Commentary: Hijacking Lincoln & Kennedy

John Kennedy wouldn’t be a Republican if he lived today.  I’m so sick of hearing otherwise from conservative friends.  The man did cut some tax rates but these had been running high for several years following a global war and a war in Korea.  As for global war he nearly started another one.  He was a serial adulterer and we now know he committed statutory rape by seducing a White House intern.  Despite putting on a show about his then conservative Roman Catholic faith he was liberal on the social issues of his day.  Had Kennedy had buckteeth and a pockmarked face conservatives wouldn’t keep wishing him into our ranks.

I bring this up after reading a great column by William McGurn at the Wall Street Journal, which you can see here.  Liberals are now attempting to adopt Abraham Lincoln as their own.  As if they knew the man!  McGurn cites examples of where Lincoln spoke publicly about self-reliance and giving people the space to make a living without government confiscating piles of personal earnings.  Lincoln doesn’t get much respect either from the far right which only makes Lefty more eager to claim him.  Can I help settle the score in today’s terms?  If Cuba suddenly shelled Guantanamo should the U.S. President respond with overwhelming force?  Lincoln was looking for a negotiated settlement in a divided country when some Confederates salivating for war decided to shell an American base in South Carolina.  Lincoln’s reply wasn’t surrender.  Good for him.  Now the right wing conspirators can shut their mouths.

Our trouble is most Americans don’t know much about Lincoln’s time.  Many college students can’t correctly place the Civil War in the 19^th Century and much less don’t know the 19^th Century means the 1800s.  As one of my frustrated high school teachers once asked a class, “When was the War of 1812?”  When met with blank stares he followed up with another.  “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” he offered.  Nervously a hand went into the air.  “Grant?” squeaked a classmate with a question of his own.  It gets worse.  Daniel Burnett writing at Washington Times tells us here most Americans remain clueless.  When people are so gold danged dumb they’ll believe just about anything.  Therefore Lincoln is now a liberal.

The folks on the Marxist-Liberal scale have been working for decades to rewrite history and their narrative benefits from ensuring we create ever more stupid people.  It’s Alinsky in progress.  The sky is now the sea and the sea is now the sky.  Same-sex marriage is good and faith based opposition is bad.  Our founders were sexists and racists and cruel slave masters.  While America saved the planet from totalitarianism in the first half of the Twentieth Century we’re told it was just a smokescreen to distract from plundering of Mexico and the “banana republics”.  So to make the world right we have a sieve at our southern border and are offering our jobs, children’s jobs and grandchildren’s dashed hopes as reparations.

The only institution ultimately capable of saying “Stop!” is just as quickly being co-opted.  Military Chaplains are being banished from service for the crime of openly talking about their faiths.  As if they were recruited to offer psycho-analysis instead of prayer!  Have you seen the latest effort by the Pentagon to discredit the bedrock of our culture?  The Bible and our founding documents are under assault as sexist and racist.  The Daily Caller shares the woeful tale here.  Once the Constitution is called into question by the officers and their troops there will be calls for a new oath.  This one not to a document but some substitute.  Perhaps a charismatic and/or leader of a political movement.

Lincoln never sought to set himself up as a king.  As the war ended he wanted to quickly welcome our warring regions back into the family and restore a founding vision across the land.  An assassin ended the plans of a man who stands as perhaps the greatest human being of the last two-thousand years.  Not long after Lincoln’s death a General was serving as President, the country reverted to a form of pre-war status quo and one wonders what all the bloodshed was for?  And today the public school graduates can’t even remember where the General is entombed.  What a strange and perilous turn of events.