Those Bush Portraits Just Have to Go

Barack Obama has plenty to do, but could he take on one more teensy little job? Because those Bush portraits just must come down, Michael Wiseman writes in the Washington Post. Way back in February 2001, the Bush administration rolled out an unusually high portrait deployment, plastering pictures of the president, vice president, and officials in every federal agency. “It’s time to call those troops home," writes Wiseman.

One British journalist said he had seen such portrait fetishism in only one other place: Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, for example, has plastered some 73 photos of administration stalwarts outside her office, including 39 of herself. Those images, and many, many more are all public property, and ought to be auctioned off: “The money raised might be used, in part, to restore the lights in the Roosevelt Memorial.” (More Bush legacy stories.)