Posted on 02/06/2007 10:16:07 AM PST by Hillary'sMoralVoid
Honest Abe was depressed. The War was going badly, his polls were in the toilet, all the major newspapers were on his case. What to do, he wondered? Maybe it was prayer, or maybe divine intercession, but he had an inspiration!
The war had become simply a war between North and South, somehow the defining issue was lost in the fog of war. That issue was the immorality of slavery. While abolishment of slavery was not a universally supported ideal, even in the North, it provided a simple crucible -- a clear choice between right and wrong.
By taking the moral high ground, Lincoln redefined the war. This gave the country something to rally around. The rest is history.
President Bush, take note! We have a moral imperative in Iraq. We promised freedom and democracy. We promised this even at the cost of the lives of our sons and daughters. Great civilizations believe in their principles, great civilizations don't break promises they make to their friends, great civilizations help other civilizations become great.
Mr. President, you can win this war! Seek the higher ground! Let your detractors wallow in the smallness of their arguments! Give us a reason to win!
Good Idea. Abe also switched to fighting generals Grant and Sherman to name a few.
The President gave us all the right reasons why we have to win the war in Iraq because first and foremost it is for the very interest of the United States, our freedom, and our way of life, even more so than the Iraqi people. We are fighting in Iraq primarily for ourselves and our national security. President Bush has not been distracted by the traitors and defeatists mostly on the left wing liberal side and some on our side. He has shown great leadership and for this he and our brave troops need our full support to achieve the ultimate victory.
the civil was was less about slavery than it was about preserving the union. slavery existed since the founding, the civil war didn't come about until the south secceeded.
Sounds good, but the causes of the war of Northern Agression was due to the restrictive taxes and tarriffs levied on the Southern states by the Northern states in an attempt to keep Britan out of the textile trade that the Northerners were trying to protect after the invention of the cotton gin and bailer. thats not what the revisionists want you to think, though.
Exactly right.
Northern textile manufacturing was practically 100% dependent on Southern cotton. Think of Mass., Conn., and R.I.
Also, the Northeast was the shipping capital of the western hemisphere. With Southern goods all prepared to go directly to Europe on European or Southern ships, the New York shippers, bankers, and insurers were facing staggering losses.
But one more thing..........access to the West. Would it come through New York or New Orleans? Big mess for Northern businesses.
That is when they went to Washington to pledge the state militias to Lincoln and the Union army.
No, the war did not start with secession. It started as soon as the North learned the real losses they were about to experience.
Horsepuckey.
Heh, heh, heh... Get the popcorn!
Abolishing slavery was a political move to give a moral legitimacy to the war... an afterthought on a recruiting poster.
Huh?
And bombarding the crap out of Sumter had nothing to do with it, huh?
Unfotunately, that cute, simple-minded, politically-correct idea is historically false.
Lincoln's proclamation freed only the slaves in the south, and, more significantly, Lincoln is on record as saying, essentially, that slavery was inconsequential, even acceptable, but what he could not abide was the destruction of the Union.
Although the writer's thesis of the war's START is wrong, I think that the slavery issue WAS a key in keeping support for the war and to bring it to an END.
I was trying to find Lincoln's poll numbers back during the Civil War but couldn't find any - but I believe they were much lower than what President Bush's are. Our newspaper had an article and editorials comparing Bush to other "failed" presidents with low poll numbers.
About as much as the Union troops shooting the crap out of the Florida militia three months earlier.
Bush still isn't fighting to win in Iraq. He wants to put in fairly little effort and get post WWII results. To win in Iraq, we have to be brutal--not barbaric, but brutal--and Bush just doesn't have the guts to do it.
He certainly have the guts to do it and he is doing it else he would have folded under the pressure from defeatists and traitors at home including some defeatist conservative who hide under the cover of “Macho Talk” as you are doing here.
PS: In WW II we lost 410,000 troops. The defeatists including the phony “Macho Talk” conservatives do not even have the guts to accept a loss of 3000 heroes who died in Iraq.
The federal troops fired on militia attacking the fort. They acted in self-defense.
If he had the guts, there would be more troops and he would have come down hard on the insurgents instead of tring to play nice (take Falujah for example). If he had the guts, we would have stood Saddam up before a military tribunal and shot him in short order instead of setting up an Iraqi trial for PR purposes. Bush's measures have been half-measures, taken so that "we won't look mean."
including some defeatist conservatives who hide under the cover of “Macho Talk” as you are doing here.
A defeatist is someone who believes defeat is inevitable, which is not what I believe. What I do believe is that Bush wants complete victory but is unwilling to take the extreme measures that are required to meet that goal. If you want victory in Iraq (and, since we're there, we might as well win), you need to be brutal--not barbaric, but brutal. Taking the WWII occupation as a model, here is what I think it takes: trying and executing the leadership ourselves, crushing any insurgency with the utmost severity, disgracing Islam (ulitmately, Islam is the problem; we will never get the pro-US democracy in the middle east under Islam), and running the government ourselves until we deem it time to leave (I say this because Bush has been in a big hurry to prove that the Iraqis are ready to take control and to turn over whatever control he could to them; truth be told, he's rushing it).
PS: In WW II we lost 410,000 troops. The defeatists including the phony “Macho Talk” conservatives do not even have the guts to accept a loss of 3000 heroes who died in Iraq.
I believe it is the MSM you mean here. While losing 3,000 lives is terrible, it is pretty small when you look at wars in general. In the American Civil War, both sides lost ~500,000 troops.
As an endnote, you seem to think that anyone who disagrees with Bush is a defeatist. This is hardly true. Even on the leftist side of the aisle, there is a difference between a pacifist and a defeatist. Both are wrong, but they are wrong in different ways and for different reasons.
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