My first meme

MEME

Gifted by Hoarded Ordinaries author, Lorianne (linked in title above):
"Recently Les tapped me for another blog meme, the rules of which are as follows.

1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post.
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five other people to do the same."

My 23 post was "Why am I not surprised?," written on June 2, 2005.

This is the 5th sentence: "Read the British government's internal memo on the matter, now called the "Downing Street memo."

I did a bit of research on what's going on with this now. There is still a blog called "The Downing Street Memo," but the last post on it was June 12 of this year. This Downing Street Memo site is current. Here is a good article by Julie Hollar and Peter Hart about the U.S. media coverage of this story.

Our current president is still trying to justify the war, and his recent speaking about Iraq and the war on terror generated some interesting letters to the editor in The New York Times.

These letters bring me back to the question/title of my 23rd post, 'why am I not surprised?' It doesn't surprise me that OCP (our current president) is now trying yet another twist on the why of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. These kinds of speeches distorting the truth began prior to the invasion. They are still happening. You can look for another one, trying to distract our attention, the next time the administration is in trouble about something again.

"Voila!" I just figured out. This administration's tactic of trotting out the same old thought in a new incarnation has become a MEME itself. It has become "a unit of imitation," "language as a virus," self-replicating, as Wikipedia explains the term:

In casual use, the term meme often refers to any piece of information passed from one mind to another. This usage more closely resembles the analogy of "language as a virus" than Dawkins' analogy of memes as replicating units. This definition has come into popular use on the Internet to refer to phenomena such as Obey Giant, "All your base
are belong to us", Blogebrity and Icy Hot Stuntaz.