>From www.lewrockwell.com/orig/ostrowski3.html
}}>Begin
It Takes a Library
by James Ostrowski
Bill Clinton held a fundraiser in Hollywood last weekend to raise money for his
Presidential Library. The choice of venue shows excellent judgment as both
Hollywood and Presidential libraries specialize in fantasy. Presidential
libraries employ favored court historians to try to convince us that their
heroes were great Presidents. This is a daunting task as no great President has
a Presidential library. Washington and Jefferson are libraryless. Some pretty
good Presidents like Cleveland and Harding are sans library. Even some of our
faux-great Presidents such as Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln have no libraries.
That puts them in the same category as President Jefferson Davis.
Presidential libraries are strictly a product of the modern era of the
Imperial Presidency. Naturally, they were FDR�s invention. For the record, the
following presidents have Presidential libraries: Hoover, FDR, Truman,
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush. From this
list we can discern that to earn a Presidential library, you have to either
raise taxes during a recession, turn a recession into a Great Depression with
silly economic policies and lie about keeping America out of World War II,
engage the Army in a full-scale war without Congressional authorization, run as
Republican but govern like a Democrat, start the Viet Nam War, escalate the
Viet Nam War, engage in a fourth-rate cover-up of a first-rate burglary,
manufacture "WIN" (Whip Inflation Now) buttons and wear them, lower the speed
limit and room temperature to 55, promise to get the government off our backs,
but increase the size and power of government in every area, or lie about not
raising taxes. If you were an unindicted co-conspirator, you get only a strange
animal known as the "Nixon Presidential Materials Staff". But true to his
nickname, Tricky Dick was able to fanagle his own unofficial library anyway.
With such pedestrian competition, even a fifth-rate President like Clinton
deserves a Library.
In the course of preparing this article, I was able to obtain a secret memo
outlining plans for the Clinton library. The bold and daring scheme will
guarantee this will be the most popular Presidential library ever. The Clinton
Library will feature a virtual reality tour of the Clinton White House. Other
Presidential libraries allow you to read the president�s official papers; the
Clinton Library will allow you to be Clinton. Through the miracle of virtual
reality, you will personally experience what it�s like to take calls from
congressmen while being serviced by a young intern; unleash your socialist wife
upon the nation�s health care system; or share a good laugh with James
"Junkyard Dog" Carville about how the suckers actually believed us when we
promised a middle class tax cut.
The director of the Clinton library will of course be Sidney ("Son of
Carville") Blumenthal. All Presidential library directors must be fawning
fawners and Blumenthal is extraordinarily qualified in this department. He not
only thinks Bill Clinton is a great president, but, like Al Gore (who after his
loss will be assistant director), he thinks that Clinton is the greatest
president ever. In fact, in neo-Randian fashion, he (like Clinton) thinks
Clinton is the greatest human being ever!
A special room is being set aside for Clintonian writings of masterpiece
stature, in the event that researchers undercover any such writings. Special
audiovideo equipment is being readied to allow visitors to listen to Clinton�s
notoriously lengthy speeches in just a fraction of the original time. My
sources are going to kill me for revealing the secret. Yes, the recordings will
be speeded up; that�s obvious. But get this: all words such as "the" and "a",
and all conjunctives, disjunctives and prepositions will be automatically
deleted. These techniques will allow us to listen to these speeches in little
more than the time it takes to list President Clinton�s accomplishments.
Further, the experts assure us that removing all these words will make the text
only slightly less intelligible than the original.
Finally, this will be the first Presidential library with a special wing
devoted to the First Lady. Hillary will get her own separate wing, hermetically
sealed from Bill�s suite. The highlight of the Hillary wing will be a contest
to see which visitors can come up with a plausible scenario for how the missing
Whitewater billing records mysteriously appeared in the White House one day.
Rumor has it that Susan Thomases will be director in charge of the Hillary
wing. Thomases isn�t really a herstorian, but that�s okay. Hillary isn�t really
a First Lady; she�s a co-president. Besides, if your name is Clinton, it�s
always good to have a tough-as-sandpaper New York lawyer nearby.
Presidential libraries are here to stay. They facilitate the worship of ex-
and dead presidents. Such worship is essential to maintaining our present
system of government: global empire led by a supreme executive. We can�t very
well have a jackass ruling the world. The job of Presidential libraries is to
convince us that our ex-presidents weren�t jackasses, even if they were.
Clinton�s Library will face the ultimate challenge.
August 25, 2000
James Ostrowski is an attorney practicing at 984 Ellicott Square, Buffalo, New
York 14203; (716) 854-1440; FAX 853-1303. See his website at
http://jamesostrowski.com.
End<{{
A<>E<>R
Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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