Till he gets his new SMU digs are done, George W. Bush is keeping his stuff in storage in Lewisville, and along with his futon, "grown-up" dresser and collection of framed mid-'80s Tom Cruise movie posters is Saddam Hussein's pistol -- quite the keepsake, as this is the very (unloaded) gun the Iraqi leader had on him when he was yanked out of his spider hole back in '03. According to this morning's New York Times, the former president kept the pistol close by when he was in the Oval Office, and he's likely to put it on display in his Hilltop presidential library come 2013.
Mark Langdale, the president of the George W. Bush Foundation, tells the paper that the pistol might rank among the items used "to highlight 25 of Mr. Bush's presidential decisions." And historian Doug Brinkley has a theory about that:
"It represents this Texas notion of the white hats taking out the black hats and keeping the trophy. It's a True West magazine kind of pulp western mentality. For President Bush, this pistol represents his greatest moment of triumph, like the F.B.I. keeping Dillinger's gun. He wants people generations from now to see the gun and say, 'He got the bad guy.' "
