Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Don't Give up The Quote

My wife wished me to post this article about Senator Byrd's opposition to the Homeland Security Bill:

"This mon-stros-ity," Mr. Byrd has been calling the bill, repeatedly lifting its 484 pages above his head with trembling hands and flinging them down on his desk with the fury of Moses smashing the tablets. Mr. Byrd used to be known less for his distaste of federal bureaucracy than for his love of federal aid %u2014 he once vowed to be West Virginia's "billion-dollar industry," while his critics crowned him the "prince of pork." But now he is riffing against big government.

"Osama bin Laden is still alive and plotting more attacks while we play bureaucratic shuffleboard," Mr. Byrd told the Senate. "With a battle plan like the Bush administration is proposing, instead of crossing the Delaware River to capture the Hessian soldiers on Christmas Day, George Washington would have stayed on his side of the river and built a bureaucracy." Mr. Byrd imagined Nathan Hale declaring, "I have but one life to lose for my bureaucracy," and Commodore Oliver Perry hoisting a flag on his ship with the rallying cry, "Don't give up the bureaucracy!"

My reaction: "it would be less of a bureaucracy with civil service employment rules?"

The wife's reaction: It was James Lawrence who uttered those famous words, which Perry carried on the flag of his ship - a ship named after lawrence. A common mistake.

Interestingly for Byrd and the Homeland Security debate, Perry is actually famous for saying "we have met the enemy and they are ours", later appropriated with alteration in Pogo.

So there.

Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at November 20, 2002 9:24 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links