Posted on 03/16/2012 12:14:13 PM PDT by JennysCool
The almost criminally smarmy "President," following his pointless insult of Rutherford B. Hayes yesterday, had this to say this morning in Chicago:
"My message to all the candidates is 'welcome to the Land of Lincoln.' Maybe some Lincoln will rub off on them while they're here."
What. A. Jerk.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
AO bama?
Well, it didn’t work for Zero, and he was here a lot longer.
Yup.
Maybe that will rub off on obama.
Here’s hoping that a perfectly good ridiculously stupid 0bama vanity thread is not hi-jacked into a stupid FR civil war thread.
I’m pretty sure all the candidates are straight, or else they could go to the bars you used to frequent, Mr. President, and enjoy a lot more rubbing off on them.
Lincoln? Not a big fan.
The deification of King Abe is the biggest crock of historical BS ever foisted upon school children for the past 150 years.
Dittoes! :-)
Dittoes! :-)
Yeah, but think of all the pennies we would have to recall.
Too late - the Lost Cause Losers were here as of #3.
“stupid is, as stupid does” - I ‘d rather have Forrest than Hussein.
He can't produce that in one term, so he gives society a classless President.
In less than one term, he's uttered more insults, taunts, and slanders about his opponents and his predecessors than all the previous Presidents did in 220 years.
Lincoln believed in the ideas of Jefferson and warned future generations on what to do if the nation strayed from those ideas. Perhaps we might remind ourselves of the difference between those ideas and those of the current Administration:
Springfield, Ills, April 6, 1859
Messrs. Henry L. Pierce, & others.
Gentlemen
Your kind note inviting me to attend a Festival in Boston, on the 13th. Inst. in honor of the birth-day of Thomas Jefferson, was duly received. My engagements are such that I can not attend.
Bearing in mind that about seventy years ago, two great political parties were first formed in this country, that Thomas Jefferson was the head of one of them, and Boston the head-quarters of the other, it is both curious and interesting that those supposed to descend politically from the party opposed to Jefferson should now be celebrating his birthday in their own original seat of empire, while those claiming political descent from him have nearly ceased to breathe his name everywhere.
Remembering too, that the Jefferson party were formed upon its supposed superior devotion to the personal rights of men, holding the rights of property to be secondary only, and greatly inferior, and then assuming that the so-called democracy of to-day, are the Jefferson, and their opponents, the anti-Jefferson parties, it will be equally interesting to note how completely the two have changed hands as to the principle upon which they were originally supposed to be divided.
The democracy of to-day hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man's right of property. Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.
I remember once being much amused at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great-coats on, which fight, after a long, and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat, and into that of the other. If the two leading parties of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have perfomed the same feat as the two drunken men.
But soberly, it is now no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation.
One would start with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but, nevertheless, he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society.
And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success.
One dashingly calls them "glittering generalities"; another bluntly calls them "self evident lies"; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to "superior races."
These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect--the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the van-guard--the miners, and sappers--of returning despotism.
We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.
This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers[initiators of threatening change] of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
Your obedient Servant
A. Lincoln--
Source for this reproduction of the letter is
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"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39
"I deem [this one of] the essential principles of our government and consequently [one] which ought to shape its administration:... The honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith." --Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801. ME 3:322
"I sincerely believe... that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816. ME 15:23
"[With the decline of society] begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40
“Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines which conflict with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence…let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountains whose waters spring close to the blood of the Revolution.” (Abraham Lincoln)
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Wasn't Lincoln known as "Honest Abe"?
Now all of you try to say "Honest Barack" out loud five times without laughing.
I bet that you can't do it.
Symbols of national unity only work when they're evoked in a spirit of national unity. When it becomes partisan it leaves an ugly taste in voter's mouths.
Nixon got mocked for the bust of Lincoln that was visible in every broadcast he made from the White House. But Nixon wasn't saying "Lincoln would be on my side." He wasn't explicitly appropriating Lincoln for partisan purposes. Rather, he let voters draw that conclusion (or not) as they saw fit.
FDR's self-identification with Jefferson may strike us as absurd today, but because it was more a matter of implication and inference than of outright appropriation, it went down a lot better than Arthur Schlesinger's more explicit identification of Roosevelt with Andrew Jackson.
As in other matters, sometimes less is more.
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