Oh look, it's Monarchs' Day!

Well, actually, No. But it is getting harder to tell every time Congress rolls over and plays dead. It was nice to see the House tell Bush to shove it this week.

I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy.
--George Washington's Farewell Address (1796)
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
--Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863)

I want to remind you all that in order to fight and win the war, it requires an expenditure of money that is commiserate with keeping a promise to our troops to make sure that they're well-paid, well-trained, well-equipped.

--George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Dec. 15, 2003

I believe he was speaking of the troops whose combat pay was reduced, who had inferior body armor and inadequately armed vehicles, and whose training is being cut short and are being redeployed with insufficient R&R--not by the choice of the American People or Congress but by his administration policies.
--the BB