Happy 4th of July from Tony Norman!

Go read his column.

After asserting that I.F. Stone would surely have exposed the Bush Administration's monitoring of international banking transactions, he goes on to trash the Congress and its media lapdog.

When Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert cracked wise at the White House Correspondents Dinner that reporters should continue taking the administration's dictation regarding the war, an indignant Washington press corps took umbrage, insisting Mr. Colbert was rude and unfunny.

But as usual, it took a satirist far removed from D.C.'s daily banalities to intuit the truth. In his ironical way, Mr. Colbert articulated what would become the openly stated policy of the Republican-controlled Congress a few months later: identify as treasonous any news outlet that dares to tell the American people the truth about how the war on terror has gone terribly awry.

And follows with a punch to the gut:

If this Congress, addicted to flag symbolism and gay marriage bans but allergic to actual work, had its way, we wouldn't know about the rendition of suspected terrorists to so-called "black sites" in Europe, warrantless domestic wiretapping or prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

That's exactly the point. Instead of investigating the allegations of abuse by our government (done in our names, of course), Bush's rubber-stamp Congress struts and frets about those few times that the media actually reports about those allegations.

And then accuses the media of treason when it does.

This Congress and this President have never wanted us to know about the human rights abuses, the torture, and the corruption. I'm sure they'd be happy if we just sang Lee Greenwood all the time.

And I’m proud to be an American,
where at least I know I’m free.
And I won't forget the men who died,
who gave that right to me.

I know this is an aside, but the thing that has always bothered me about that passage was how it runs directly contrary to the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

See that? The Founders held it self-evidently true that all men are created equal. No one gave us that freedom. It's "unalienable" according to Jefferson. Greenwood's "men who died" certainly protected but did not give it to us. We are free because we are human.

But let's get back to Tony's column. I think Tony gives us (collectively in the blogosphere) a shout out!

After years of being encouraged to view the news media as just another arm of the vast corporate entertainment complex that rules our lives, it's difficult to think of the Fourth Estate as having a profound role to play in a properly functioning democracy.

With the exception of The Times and a handful of other papers, much of the media is silly and irrelevant. Politicians sense this and have decided to take advantage of it.

Bloggers and documentarians will eventually fill the vacuum if newspapers abandon their historic role out of fear.

Go read the column.

And Happy Fourth!