This may qualify as even more amusing than the spectacle of diehard secularists in the media swooning over the pope like teen scribes for Tiger Beat backstage after a Bieber concert.
Radio host Thom Hartmann, one of Bernie Sanders' most enthusiastic supporters in the left-wing media, has hosted Sanders on weekly "Brunch with Bernie" interviews for several years and, like Sanders, describes himself as a democratic socialist.
Occasionally Hartmann's ardor for Sanders gets the better of him, as was the case earlier this week on Hartmann's program during a conversation with an equally-besotted caller --
CALLER: My parents both worked in the auto industry and I work in the auto industry also. They blessed me with a college education and it's helped me survive some ups and downs in the economy. Sadly I lost my dad in 2012 and my mom this year, just as Bernie was entering the race and he is the champion that he had prayed for for the last 30-some years and I just think it's fantastic. I hear him, I heard him at the Liberty University speech and it was very Kennedyesque to me, sounded to me like his speech on the moonshot or the one at American University.
HARTMANN: Yeah, yeah, I agree. And Bernie wrote that himself on his legal pad. (chuckles) You know, it's like Abe Lincoln writing the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope, you know. Bernie shows up with a legal pad with a million notes on it. Incredible.
What's genuinely incredible is the chutzpah required to compare the boilerplate collectivist rhetoric of Sanders, which hardly varies by locale, to the most concise and eloquent statement of national purpose ever written by an American president.
This might be the only time you'll ever hear Sanders compared to Lincoln, at least until your next conversation with another Sanders supporter.
Not incidentally, the old saw about Lincoln writing his address on an envelope isn't even true. As pointed out at the website for the book "Long Remembered: Lincoln and His Five Versions of the Gettysburg Address" --
This may be the most harmful myth surrounding the Gettysburg Address, as it suggests Lincoln's speeches were spur of the moment. Even the astute Harriett Beecher Stowe fell for this one. In 1868 Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, wrote that Lincoln "wrote it in a few moments, while on the way to the celebration, on being told that he would be expected to make some remarks."
Lincoln, as Douglas L. Wilson and other scholars writing in "Long Remembered" make clear, put great thought and care into what he wrote. And as most writers will tell you, to gain both brevity and brilliance in a speech is a time-consuming task.
The so-called Nicolay copy of the address, named for Lincoln secretary John Nicolay and thought to be the earliest of five surviving copies, begins on White House stationery and continues onto a lined second page. A second copy, provided by Lincoln to John Hay, his other secretary, was written on the same lined paper as the second page of the Nicolay draft. The remaining three copies are believed to have been written after Lincoln gave the speech.
This wasn't the only amusing thing heard by Hartmann on his radio show this week. He also served up this one
--
CALLER: Everywhere I go with the Bernie (Sanders) sweatshirt, half the people are like, yeah! And then half the people are like, what is that?
HARTMANN: Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. This is why the Clintonistas do not, and I call myself a Sandersista, but you know, the Clintonistas don't want there to be more debates because what do debates do? They raise the profile of peo-, I know, three months ago nobody knew who Carly Fiorina was, right? Now the whole nation knows who she is. Why? Because the Republican Party had a couple of debates. Most people in the country do not know Jim Webb, they don't know Lincoln Chaffee, they don't know Martin O'Malley, they're just beginning to get to know Bernie Sanders, you know, on the cover of Time magazine.
And by the way, that gave me a little bit of a chill when I saw that because the week that Howard Dean was on the cover of Time magazine was, the week that followed that, that was when the institution, the media, the media institution realized that Howard Dean was a real threat. It was the week that Howard Dean told Chris Matthews live and on television that he would break up the big media companies and the following week, of course, the Dean Scream took down Howard Dean. So, I'm concerned. I'm very concerned about that.
More than a decade has passed since Dean's barbaric yawp for the ages -- and I'm hearing this conspiracy theory for the first time, even after countless hours wading through the fever swamps of Air America Radio and MSNBC. We'll eventually hear an updated version of it after Democrats decide want a stealth socialist instead of a transparent one like Sanders.
