Bush Inbox lets you read, write, rate, and comment on open letters to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Karl Rove. We call these open letters “emails” to perpetuate the fantasy that these emails — the ones addressed to Bush — will be waiting for him in his Inbox as soon as he leaves office and logs on to his email account for the first time since 2001. This premise is explained better on our home page.

You got it. They are more like forum or blog posts.

Here’s hoping. If we hear of a valid email address for Bush or any of the others, be assured we will forward the emails posted here on to them. In the meantime, we can imagine them reading them here on Bush Inbox.

If you hear of an address, let us know.

The emails on Bush Inbox are open letters — they are intended to be read by the public. If you were to send your email privately without posting it here, it wouldn’t be open.

That said, you might want to send your open letter privately in addition to posting it here. For the record, the current official email addresses for this not so fabulous four are

• George Bush — president@whitehouse.gov
• Dick Cheney — vice_president@whitehouse.gov
• Condoleezza Rice — secretary@state.gov
• Karl Rove — ??? something @foxnews.com ?

Good point. Many will find it helpful, though, to blow off steam — get it off their chests — here before volunteering to campaign.

In the right-wing magazine The Weekly Standard, Bush was quoted as having said that before he became president, he “stayed in touch with all kinds of people around the country, firing off emails at all times of the day”. While one must be skeptical of anything Bush says, we think he’s being truthful about this.

According to the same article, Bush told reporters in the spring of this year “he eagerly looked forward to signing on [to email] again” once he leaves office.

Latin American media reported in late 2006 that Bush or his father had bought a 100,000-acre farm in a remote area of northern Paraguay. Because Paraguay has no extradition treaty with any nation, it has for decades been a safe haven for aging Nazis, such as Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann, and numerous ousted or retired dictators. More here.

Based on the lack of accountability Bush has had for his actions during his presidency, it unfortunately seems unlikely he will feel pressured to flee the United States. But it’s fun to think about, and it makes the premise of Bush Inbox more compelling.

Submit your email using the Write form. The right-hand end of the horizontal navigation bar on every page has a “Write Email” link to the Write form. On each Inbox page, there is also a “Write to” link — for example, “Write to Bush”.

All fields on the Write form are required. When you’re done filling in the form, click the Preview button to preview your submission. If you’re satisfied with the preview, scroll down and click the “Send” button to make your submission. If you want to make further changes, make them in the form and then click Preview or “Send”. There is no limit to the number of times you can preview a submission.

It’s the QuickTags bar. You can use it to insert HTML tags in the body of your email. You can also type tags manually. If you don’t know HTML, don’t worry — HTML tags are not required. All you really need to know is that to start a new paragraph, press Enter twice (on a Mac press Return twice).

• Any images in your emails must be either hosted by your own hosting account or by one of the following image hosting services:
  • allyoucanupload.com
  • editgrid.com
  • flickr.com
  • imageshack.us
  • mac.com
  • photobucket.com
  • picturetrail.com
  • smugmug.com
  • webshots.com
• Copying and pasting entire copyrighted works is prohibited. If you do quote something, keep it brief, always provide a link to the original source, and use the <blockquote> tags (QuickTag “Quote”) to clearly identify the quoted material. Ignoring this guideline is grounds for immediate banning.
• Don’t use profanity in the Subject field.
• If you must use profanity in the body, do so judiciously and intelligently. Granted, this guideline is challenging for some users to follow. Fair warning: moderators will delete submissions containing excessive profanity.
• Don’t write emails whose main purpose is to deliberately inflame other users.

Yes, but the assumed name must be that of a well-known public figure and the content of the email must be relevant to the relationship between that person and the addressee (Bush, Cheney, Rice, or Rove).

No, not yet, but it’s on our to-do list.

The guidelines for commenting are analogous to those for submitting emails. We don’t require civility, but moderators will delete ad hominem attacks on other users.

Yes. Here’s the list. Omit the quotes and put a space before and after.

emoticon	type this	or this	or this
	“:)”	“:-)”	“:smile:”
	“:D”	“:-D”	“:grin:”
	“:(”	“:-(”	“:sad:”
	“:o”	“:-o”	“:eek:”
	“8O”	“8-O”	“:shock:”
	“:?”	“:-?”	“:???:”
	“8)”	“8-)”	“:cool:”
	“:x”	“:-x”	“:mad:”
	“:P”	“:-P”	“:razz:”
	“:|”	“:-|”	“:neutral:”
	“;)”	“;-)”	“:wink:”
	“:lol:”
	“:oops:”
	“:cry:”
	“:evil:”
	“:twisted:”
	“:roll:”
	“:!:”
	“:?:”
	“:idea:”
	“:arrow:”
	“:mrgreen:”

At the top of the body of an email, look for the band of five stars. To rate an email, click the star that corresponds to your rating. To assign the worst possible rating of one star, click the leftmost star. To assign the best possible rating of five stars, click the rightmost star.

Yes — Microsoft Office Outlook 2007.

It’s kind of unusual these days, isn’t it? We figured — who needs another login to keep track of. But it’s not a decision we reached cavalierly, and we may change our mind at some point. Read more about this in this post on our blog.

There are indeed some advanced search capabilities:

• To search for an exact phrase, wrap it in quotes — for example, “Abu Ghraib”.
• * is a wildcard character. For example, to find all words that start with “head”, search head*.
• + marks a word to require and – marks a word to exclude. For example, +headline means “headline” will be present in all search results; –headline means “headline” will be absent from all search results.
• You can use the logical operators AND and OR. For example, headline AND veto is equivalent to +headline +veto.

• Linux operating system
• Apache Web server
• WordPress, scripted in the PHP scripting language, and reliant upon the MySQL relational database management system.
• plugin extensions for WordPress by the following developers:
  • “The Dead One” (don’t you love it?) aka Mark Cunningham (Thank you, thank you, thank you!)
  • Lester “GaMerZ” Chan
  • John Godley
  • MountainGrafix
  • Joachim Praetorius
  • Vladimir Prelovac
  • Scott Reilly
  • Oliver Schlöbe
  • Bas van Doren
  • Michael Woehrer

• WordPress theme — “Blueprint” by Joshua Sowin, modified in house. The Blueprint theme is based on the Blueprint CSS Framework and includes Fam Fam Fam Silk icons.
• Color palette — “Seattle” by ColourLovers.com “lover” “FlamingMyst”, slightly modified in house to make it consistent with the Microsoft Outlook Office 2007 color palette.
• logo — designed in house using SiteSpinner
• RSS feed icons — FeedIcons.com
• pencil icon — The Lila Community via Iconlet.com
• address bar icon (“favicon.ico”) — Dynamic Drive Favicon Generator
• inbox heading gradient background — Dynamic Drive Gradient Image Maker

You can’t yet. We are planning to open an online store, though.

“We”, as used in this FAQ, is — for now — one person: Jon Brams, doing business as QCB Media. Read more about Jon on his personal blog, Quiet Clown.

Post a comment on this FAQ. If your inquiry must remain private, send an email.