Some SMU faculty members don't want Bush library

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Negotiations to build George W. Bush's presidential library at Southern Methodist University have divided the campus, pitting the administration and some alumni against liberal-leaning faculty members who say the project would be an embarrassment to the school.

Some professors have complained that the combined library, museum and think tank would celebrate a presidency that unnecessarily took the country into a war.

The fear is that the library "will continue to espouse the philosophy and practice of the Bush administration, which has seriously divided our nation and has brought the ire of other countries," said William McElvaney, a retired professor at SMU's theology school and co-author a November opinion piece in the campus newspaper titled The George W. Bush Library: Asset or Albatross?

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As amusing as this controversy is, it fully illustrates one of the things about liberals that really bugs me. That is, they're letting their political passion get in the way of their thinking. Whatever one thinks about Bush, and Real Art readers fully know that I think he's the Devil, his Presidential library will be an invaluable academic resource. Sure, the place is probably going to try to deify our wanker-in-chief, and the think tank is most likely going to be another right-wing blowjob factory, just like every other conservative think tank. But so what? Like the Vietnam era over which President Johnson presided, these are fascinating times; the LBJ library in Austin, also protested, as the article observes, when it opened in 1971, has been over the years a treasure trove of research material for constructing a real understanding of exactly how things went so badly back in the 60s. The Bush library will surely do the same thing for us in the long run. And, bloody hell, placing a conservative think tank so close to true academia strikes me as having great potential for side-splitting hysterics and hilarity--the reason conservatives have resorted to think tanks over the years is because their views don't hold up too well when subjected to bona fide intellectual criticism, which is also why there aren't too many conservative university professors. One hopes that these liberal SMU profs would avail themselves of this priceless opportunity to take down such light-weight conservative "intellectuals" in their midst, if only for amusing sport, if not out of a sense of academic duty.

In the end, a Presidential library is simply a library, and it's damned foolish to allow political anger to get in the way of knowledge and inquiry. Goddamned lefties need to shut their fucking mouths and get back to work.

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