” have “never had a situation where it is quote ‘a ticking bomb.’” Watch it:

Cloonan was one of the experts interviewed for the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi To The Dark Side.

In a townhall meeting today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was asked about the status of the situation in Iraq. McCain, who notoriously said last month that U.S. troops could be in Iraq for another 10,000 years, said “the war will soon be over“:

That reminds me this 100 year thing. I was asked in a town hall meeting back in Florida, how long would we have a presence in Iraq?

My friends, the war will be over soon, the war for all intents and purposes although the insurgency will go on for years and years and years. But it will be handled by the Iraqis, not by us, and then we decide what kind of security arrangement we want to have with the Iraqis.

Listen to it:

For years, McCain has misjudged the length of conflict in Iraq, repeatedly telling the American public that the war will be over soon. Some lowlights:

I think the victory will be rapid, within about three weeks. [MSNBC, 1/28/03]

It’s clear that the end is very much in sight. … It won’t be long. It, it’ll be a fairly short period of time. [ABC, 4/9/03]

We’re either going to lose this thing or win this thing within the next several months. [Meet The Press, 11/12/06]

Although McCain says “the war will be over soon,” he still wants to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for hundreds of years, even acknowledging that the Iraq insurgency will simultaneously “go on for years and years and years.”

To recap, here’s what McCain said in January about the length of an Iraq occupation: “one hundred years, one thousand years, ten thousand years or until the earth collapses under global climate change.”

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