http://www.mcclatchydc.com/338/story/59958.html
Pitts: Lincoln might not have welcomed Obama’s election
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Actually, Lincoln likely would have been appalled. How could he not? He was a 19th century white man who famously said in 1858 that “there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which . . . will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality.”
How do you reconcile that with all those cartoons of Lincoln congratulating Obama? You don’t. You simply recognize it for what it is: yet another illustration of how shallow our comprehension of history is, yet another instance where myth supersedes reality.
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Of course, Lincoln freed no slaves. That’s the myth. His Emancipation Proclamation was a military measure to demoralize and destabilize the rebellious South; it covered states he did not govern but did not apply in slaveholding states that remained under his jurisdiction.
None of which is to deny or diminish the greatness of the 16th president. His greatness stands unquestioned, unquestionable. We would be a very different nation, a lesser nation, without his political genius, his dogged faith in the unsundered Union, his refusal to accept less than Union, even when haunted by reversals and setbacks that would have broken anyone else.
No, the argument is not about Lincoln’s greatness.
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But, it should be!
Lincoln is up there on my list of “Worst American Presidents”.
As a corrupt Illinois politician who was in bed with more than the railroads, one has to take not of the following:
(1) The War of Northern Aggression. What you call the Civil War. What some call the Second American Revolution. The is no Constitutional, legal, or moral justification for this war. That alone would rocket him too the top of the list.
(2) Income tax to pay for that war. Government debt too.
(3) Freedom of Press savaged when editors dared to criticism him.
(4) Atrocities against civilian populations like Sherman’s “March to the Sea”.
(5) Single handedly destroying the concept of a Union of Equals amd morphing into the USA as the tyrant state.
And, don’t forget, he want to send all the “Negros” back to Africa. A racist among his other “endearing” qualities.
Those are just my uneducated points. There are much smarted folks than I who can give you “Chapter and Verse” about Lincoln.
But, don’t disturb the sheeple.
One of these days I should codify my “worst list”!
But that’s hard on the old BP.
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Posted by reinkefj 
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