Bush's new digs

Abandoning any pretense of being a brush-clearing "rancher" in Crawford, George Bush will be moving into the posh Dallas suburb of Preston Hollow after his term ends in January. The town, possibly the wealthiest in Texas, has a racial history that's apparently of no concern to the Bush family.

A racially-restrictive covenent in Preston Hollow prohibited nonwhites from using and occupying specified properties until 2000, when it was invalidated. The covenant, adopted in 1956, provided a useful exception:

"Said property shall be used and occupied by white persons except these covenants shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of different race or nationality in the employ of a tenant."

Though freestanding "servants quarters" were generously permitted, they had to be placed "to the rear of the lot."

Racial covenents have been legally unenforceable since the Supreme Court's decision in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), but Preston Hollow's was still on the books just eight years ago. Preston Hollow remains exclusive, however: one local realtor boasts that the community has an "average household income of about $1.5 million a year."

Preston Hollow's elementary school was also in the news in 2006 after a federal judge found that the school district had attempted to undermine the desegregation decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954) by using discredited "separate but equal" arguments. Not surprisingly, most non-Hispanic white residents of Preston Hollow send their children to private schools.

With little brush to clear, what will ex-president Bush do with all his spare time in Preston Hollow? One clue: the wealthy investor who lives next door has just installed a pond stocked with trout on his 14-acre estate. Much of his time, no doubt, will also be devoted to making speeches for exorbitant fees and raising a half-billion dollars for a presidential "library" at Southern Methodist University. The library's principal function will be to put a positive spin on the worst presidency in modern U.S. history. Meanwhile, good luck with that Bush legacy project, Karl Rove...

PHOTOS: Preston Hollow non-servant housing (top); Bush hosting Angela Merkel at the "Western White House" in Crawford (bottom). (Wikimedia)

[H/T to The Raw Story]

Bush's first (and last) selfless act

“For the next 75 days, all of us must ensure that the next president and his team can hit the ground running,” Mr. Bush said in an emotional speech to hundreds of employees of the executive branch on the South Lawn of the White House. He urged them to “conduct yourselves with the decency and professionalism that you have shown throughout my time in office.”

New York Times, November 6, 2008

No doubt President-elect Obama appreciates Bush's sincerity and generosity in offering full cooperation during the remaining days of his administration.

Bush's understandable concerns about his legacy could be slightly alleviated if he took one further step that would be wildly popular around the world: resign immediately. And take Dick Cheney with him. Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, that would leave Nancy Pelosi as regent until Obama and Biden can be sworn in.

Then the adults could take over immediately and begin to grapple with the wasteland that Bush/Cheney will leave as their true legacy.

Monomania in the White House

In the face of abysmal poll numbers, Bush and Cheney will again have to recalibrate and redefine the standards for passing historical judgments on their administration. No doubt they will declare their years in office to be a grand success if no additional terrorist attacks occur within the U.S. on their "watch." The boast would be simple enough: "we kept you safe."

But to make such a claim, they'd have to ignore the 4,102 U.S. troops who have been killed in Iraq and another 30,000 who have been wounded. Not to mention the tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties. They'd also have to dismiss the greatly increased long-term risk of attacks that their disastrous policies have created. Such short-term thinking, in one form or another, has long been the bane of U.S. politics. For Bush and Cheney, all that matters is deferring the consequences of their mistakes until after their term has ended.

On domestic issues, their only consistent policy has been to maximize the influence of — and minimize the restrictions on — multinational corporations. In this effort, and often with the assistance of a nominally Democratic congress, they have enjoyed some modest successes at the expense of the economy and the political process.

On his recent visit to the U.K., Bush again tried to insulate himself from contemporary judgments about his "legacy" by declaring, in his inimitable way:

“Well, first of all, just so you know, I’m not going to be around to see it. There’s no such thing as objective short-term history,” [Bush] said. “It takes a while for history to have its, you know, to be able to have enough time to look back to see why decisions were made and what their consequences were.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald offered a far more telling judgment on the Bush/Cheney administration's legacy in this description of two main characters from The Great Gatsby:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…"