Happy May/Loyalty/Mission Accomplish Day!

It's a couple of hours late, but the Mavs/Warrior series is ruling my world and I don't even live in Europe. With the Lakers all but eliminated and the focus being who is going to be blown out when the team is blown up (Lamar, really?), the great drama left is that shocking grudge match. Game 6 in Oakland Thursday = Game 7.

But yesterday might be more noteworthy for the clusterfuck of observances/anniversaries that happen on May 1st. It was the fourth year anniversary of the fantastic "Mission Accomplish" speech, which Bush now claims wasn't really a mission accomplish speech. It's mostly noteworthy for a specific example of just how glorious our glorious leader once was (and how well everything has actually turned out!). People on television, who are still on television, actually said things like this:

MATTHEWS: We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like [former President Bill] Clinton or even like [former Democratic presidential candidates Michael] Dukakis or [Walter] Mondale, all those guys, [George] McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits. We don't want an indoor prime minister type, or the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians, or a [Russian Federation President Vladimir] Putin. Can you imagine Putin getting elected here? We want a guy as president.

I don't know if Matthews knows this, but Putin actually is a guy. A guy who will kill you with low grade radioactive waste and then suggest his enemies killed you just to make him look guilty. They don't say Putin '08 for nothing!

May 1st is also May Day and this year marks the one year anniversary of the enormous, politically earthshaking immigration march in LA and elsewhere. Guestavo Arellano has a very interesting op-ed in the LA Times about how huge those protest were, essentially saying the immigration "debate" and immigrants won. I want to believe this is true, but I don't think any of us are in the mood of believing progress actually happens.

Especially on Loyalty Day. AT sent this to me not believing something like this was for real, until she found a similar resolution from Clinton. It does sound way weird, but after doing some in-depth research (on wikipedia), I confirmed what I originally suspected: Loyalty Day is capitalism's answer to May Day. For real. Supposedly it was first celebrated in 1921 when it was called "Americanization Day". For real. Too bad that name never caught on, otherwise we would read headlines like "Large groups of protesters demand amnesty on Americanization Day". That way it would probably be harder to vilify people who wish to become Americans and have lived in America for years for being "illegal", lazy, and untrustworthy.

It would be harder, but not impossible.