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Originally Posted by dmelvin1786 The campaign strategy of Barack Hussein Obama, the lean and tall junior United States Senator from Illinois — to pose as a politician in the Lincoln tradition — is as absurd as it is apparent:
Some people don't learn from the mistakes of others.
Remember former Vice President Dan Quayle being told by Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas in the 1988 vice presidential debate that he was "no Jack Kennedy"?
Likewise, Senator Obama is no Abe Lincoln and he should not pretend to be Lincolnesque.
Abraham Lincoln said: "Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good." Response to a Serenade, November 10, 1864.
Lincoln was right.
Senator Obama is weak and silly, and not good for America.
Of his early childhood, Senator Obama wrote: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me — that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk — barely registered in my mind." As a teenager supposedly struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage, he used marijuana and cocaine to "push questions of who I was out of my mind."
Hardly a confidence boaster.
Republican Lincoln, no quitter, would find the suggestion that Democrat Senator Obama is Lincolnesque ludicrous.
In 1864 the "big issue" was the war. The Democrats nominated General George McClellan, who had been relieved of his duties by Lincoln early in the war because he wasn't accomplishing much. McClellan ran on a platform calling Lincoln a "social tyrant" and calling the Emancipation Proclamation "a radical step that didn't address the problems inherent in freeing thousands of slaves."
Fortunately, Lincoln found the right general (Ulysses S. Grant) in time.
Today, almost nobody remembers what McClellan said in the presidential campaign of 1864. They remember Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and his Gettysburg address, in which Lincoln rightly resolved that "these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
As a presidential aspirant in 1860, Lincoln declared: "Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it." Address, Cooper Union, New York, February 27, 1860.
Senator Osama is not that daring (or caring).
As President struggling to preserve the Union, Lincoln called for unity and responsibility: "If there ever could be a proper time for mere catch arguments, that time surely is not now. In times like the present, men [he would add women today] should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity." Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.
Senator Osama is not calling for unity and responsibility.
President Lincoln called for sacrifice: "Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the last generation. We say that we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We — even we here — hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — notable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail." Second Annual Message to Congress.
Senator Obama would rather sacrifice the enormous investment already made in Iraq and accept the dire consequences of premature withdrawal.
President Lincoln's poignant prayer for peace contained a crucial caveat: "Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" Second Presidential Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865.
Senator Obama wants to withdraw before the job is done.
President Lincoln famously said: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." Second Presidential Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865.
Senator Obama is opportunistically calling for being finished with the work in Iraq, not finishing it, and eschewing the "just and lasting peace" that can only follow if the work is finished.
He's just Barack Hussein Obama, not a Lincoln.
Osama knows it and Saddam would know it (if he was not dead).
by: Michael J. Gaynor |
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