Bush builds his legacy

You're the president of a superpower and you've really screwed things up. Everything you touched has turned to shit. You got yourself into a war that you can't get out of, you've caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, nobody in your own country likes you and the rest of world loathes you and thinks you're a buffoon. So what do you do? Why build a monument to yourself of course.

Bush is looking to raise half a billion bucks to fund his presidential library and a think tank slated to be built at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Bush sources with direct knowledge of library plans told the Daily News that SMU and Bush fund-raisers hope to get half of the half billion from what they call "megadonations" of $10 million to $20 million a pop.

Bush loyalists have already identified wealthy heiresses, Arab nations and captains of industry as potential "mega" donors and are pressing for a formal site announcement - now expected early in the new year.

"You can't ask people in Dallas for $20 million until they can be sure the library won't be in Waco," one Bush source noted.

Too bad there isn't a town called Whacko. That would be more fitting. But I guess we know what Cheney was really doing in Saudi Arabia this week. And maybe Rove was busy charming the heiresses? I hear he's a real ladies' man.

The half-billion target is double what Bush raised for his 2004 reelection and dwarfs the funding of other presidential libraries. But Bush partisans are determined to have a massive pile of endowment cash to spread the gospel of a presidency that for now gets poor marks from many scholars and a majority of Americans.

The legacy-polishing centerpiece is an institute, which several Bush insiders called the Institute for Democracy. Patterned after Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Bush's institute will hire conservative scholars and "give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President's policies," one Bush insider said.

In other words he just intends to continue the common practices of his administration. Rewriting history -- one lie at a time -- is their speciality. But still, I would think it would be a hard sell except for this.

There's another major inducement for potential donors: Their names aren't required to be made public.

That can only help. I doubt many people are that anxious to be publicly associated with this failed presidency.

Update: Romunov has the architect's rendering of the place.