Abraham Lincoln

The overly-caffeinated, partisan headline writers at Huffington Post are at it again, this time in response to "Killing Lincoln," a book on the Lincoln assassination co-written by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard.

Here's how one of the headlines at HuffPo described the book --

Joy Behar once again showed how totally ignorant of history she is.

When she absurdly told GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain on Tuesday's "The View," "The Republican Party hasn't been black friendly over the many centuries in this country," co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck smartly replied, "Should we begin with Lincoln?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In today's "What Fact Did Keith Olbermann Mangle Now" segment, the host of MSNBC's "Countdown" on Tuesday hysterically mocked Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle for claiming Abraham Lincoln lost "quite a few" elections.

"Just for the record, do you know how many elections Abraham Lincoln lost in his lifetime?" Olbermann arrogantly asked.

"Seven of eight he won," answered MSNBC's hottest property.

Just for the record, Olbermann wasn't even close to being right (video follows with transcript and commentary, h/t The Corner):

At the conclusion of a program that included Chris Matthews inviting on Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen to compare the Tea Party to the KKK, the Hardball host finished his Thursday episode with a "Let Me Finish" rant where he questioned if Abraham Lincoln would even be a Republican today and wondered if the GOP would even "like him?" Matthews even went as far to ask his audience "who do you think represents the spirit of Lincoln in today's politics," Obama or the GOP?

The following teaser and final commentary were aired on the April 8 edition of Hardball:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: When we return which party would Abraham Lincoln join today? Would he still be a Republican after all the talk about state's rights and honoring the Confederacy? Would they like him? You're watching Hardball! It's choosing up sides time for Abraham Lincoln. Only on MSNBC.

Ken Shepherd and Colleen Raezler both noted the liberal-media loathing for a conservative Bible project last month. In noting conservative Rod Dreher's beard-plucking loathing for the "American Patriot's Bible" on The Corner, Mike Potemra suggested that if the patriot Bible would offend liberals, one can only imagine the pain a conservative would find at this Christmas gift, made available on October 27: The Lincoln/Obama Inaugural Bible Collection.

Somehow, I doubt liberal reporters like Amy Sullivan at Time will have a discouraging word about this project.

For 100 dollars (alright, $63 with generous Amazon discounting), the publisher Andrews McMeel gives a Bible-toting Christian everything one would want to revere Obama's swearing-in:

On last night's "Rachel Maddow Show", the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh commended President Obama for taking the reins in Afghanistan. Hersh stated that Presidents must decide their own war strategies. But in the early stages of the war in Iraq, Hersh was a leading critic of similar actions by the Bush administration. Hersh's hypocrisy suggests he is more concerned with the political implications of military policy than strategic ones.

"Lincoln did not let McClellan write a report on how to win a war against the South," Hersh told Maddow, in reference to Gen. George McClellan, initially the top general for the Union during the Civil War. Hersh was offering a historical perspective on why Presidents should not rely on military commanders to form strategy--McClellan was a disastrous general, after all (video embedded below the fold).

This little report is interesting in a few ways, but the most important is that it seems to show that the publishers of at least one American newspaper are wholly ignorant of American history. It seems that early last week the Warren Times Observer of Warren, Pennsylvania published an ad that basically expressed a desire to see President Barack Obama assassinated and they didn't even know it.

The small town paper published an ad that read as follows: "May Obama follow in the steps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy!" Sadly, the paper's editors completely missed the salient fact that all these historical presidents -- except for Obama -- were assassinated in office!

By Friday, the paper printed an apology and told the AP that it had turned over all relevant info to the Secret Service.

CNN’s Kyra Phillips marked the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth on Thursday’s American Morning by harkening back to Barack Obama’s decision to announce his candidacy for president on the steps of the Old State Capitol Building in Springfield, Illinois, where the 16th president once worked: “It was here in the Old Capitol that Abraham Lincoln gave his famous ‘House Divided’ speech. A house divided against itself cannot stand, he proclaimed. Sound familiar? Fast-forward -- February 10th, 2007, Lincoln came to life here as if it were 1858.” She then remarked that with the Democrat’s announcement, “we all witnessed Lincoln’s dream and Obama’s reality.”

The correspondent’s odd comparison came at the end of the 8 pm Eastern hour of the CNN program, as part of the network’s all-day “From Lincoln to Obama” special programming. Phillips traveled to Springfield for the occasion, and began her report with another “parallel,” as she put, between the two presidents concerning their names: “For example, this campaign flag [from Lincoln’s presidential campaign]. Look at this -- ‘Abram Lincoln.’ They even spelled his name wrong. So it wasn’t just Obama that’s been having issues with his name -- also, Abraham Lincoln. Just one of the parallels that we found as we’ve been spending time here.”

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on Thursday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Maggie Rodriguez did a segment highlighting five, "...things you may not know about Honest Abe," including his sexual orientation. The segment featured New York University history professor Jeffrey Sammons, who argued: "One of the very interesting stories about Abraham Lincoln is that he might have been gay. Lincoln actually did sleep in the same bed with a gentleman for a four-year period." Rodriguez concluded: "So the question of Abraham Lincoln's sexuality still remains a mystery."

In addition to spreading revisionist rumors about Lincoln’s sexuality, the segment also focused on his racist attitudes as Rodriguez declared: "Myth number two, he was the great champion of equality." Sammons explained: "Lincoln is known as the great emancipator or the great father of black people, but Lincoln was a man of his times when it came to race. He indicated that he did not believe that blacks were equal to whites, said to have used the n-word in speeches and in letters. So there's no indication that Abraham Lincoln believes in black equality."

Images below the fold

Like Seinfeld's "soup Nazi," CNN is yelling "No birthday for YOU" to Abraham Lincoln on his 200th birthday -- at least not one for Lincoln alone. Interestingly, the Cable TV Newser can't seem to just give Lincoln his day without shoehorning Barack Obama into many of its stories about Lincoln. It's Lincoln/Obama day as far as CNN is concerned.

Certainly it is natural to see Obama as the culmination of Abraham Lincoln's legacy, but CNN takes this coupling a tad too far. Out of the 12 stories about Lincoln on their Lincoln page, fully one third include Obama. Additionally, the header graphic on the Lincoln page celebrates the day as being "From Lincoln to Obama." One of the stories is about an artist that morphed photographs of Lincoln's head with Obama's face as if this was somehow pertinent to Lincoln's birthday... or even pertinent to art, for that matter.

Far be it from me to sow discord in MSNBC ranks, to stir up old animosities between colleagues there.  But if Joe Scarborough is going to do a mocking imitation of Keith Olbermann in full Special Comment rant, well then, blogging ethics compel me to report it.

The jumping-off point on Morning Joe today was Eugene Robinson's current WaPo column. After claiming that he didn't want to kick the president on his way out the door, Robinson proceeded to do just that.  The columnist described a variety of measures adopted by the president in prosecution of the war against terror as "departures from American values and traditions." Robinson recommended an investigation if not a criminal prosecution. That led Pat Buchanan and Scarborough to cite, chapter and verse,  the ways in which Bush's supposed abrogation of  "American values and traditions" were small potatoes compared to the actions of predecessors including Lincoln, Wilson and FDR.

Without mentioning the Countdown host by name, Scarborough closed with an unmistakable impression of Keith Olbermann in pompous Special Comment peroration of the sort that can be seen here.

In a rapid fire display of flip-flopping that would make even the staunchest of liberals proud, Newsweek's Howard Fineman manages to change his opinion on the justification of an Obama-Lincoln connection three times in just under 900 words.

The random logic is hard to see through all the gooeyness behind the concept of such a ridiculous comparison in the first place, but once you wipe the screen, you'll be able to spot it clear as day.

Fineman starts by asking himself a few questions:

Is there any reason, other than the lean frame and knack for giving good speeches, to compare the two men? Is there any reason to see in Obama a Lincoln-like ability to unite a "house divided" in our perilous times? Is that even a fair question to ask or comparison to make?

While most of us would scoff at the notion, Fineman concludes otherwise:

CNN senior political analyst David Gergen gushed over Al Gore’s speech at Invesco Field on Thursday evening during the network’s coverage of the Democratic convention as he urged viewers to go back and read the text:

I think the Gore speech, he -- while it was way too rushed in delivery, had an awful lot to offer, and was one of the first times anybody in this campaign has spoken seriously to the nation about the potential catastrophe coming from global warming.... I think it's really was worth for a lot of people going back and actually reading the text of Al Gore's speech.

He then mentioned Abraham Lincoln’s "brief time in politics before he became President" in an indirect reference to Barack Obama’s short political career.

Its been a rewarding yet predictable day as one liberal after another have fallen all over themselves to praise Obama's speech. One of the more outrageous ones was Chris Matthews stating the speech went beyond the "I Have a Dream" speech, and compared it Lincoln. Now the NY Times bows down to Obamessiah as he rises from the ashes.

There are moments — increasingly rare in risk-abhorrent modern campaigns — when politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs. In the best of these moments, the speaker does not just salve the current political wound, but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with.
Inaugural addresses by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt come to mind, as does John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religion, with its enduring vision of the separation between church and state. Senator Barack Obama, who has not faced such tests of character this year, faced one on Tuesday. It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better…