Meet the real Lincoln and wonder why Obama idolizes him
UPDATE: I wrote this article during my staunchly conservative days. Now that I agree with Obama and liberals on various issues (for example, see my group of articles on siding with liberals, doing the right thing, and helping people survive the economic crisis), I disagree with the vituperative tone I used in slamming Obama, yet I raised some valid points. Feel free to challenge them if you wish, or at least take heart in how I also bash Fox News, which isn't as fair and balanced as they claim, as I proved in another article.
My confidence in our ability to successfully counter our national problems was decimated when I found indisputable evidence that Barack Obama is not the C-student with a silver tongue that I presumed him to be; he is instead dangerously uninformed. Around the time of his inauguration, Obama went overboard trying to identify with Abraham Lincoln, a white supremacist obsessed with the idea of deporting all blacks. If you possess the usual bumper-sticker level of historical knowledge about Lincoln, you might think that Lincoln, the man who freed the slaves, was an obvious icon of history that Obama might understandably revere. However, if you know the real Lincoln, you would be shocked that Obama would venerate such a man.
Lincoln fought the Civil War to keep the United States intact, not to free the slaves. Many people in the North were horrified by the injustice of slavery, but Lincoln regarded black people with arrogant contempt, viewing them as being somewhat subhuman and perpetually inferior. Skeptical? Read what Lincoln said (Note #1) about them:
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Liberals drool over Obama's reputed intellect. Obama is reportedly an impressively learned man. Now I ask you: Who but an ignoramus would idolize Lincoln, a racist who viewed black people as being a cut above the great apes but forever inferior to white people?
Expressing support for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Lincoln said:
“When they [slave owners] remind us of their constitutional rights [to own slaves], I acknowledge them, not grudgingly but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the claiming of their fugitives.”
Yup, The Great Emancipator sure was concerned 'bout freeing them slaves!
Lincoln opposed the expansion of slavery, which he viewed as being a danger to the United States, but he tolerated the existence of slavery, as evidenced by these admissions:
- “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
- “I say that we must not interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists, because the Constitution forbids it, and the general welfare does not require us to do so.”
- “I have never sought to apply these principles to the old States for the purpose of abolishing slavery in those States. It is nothing but a miserable perversion of what I have said, to assume that I have declared Missouri, or any other slave State shall emancipate her slaves. I have proposed no such thing.”
- “My paramount object in this struggle [the Civil War] is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it . . .”
Lincoln had a sinister motive in opposing the expansion of slavery. In a superb book, Dred Scott's Revenge, Judge Andrew Napolitano said that “Lincoln’s opposition to the expansion of slavery is clearly racist in origin, as it guaranteed that new territories in the West would be used exclusively by whites.”
Lincoln … racist? Yes.
Lincoln said:
“There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races. [ … ] Judge Douglas is especially horrified at the thought of the mixing blood by the white and black races: agreed for once—a thousand times agreed … . A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas.”
Disgust is a strong word that conveys a strong emotion. Can you think of any animal that disgusts you? By using “disgust” to characterize the abhorrence generated in response to “amalgamation”/“mixing blood,” and by agreeing with it not just once, but a “thousand times,” this suggests that Lincoln was as disgusted by the thought of whites mixing blood with blacks as he would be if his cousin had an affair with a chimpanzee that resulted in offspring that were viable, but disgusting.
Had all Americans agreed with Lincoln, The Great Bigot who sometimes told “coon jokes,” Obama's daughters might not be in the White House; they could be on their hands and knees scrubbing the floor of some “superior” white woman. Or those daughters might never have been born, because Barack Obama's mother “mixed blood” with a black man—a man of a race that Abraham Lincoln sometimes referred to as “niggers.” Lincoln was the Commander-in-Chief of the Army when it hung some black men who protested how blacks were paid only half as much as the lowest paid white soldiers.
Lincoln was the Commander-in-Chief of the military and thus was the one ultimately responsible for this perversion of justice, which made a mockery of the constitutional guarantee of free speech and the promise that “all men are created equal.”
Lincoln even objected to the presence of blacks when he told a group of them:
“You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this be admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated. It is better for both, therefore, to be separated.”
The racist condescension in the above quotation is more apparent when you know that it was prefaced by a command that those blacks, the first visitors to the White House, were there to listen, not speak.
For President Obama to be so horrendously misinformed about Lincoln is incontrovertible evidence that his education is full of holes (I explain how that could have happened in two articles [here and here] and my free book From Bailout to Bliss) and his judgment is unsound. Obama spent millions of dollars on hoopla glorifying Lincoln and hinting that his coronation to the Presidency would jump-start Phase 2 of freeing blacks from the vestiges of slavery and catapulting them into their rightful place as recipients of his many redistributionist schemes to “spread the wealth around.”
UPDATE: I now agree with spreading the wealth around, but I don't agree with how Obama does it. In another article, I illustrated how Obama is a crony capitalist, not a socialist.
Obama is an intellectual lightweight compared with the leaders of Russia and China, who would be laughed out of Moscow and Beijing if they did anything even half as daffy as Obama's boner in openly adoring Lincoln. After months of digging into Obama's past, I know that race is one of the main themes reverberating in his mind. Hence, for Obama to be so oblivious to the unpalatable racial aspects of Abraham Lincoln is an indication of how vacuous he is. Obama has spent an unhealthy amount of time dwelling on race, yet his years of hyperfocusing on that topic did not enlighten him with basic facts about Lincoln that an elementary school student could find in less than five minutes on a computer. Therefore, I have good reason to question what Obama knows about economics, a topic that he seems to have ignored until the 2008 Presidential campaign, at which time he allied himself with economists who favor policies that keep the little people on Main Street struggling their entire lives.
Obama is out of his league on a topic—race—that is near and dear to his heart, and his knowledge of economics and other Presidential 101 basics is third-rate, at best. How, then, can our not-so-great leader help the millions of Main Street Americans who are unemployed and the rest of us who are worried about the future of our country?
He can't.
If you hold your breath waiting for Obama to think of helpful ideas, you will die of hypoxia long before his speechwriters and teleprompters can shape his ideas—which range from abysmal to mediocre to great—into words that sound good enough to dupe Americans and the bootlicking members of the mainstream media who serve as propaganda arms of the Democratic Party.
“The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.”
— P. J. O'Rourke
The overpaid journalists in the mainstream media often drip with an arrogant certitude that they are the enlightened intellectuals who are infinitely superior to us Main Street hicks, especially the ones like me who live in the heartland of America who don't get a thrill up our legs when we think of Obama, the poorly informed Idiot-in-Chief who dreams of “social justice” and “economic justice,” which means taking money from the people who earn it and giving it to illegal aliens and African-Americans, none of whom were slaves, and all of whom are inferior, according to Obama's hero, Abraham Lincoln—the most unjustifiably overrated politician in American history, other than Obama.
UPDATE: People change, and opinions do, too. Ready for a sheepish admission? I now support some form of reparations, and I am selling my Sea-doo, Ski-doo, and shed to help a deported person reenter the United States along with writing about the priceless benefits of sponsoring immigration.
My “Idiot-in-Chief” characterization, written during my conservative days, was not accurate, but it exemplifies how many conservative partisans (yes, I was one) go overboard in quantally assessing Obama's intelligence by ignoring evidence of his brilliance and hyperfocusing on his flaws, which we all have. To be a genius, one need only be a genius in one area, not all. Einstein was a genius in physics and inventing, but he wasn't a genius in other areas. Obama is clearly gifted and a political genius, with accomplishments that transcend what 99.9% of his detractors could do. In another article, I mentioned how Obama seems to be the only President in history wise enough to realize how to strengthen our long-term national defense.
People tend to go to extremes in judging others. For proof of this, one need only look at how many—not just a few—couples can go from thinking their partner is almost perfect to thinking their partner is the devil.
The hate switch in humans is too easily flipped, often with insufficient justification and almost invariably with no subsequent contemplation of whether the hate is deserved and commensurate.
Hate is often a product of frustration and desperation, or at least exacerbated by them. Americans find countless reasons to hate one another, with much of that hate rooted in political and economic frustration that they can't get everything they want. My political hatred evaporated when I thought of a way to give everyone more of what they want while lessening the burden on the givers.
Just as hate is usually too quantal, love and approval is, too, especially in regard to politics. People often speak of loving candidates who are far from perfect—candidates whose best ideas won't restore our prosperity. Thus, voters often cheer for candidates who give us nothing worth cheering about.
I encountered a woman online who said she “hates haters.” If so, she should hate herself, because she is one. In her mind, there is one correct political opinion: hers. If you agree with her, fine; if you don't, you're worthy of contempt. She's right and everyone who doesn't agree with her is wrong. Perhaps not surprisingly, she had difficulties getting along with men once their relationships passed the superficial stage of attraction. She is exceptionally attractive, and men usually bend over backward trying to get along with hot women, so if she can't harmonize well with men who are practically doormats, she obviously has problems harmonizing with imperfect people—that is, all people. I could say many good things about that woman: she is bright, educated, ambitious, courageous, funny, active, sociable, and passionate, but some of her passion is channeled into contempt for people who don't march in lockstep with her political opinions.
I see the flaw in her because it is the same one I had. I once thought that anyone who didn't agree with me was evil or an idiot, or both, yet now that several of my political opinions have changed and I am no less intelligent than I was when I held other viewpoints, it is obvious that ideological differences cannot be simply explained by differences in brainpower or moral character. Many bright and good people hold antithetical opinions. The less simple I've become, the less I gravitate toward simple explanations for why others don't agree with me on everything.
Hate is not the solution to hate. We can't help haters become better people by hating them. With the right help, a heart filled with hate can become filled with love and a desire to help others, triggering a chain reaction of goodwill that makes this world a better place.
However, most people—even Casey Anthony—think so highly of themselves that they don't perceive the need to change. If there's a problem, it is your fault, not theirs, or so they think. The finger of blame is always pointed outward, not inward.
For a multimillionaire who strongly advocates “spreading the wealth around,” Obama is awfully stingy in his personal life. His half-brother in Kenya lives on less than a dollar per month. Obama's aunt, an illegal immigrant from Kenya, lives in South Boston in a rundown public housing estate. Why isn't Obama helping them?
Obama forgot—or never knew—Lesson One in how to lead: set a good example. Obama is demanding that Americans tighten their belts and sacrifice more to support his misguided ideas about spreading wealth from those who earn it to those who don't. Is Obama sacrificing? Hardly. He is spending more money than any prior President living it up at our expense. After deciding that the billions of dollars we spent coddling him and his family aren't enough, he spent another mountain of our money flying his wife to New York for a date, along with more vacations and other entertainment in two years than an average person has in a lifetime.
Congress viewed slavery as an economic and political issue, not a moral one, and Lincoln did the same, turning a blind eye to the inherent immorality of slavery.
If you are a fan of Lincoln, you might pardon his racist comments by saying that he lived in a different time. I don't accept that excuse. Lincoln was intelligent and educated, not stupid and ignorant. He surely knew not only about slavery but what that barbaric practice entailed, such as whipping and even killing blacks who would not obey, and permanently separating young children from their parents when a slave sale forcibly broke up a family. What's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness when you're ten years old and taken away from your family while your mother is crying her eyes out and your father is boiling with justifiable rage? Lincoln knew what went on, and Obama should have known that Lincoln was too tolerant of slavery and too insulting to black people to be the hero that he is now often incorrectly presumed to be.
It breaks my heart to think of all those children being taken from their families. Parents and children did not love each other less in those days, so Lincoln must have known of the horrific consequences of slavery—something many northerners figured out. Lincoln and virtually all Americans at that time knew that slavery was antithetical to freedom, yet Lincoln wasted his time expressing disgust about the “indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races” instead of passionately demonstrating how slavery was so morally wrong in so many ways that only barbarians would tolerate it.
According to a History Channel H2 special, 10 Things You Don't Know About Abraham Lincoln, his best friend, Joshua Speed, was a slave owner. During a prolonged stay at the Speed plantation, Lincoln was deeply moved by observing the suffering of the slave assigned to him. That poignant experience reportedly kindled a desire to right the wrong of slavery, which Lincoln eventually did many years later, but for political—not moral—reasons. Lincoln is obviously not revered for his deep-seated belief that blacks were so inferior they deserved his contempt and third-class treatment by society, but for his supposed sea change of opinion in which he came to see them as fully human and worthy of at least some basic human rights. However, even late in his life, Lincoln not only dreamed of deporting freed slaves, but signed an order as President paving the way for that.
Lincoln said he felt enslaved by his father, who took him out of school and forced him to work for neighbors. Considering his experiences, it isn't surprising that Lincoln freed slaves, but why did his Emancipation Proclamation limit it to slaves in the ten states then in rebellion? Why not free all American slaves? Why didn't he do it sooner? The most charitable answer is that Lincoln cared more about politics than doing the right thing.
Just as no one can ever adequately compensate me for the murder of my great-grandfather (because he was Italian) or my father (because he had something two thugs wanted more than they wanted to work), no one can ever fully make up for the wrongs of slavery, but the most equitable remedy available to us is something that Obama likely isn't smart enough to propose.
In case I'm wrong, Mr. Obama, show the world how bright you are. I want justice, too. What I and most Americans do not want is Obama using a past injustice to impose a current one.
Remember, Barack: You're supposed to be a genius, so act like one. Do something brilliant—for a change.
If Obama wanted to pick a better President who was truly opposed to slavery, he should have picked Chester Arthur, a relative of mine, who was raised in an abolitionist home (his father cofounded the New York Anti-Slavery Society) and later practiced law in New York, where he ably and commendably defended the civil rights of slaves. I discussed President Arthur more in another article.
Racial scorecard: President Arthur versus Lincoln |
||
| Arthur | Lincoln | |
| Morally opposed to slavery? | Yes | No |
| Rejected the N-word? | Yes | No |
| Defended the civil rights of slaves? | Yes | No |
| Viewed blacks as fully human? | Yes | No |
| Viewed blacks as equals? | Yes | No |
| Thought blacks were qualified to hold office? | Yes | No |
| Thought blacks should be permitted to “intermarry with white people”? | Yes | No |
| Spoke of the constitutional right of slave owners to own slaves? | No | Yes |
| Regarded black people with arrogant contempt? | No | Yes |
| Spoke of “a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality”? | No | Yes |
| Advocated “having the superior position assigned to the white race”? | No | Yes |
| Spoke of “a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races”? | No | Yes |
| Told “coon jokes”? | No | Yes |
| Claimed that the differences between blacks and whites was broader “than exists between almost any other two races”? | No | Yes |
In this scorecard, President Arthur hit a home run every time, while Lincoln struck out every time. Now do you understand why I think Obama picked the wrong President to revere?
Read how the need for the Civil War could have been eliminated
Notes:
- Lincoln lied, people died by genius Ilana Mercer.
- Letter from freed slave to former master draws attention
- After reading the above article, you might be shocked to learn that I strongly favor spreading the wealth around, but in a way that would appeal to every thinking liberal and conservative, as I described years ago in an article.
This article was excerpted from my free book, From Bailout to Bliss.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Reference: Imagining dialogue can boost critical thinking: Excerpt: “Examining an issue as a debate or dialogue between two sides helps people apply deeper, more sophisticated reasoning …”
Comment #88 by Anonymous
January 3 2011 12:48:02 PM
Finally, someone who doesn't think Lincoln was the best thing since sliced bread!! As bad as Reconstruction was, I can't imagine what might have happened had Lincoln not been shot. Unfortunately, our education system has nearly all the U.S. population too dumbed-down to learn the truth for themselves.
Thank You!