WASHINGTON—What is left of the Bush Administration today unveiled a multi-faceted long-term plan for shaping not only how people remembered his Presidency but to also rehabilitate the parts of his legacy that citizens have not permanently blocked from their collective memory. The plan, dubbed Project: That Same Thing We Did With Reagan, will be slowly rolled out over the next few months. While some insiders note that there will be little to no change in how people view the 43rd President and his Administration in the short term, the overarching goal of this project is to reshape public and historical opinion twenty to thirty years down the line.
“We are aware of how things must look to people now,” observed project leader David Bollard. “But they aren’t taking the long-term view. As Condi, the President and really anyone who has tried to mitigate the damage to their careers and personal lives while speaking on behalf of the Administration for the past year has said, we all feel that everything we have done will be vindicated by history. But we aren’t just going to sit back and let the liberal historical elite make those judgments; we’ve got to start working now to ensure that the urine content of Mr. Bush’s future gravesite will be kept to an absolute minimum.”
Project leaders have noted that while a formal declaration of the legacy initiative was only announced today, the administration’s work had already stretched back years. They point to the failure to fund No Child Left Behind and decreasing world education rankings as a sign that future children might not even be able to read, let alone comprehend a snooty tome about the Iraq war by some pampered cyborg David McCullough.
Additionally, nearly a decade of mandatory dishonesty in every facet of governance and media relations has, they assume, dealt critical damage to the concepts of context, meaning, word definitions, time, space, reality, and the nature of communication.
“A few more years and we might have been able to rewrite the meaning of language,” sighed a despondent Karl Rove. “But I think we’ve severely damaged the underlying structure. I’d like to see some future pundit try and argue that Katrina was a fiasco when one of our legacy drones simultaneously argues that New Orleans was a myth and that the Washington Monument is really a statue built to commemorate the bold and decisive action Bush took during the crisis. Let’s see the future masses try and get a handle on what was happening during this period when they’re bombarded by that kind of shit.”
While the project is meant to rehabilitate George Bush and his administration, some key figures will not have their reputations mended by the project. For example, Donald Rumsfeld will be edited out of all official White House documents, while his image in all photographs will be replaced by photoshopped plants. Official records and accounts of Colin Powell will slowly be morphed into the records and accounts of Barack Obama, thereby melding the two into one under the guise that “they all look alike” and casting the election of the first black President as a triumphant endorsement of the Bush Administration.
As for Vice-President Dick Cheney, his actions will remain unchanged and unedited. In fact a pictographic history of his deeds will be carved onto a seven story jade obelisk and placed at the center of Washington DC as a warning to all. Rumors and legends will be spread and children will fear his name and violent retribution. Cheney himself will be allowed to return to his fortress to sleep for a thousand years, hibernating in the foul earth, awaiting the call of the Elder Gods so he can awake and bathe the planet is his horror once again.
But project leaders have placed the most hope for legacy redemption into a series of two foot by four foot lead tablets. On these series of tablets will be inscribed an alternate history of the past eight years, one filled with triumphs, successes, peace, competent decision making, and free puppies with free candy in their mouths and free balloons attached to their free collars. These tablets will be buried at over two hundred different sites worldwide.
The hope? “Look, we may be craven liars but we’re well aware of the state of the country right now,” observed Mr. Bollard. “Our projections have the survival of this country and consequently the world pegged at about 50%. So in the likely event that society is negated and the human race dies out because… say… the President traded some smallpox to Syria for an autographed Nolan Ryan baseball, then we have a contingency. When aliens survey the ruins of our once great civilization they will come across the tablets and, provided they take the time to figure out our language, learn of the ‘legacy’ of George W. Bush. Try countering that, Huffington Post!”
Project leaders hope to have the first phase completed before the complete collapse of centralized global leadership and the dissolution of the United States. If America exists in June they hope to further the rollout with pundit spots on Meet the Press and This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
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