Polishing The Bush

Will Bush raise $500 million to give to charity? Bring clean water to Africa? Fight disease? Nope, you see Bush and his supporters think the family may be seen in a tarnished light unless they rewrite the last six years of history. From Think Progress: The New York Daily News reports, “President Bush and his truest believers are about to launch their final campaign — an eye-popping, half-billion-dollar drive for the Bush presidential library.”Bush is attempting to raise $500 million to build his library and a think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Bush fund-raisers hope to get approximately $250 million from what they call “megadonations” of $10 million to $20 million each. Among the candidates for “megadonations,” whose names will remain anonymous: 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. Bush allies feel they need enormous funds to shape how history views Bush’s legacy. A Bush insider said, “The more [money] you have, the more influence [on history] you can exert.” Much of the money will be used to build a “legacy-polishing” institute: 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. Bush had earlier indicated his desire to create a think tank “to talk about freedom and liberty and the DeTocqueville model of what [French political philosopher Alexis] DeTocqueville saw in America. What has another former President done? Find out here, The Carter Center. "We believe good health is a basic human right, especially among poor people afflicted with disease who are isolated, forgotten, ignored, and often without hope." — Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter At The Carter Center, we work to build hope in some of the world's most impoverished and forgotten communities. Our health programs prevent the suffering of millions of people around the world from diseases often ignored by others. Many of the most severe afflictions are entirely preventable. Yet people living in developing nations die or are disabled because they do not have access to the services they need to treat their illness or avoid infection entirely. Every day our experts show people how they can take steps to transform their own lives. * As Guinea worm is poised to become the next disease after smallpox to be wiped off the face of the Earth, eradication efforts are rejuvenating communities throughout Africa, enabling children to return to school and farmers to their fields. The Center spearheads the international campaign, which has reduced cases by more than 99.5 percent since 1986. * Improved sanitation and hygiene are critical to public health and overall development. As part of the Center's trachoma control efforts, more than 200,000 latrines were built in Ethiopia since 2004, transforming life in those communities. * We have assisted in the delivery of more than 75 million treatments in 11 river blindness-endemic countries in Latin America and Africa since 1996. The Carter Center is leading the drive to eradicate this debilitating disease where it occurs in the Americas by the end of the decade. * Building on village-based drug distribution systems now in place in Nigeria to prevent river blindness, the Center also is reducing incidences of the parasitic disease schistosomiasis, enhancing children's abilities to grow, develop, and learn.