Red Robin said:
My admiration for each of them Mike is strictly based on their reported integrity, leadership and decision making skills. Seems like all three qualities are MIA in our society. We have a bunch of McClellans and Shermans running our country in both parties at all levels. I guess that's what we get for losing. If only we could have got the cotton sold...
And Lincoln's:
History tells us that Lincoln was a politically ambitious
lawyer who eagerly prostituted himself to northern industrialists
who were unwilling to pay world prices for their raw materials and
who, rather than practice real capitalism, enlisted brute government
force -- "sell to us at our price or pay a fine that'll put you out
of business" -- for dealing with uncooperative southern suppliers.
That's what a tariff's all about. In support of this "noble
principle", when southerners demonstrated what amounted to no more
than token resistance, Lincoln permitted an internal war to begin
that butchered more Americans than all of this country's foreign
wars -- before or afterward -- rolled into one.
Lincoln saw the introduction of total war on the American
continent -- indiscriminate mass slaughter and destruction without
regard to age, gender, or combat status of the victims -- and
oversaw the systematic shelling and burning of entire cities for
strategic and tactical purposes. For the same purposes, Lincoln
declared, rather late in the war, that black slaves were now free in
the south -- where he had no effective jurisdiction -- while
declaring at the same time, somewhat more quietly but for the record
nonetheless, that if maintaining slavery could have won his war for
him, he'd have done that, instead.
The fact is, Lincoln didn't abolish slavery at all, he
nationalized it, imposing income taxation and military conscription
upon what had been a free country before he took over -- income
taxation and military conscription to which newly "freed" blacks
soon found themselves subjected right alongside newly-enslaved
whites. If the civil war was truly fought against slavery -- a
dubious, "politically correct" assertion with no historical evidence
to back it up -- then clearly, slavery won.
Lincoln brought secret police to America, along with the
traditional midnight "knock on the door", illegally suspending the
Bill of Rights and, like the Latin America dictators he anticipated,
"disappearing" thousands in the north whose only crime was that they
disagreed with him. To finance his crimes against humanity, Lincoln
allowed the printing of worthless paper money in unprecedented
volumes, ultimately plunging America into a long, grim depression --
in the south, it lasted half a century -- he didn't have to live
through, himself.
In the end, Lincoln didn't unite this country -- that can't be
done by force -- he divided it along lines of an unspeakably ugly
hatred and resentment that continue to exist almost a century and a
half after they were drawn. If Lincoln could have been put on trial
in Nuremburg for war crimes, he'd have received the same sentence as
the highest-ranking Nazis.
If libertarians ran things, they'd melt all the Lincoln
pennies, shred all the Lincoln fives, take a wrecking ball to the
Lincoln Memorial, and consider erecting monuments to John Wilkes
Booth. Libertarians know Lincoln as the worst President America has
ever had to suffer, with Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and
Lyndon Johnson running a distant second, third, and fourth.
Conservatives, on the other hand, adore Lincoln, publicly
admire his methods, and revere him as the best President America
ever had. One wonders: is this because they'd like to do, all over
again, all of the things Lincoln did to the American people?
Judging from their taste for executions as a substitute for
individual self-defense, their penchant for putting people behind
bars -- more than any other country in the world, per capita, no
matter how poorly it works to reduce crime -- and the bitter
distaste they display for Constitutional "technicalities" like the
exclusionary rule, which are all that keep America from becoming the
world's largest banana republic, one is well-justified in wondering.
The troubling truth is that, more than anybody else's, Abraham
Lincoln's career resembles and foreshadows that of V.I. Lenin, who,
with somewhat better technology at his disposal, slaughtered
millions of innocents -- rather than mere hundreds of thousands --
to enforce an impossibly stupid idea which, in the end, like forced
association, was proven by history to be a resounding failure.
Abraham Lincoln was America's Lenin, and when America has finally
absorbed that painful but illuminating truth, it will finally have
begun to recover from the War between the States.