Sewage plant may ‘honour’ Bush

REAGAN has his highways. Lincoln has his memorial. Washington has the capital, and a state, too. But President George W Bush may soon be the sole president to have a memorial named after him that you can contribute to from the bathroom.

From the Department of Damned-With-Faint-Praise, a group going by the regal-sounding name of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is planning to ask voters to change the name of a prize-winning water-treatment plant on the shoreline to the George W Bush Sewage Plant.

The plan would place a vote on the November ballot to provide “an appropriate honour for a truly unique president.”

Supporters insist that they have plenty of signatures to qualify the initiative. “Most politicians tend to be narcissistic and egomaniacs,” said Brian McConnell, an organiser who regularly suits up as Uncle Sam to solicit signatures. “So it is important for satirists to help define their history rather than letting them define their own history.”

Howard Epstein, chairman of the San Francisco Republican Party, called the initiative “an abuse of process“.

“You got a bunch of guys drunk who came up with an idea,” Epstein said, “and want to put on the ballot as a big joke“.

The renaming would take effect on January 20, when a new president is sworn in when supporters plan a “synchronised flush” of hundreds of thousands of toilets that would send a flood of water toward the plant, now named the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant.