The GWB library will be "the most empty $200 million library in the world"

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/05/10/scraping_to_fill_the_shelves_of_the_bush_library/

The Boston Globe

Scraping to fill the shelves of the Bush library

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist | May 10, 2006


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Bush himself is already telling the story that will be told. In January, he told CBS's Bob Schieffer, ''I would like to leave behind a legacy or a think tank, a place for people to talk about freedom and liberty and the de Tocqueville model, what de Tocqueville saw in America."

The joke will be on the winner. If this library is stocked the way Bush stuck it to the people, this is going to be the most empty $200 million library in the world. It will be unique because the most interesting story of the Bush administration is how it did as much as possible without visibility.

A Bush library would indeed represent a lot of what Alexis de Tocqueville observed in ''Democracy in America," the first volume of which was published in 1835. But it would be the part where de Tocqueville said, if ''a man by chance takes it into his head to consult no other propriety than his particular opinion . . . and afterwards disorder of mores and misery are not slow to be introduced into his household, one must not be surprised."

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Lots of libraries have a rare-manuscript section. This one at best would feature redacted manuscripts, such as: the 2003 Environmental Protection Agency report about global warming where the administration deleted the part that pinned warming on cars and industry; the 2003 Health and Human Services report on healthcare to people of color that deleted the words ''disparities" and ''inequality" from a first draft; and the Department of Justice report on perceptions of racism on its staff where half of the 186 pages were blacked out. Don't even think about notes from Cheney's Energy Task Force.

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