MOIST
I recieved this along with a basket of wings. I thought it was funny (read the text carefully).
This article also made me happy.
Indie rocks
Beau Elliot - The Daily Iowan
Posted: 7/11/06
It's almost Independence Day, as Van Morrison used to sing. Well, OK, Independence Day has come and gone, with all of its flags, fireworks, and foofaraw - though one could probably make the argument that, living in a republic, as we still pretty much do, every day should be Independence Day.
(I wrote that line on July 3; the next day, President Bush used almost exactly the same words, proving, I guess, that even he and I can agree on something. Talk about a relative universe.)
Oddly enough, nothing much happened on July 4, 1776 - at least in the sense of being the birthday of American independence. According to historian David McCullough, the Declaration of Independence was not signed that day - in fact, the delegates to the Continental Congress spent several months adding their signatures to the document, with the last one coming in January 1777. That Congress did ratify the document in July 1776 - on July 2. On July 4, 1776, the Congress authorized the printing of the declaration.
So our Independence Day could just as easily be called Printing Day.
Somehow, it just doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?
But then, so little does, anymore.
For instance, Patrick Henry, in his famous speech, never uttered the words "Give me liberty, or give me death."
Yeah, I know - it's kind of like learning that Marilyn Monroe wasn't truly blonde. (OK, I admit; I'm not old enough to know that for sure.)
I've been thinking about independence lately - well, we just had the day (though I'm not quite sure why Independence Day isn't Sept. 3, the date in 1783 on which Britain and the American colonies signed the treaty that officially ended the American Revolutionary War and, pretty much, established the United States.)
But I've also been thinking about independence because of some odd events recently. Granted, odd events seem to occur all the time (or at least often enough that they almost become commonplace, and you wonder why we call them odd). This event started on June 23, when the New York Times (and the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times) reported that the United States, through a Belgian outfit called Swift, was attempting to covertly track the financial dealings of terrorists.
The White House reaction was, well, swift. That day, White House spokesman Tony Snow described the reporting as "… interesting, because I think there's a fair amount of balance in the story in that you do have concrete benefits and you do have the kind of abstract harms that were mentioned in there" (From Frank Rich of the New York Times).
By June 26, however, the right wing had rediscovered its venom; the Bush administration changed its tune and said the New York Times' story was a boon to terrorists ("a fair amount of balance" apparently having disappeared from the White House vocabulary). Rep. Peter King and Sen. Jim Bunning, both Republicans, accused the Times of treason (an accusation, oddly, that apparently didn't apply to the conservative Journal or the LA Times). And a right-wing talking head said that if NY Times Executive Editor Bill Keller were convicted of treason, she "… would have no problem with him being sent to the gas chamber."
The gas chamber? What country do we live in, celebrating independence?
What's curious about all this, if not odd, is that the aforementioned King led a hearing in September 2004 that featured a Treasury Department official describing how the agency was tracking terrorists' financial activities. For that matter, in September 2001, President Bush told us all that the United States was monitoring Al Qaeda's financial activities, and in November 2002, he and then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill made a big deal, addressing the media, about the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center, which would, as Bush said, "… investigate the financial infrastructure of the international terrorist networks."
So how, exactly, did the NY Times commit "treason"?
And frankly, if the terrorists were getting all their information about the United States from the New York Times, they'd be pretty easy to beat. (For one thing, courtesy of the pre-Iraq war "reporting" of the Times' Judith Miller, they would have believed that Iraq had WMD. Ha-ha, terrorists. Fooled you.)
Odd thing, independence.
Seems to get odder every day. But then, every day is Independence Day.
Beau Elliot believes independence tastes best chased by a smidgen of Irish whiskey.