Outgoing prez seeks shills for legacy-padding-- earn big $$$ today!

Although the very concept of a $500 million George W Bush will launch a thousand jokes, there's something all-too-typical about the contents. And they'll certainly reflect his administration. Maybe they could just call it the Potemkin Library.

The half-billion target is double what Bush raised for his 2004 reelection and dwarfs the funding of other presidential libraries. But Bush partisans are determined to have a massive pile of endowment cash to spread the gospel of a presidency that for now gets poor marks from many scholars and a majority of Americans.

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.