With Hollywood Help, Obama Begins Re-Writing History

[Geee]

Commentary Magazine:

According to the New York Times, the planning for Barack Obama’s post-presidency started as soon as his second term began. The conversations began with director Steven Spielberg and studio executive Jeffrey Katzenberg impressing upon the president the need to employ cutting edge technology in the presidential library to be built to honor him. Their goal, which has apparently been reinforced in many other late night conversations at the White House with a variety of other well-heeled and influential Obama fans, is that the aim of the new institution will be to develop, as the Times tells us, a “narrative” for his post-presidency. The reaction to that from most of the country, including the many who don’t think he’s been a good president (a group that has included a clear majority of Americans for most of his disastrous scandal-ridden second term), is so what? As long as the Obama library isn’t being built on our dime, what do we care what it contains or how it spins his historic yet flawed presidency? I share that sentiment, but I also think the plans to build Obama a mausoleum that will dwarf the ones built for his predecessors and to re-write history to burnish his reputation provide us with new proof of the moral vacuum at the heart of his administration.

 

The practice of building ever-bigger presidential libraries for each retiring president is not something that we halt but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Due to security requirements as well as the entourages and taxpayer-paid perks we give former presidents we may not be able to go back to the 19th and even early 20-century practice of retiring presidents going back to being ordinary citizens rather than assuming the status of dowager emperors as they do today. But there was a great deal to be said for a system that reinforced the idea that presidents were just people who had been given a great honor but then asked to return it once they were done.

[Geee]

Steven Spielberg and the Temple of Obama

 

The closest I’ve ever come to glimpsing hell was on Monday, when I read an article in the New York Times headlined, “With High-Profile Help, Obama Plots Life After Presidency.”

Reporters Michael D. Shear and Gardiner Harris reveal the “methodical effort taking place inside and outside the White House as the president, first lady, and a cadre of top aides map out a post-presidential infrastructure and endowment they estimate could cost as much as $1 billion,” or about as much as Obama fundraised for the 2012 campaign.

This effort began in November 2012, shortly after his reelection, when the president hosted filmmaker Steven Spielberg at the White House for a screening of Lincoln. President Obama was “spellbound,” the Times reports, as Spielberg held forth “about the use of technology to tell stories.”

Such technology, Spielberg went on, could also be used to tell Obama’s story—to somehow convince future Americans, against all evidence to the contrary, that his presidency was an experience they would like to repeat. “Ideally, one adviser said, a person in Kenya could put on a pair of virtual reality goggles and be transported to Mr. Obama’s 2008 speech on race in Philadelphia.” I’m sure they’ll be banging on the door to get into that exhibit.

The president has raised, to date, “just over $5.4 million from 12 donors,” which puts him $994.6 million from his goal. Those donors include “technology entrepreneur” Jim Symons, whose co-CEO Robert Mercer, a Republican, was described by the Times the very next day as a “hedge-fund magnate.” These two billionaires are business partners—can’t they both be magnates? Or are some technology entrepreneurs more equal than others?

 

http://freebeacon.com/columns/steven-spielberg-and-the-temple-of-obama/