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Thursday, January 05, 2006

Axe Me Anything
Americans barely know their own history, and even fewer know much English history. Those of us who do can take special enjoyment in these contenders for Quote of the Day (or, more precisely, Quote of Yesterday, but gimme a break):

First quote, which finds DCeiver at Wonkette boiling the standard Pentagon briefing on Iraq down to its most basic form:
[F]reedom is marching, constant elections will soon replace potable water as a source of refreshment, a new Middle Eastern government based on Sharia law is just what the American taxpayers wanted, the Iraqi forces are well on their way to retaking Hadrian's Wall from the Celtic hordes, et cetera, ad infinitum, with liberty and justice for all, strategery.
Hadrian's Wall--a stone fortification completed in the year 132 AD, built to keep various tribes in northern England from joining forces to make mischief in the Roman province of Brittania. Parts of the wall are still extant. We should have built something similar around Texas while we had the chance.

(Parenthetical Aside Number One: With news coming yesterday that Ana Marie Cox is leaving Wonkette to seek greater fame elsewhere, I hope DCeiver gets more exposure. For the last several months, he/she/it has been providing some of the sharpest political commentary this side of The Onion.)

Second quote, from The Poor Man, commenting on the announcement that He Who Shall Not Be Named will ignore the McCain torture ban if he decides it's necessary to do so (which makes the ban meaningless), and two Repug senators' insistence that Congress will strictly monitor what the administration does under the law:
I’ll believe it when I see it. And if I see it, I believe we may finally see the long-awaited collapse of the GOP’s “big tent” - not between the fundamentalist power brokers and their faithful conservatarian rent boys, as had long been expected in some quarters, but between Parliamentarians and Bush Monarchists. Perhaps we shall all party like it’s 1649. Me, I picked the wrong week to quit hittin’ Ye Olde Cracke Rocke.
1649: In the climactic event of the English Civil War, the Parliamentarians behead King Charles I and replace the monarchy with a commonwealth. Good fun, good times.

(Parenthetical Aside Number Two: The history prof who taught me most of what I know about the English Civil War will come either out of retirement or back from the dead and find me if I don't acknowledge that the years following the regicide were, in actuality, neither good fun nor good times. The commonwealth and the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell that followed it were as anti-democratic in their own way as the one-man rule of Charles I had been, and the parliamentarians were as uptight as our own modern Puritans are. Still, for making sure your opponent is good and truly neutralized, you can't beat the headsman's axe.)

Recommended Reading: From Australia, Silent Speaking accepts my invitation to try the meme of seven. Also be sure to read the post on the abortion debate--which is as hot and weird down there as it is up here. I'm still waiting for TK at Paralysis of the Mind to accept my tag for the meme of seven--but he's been busy writing two great year-in-review pieces that are well worth your time: the year in news and the year in pop culture. One of my resolutions for 2006 is to read Paralysis of the Mind more often. I swear.

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