The Presidential Library Scam

Acting like a four-year-old, George Bush has squashed his eyes tight and placed his fingers in his ears, arrogating that he has no approximation of who is chipping in the big bucks for his half-a-billion-dollar presidential library to be raised in Dallas. He says he doesn’t want his staff to say him the names of these special-interest givers while he’s still in office, as if his temporary ignorance can clean the malodor of such clandestine fundraising by a sitting president.

One of the canvassers for Bush’s ego temple unknowingly outed himself. Stephen Payne, a Houston businessman and sometime political arranger for Bush, was captured on video in July offering White House privileges to foreign interests in substitution for a suggested contribution of $200,000 to the library fund.

It is, of course, giddy to believe that George and his Oval Office managers don’t know who is funding his legacy library, but it is horrific that they want to hide this knowledge from the people. After all, the people pay millions of tax dollars each year to sustain these things. Yet, last year, at the bidding of the White House, Sen. Ted Stevens killed a bill to require revelation of such donors.

Not that this is a partisan cover up. Bill Clinton raised $165 million for his presidential palace, and he remains to keep his donor list inserted away in his vest pocket, safe from public scrutiny.

What are they hiding? If no privileges are being interchanged for these high-dollar donations, why not divulge them? Indeed, if the contributors are simply selfless souls with no self-agenda, wouldn’t they want their names colored on the walls of a presidential library?

By the way, there’s no requisite that every ex-president has to have one of these memorials – and very few deserve them.