Recently I posted a poll asking how many people thought George W. Bush, Franklin Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, respectively, were good presidents. 81% disagreed that G.W.B. is a good president, and an impressive 92% agreed that Lincoln was a good president.
What I want to understand is, how can the people I see routinely bashing Bush on here for lying, violating the constitution, fighting an illegal war, corruption, cronyism, etc. possibly think Lincoln was a "good" president? And don't misunderstand, I think Bush, like all politicians, is a douchebag. But honestly, compared to Abraham Elizabeth Lincoln? Bush is practically Thomas Jefferson.
Just as a little reminder:
- Abraham Lincoln violated the Constitution in practically every particular
- He invaded a sovereign constitutional democracy, with the full knowledge that all States reserved the right to secession
- He waged total war on civilians, killing approximately 50,000 of them. This wasn't a push button war; when civilians were killed they got killed up close and personal
- His unconstitutional and illegal war killed between 600,000 and 700,000 soldiers; as a fraction of the population that would be over 5,000,000 dead today
- He suspended the writ of habeus corpus, something only the Congress can do, and interned between 10,000 to 15,000 northern civilians in military prisons without charges or trials
- He shut down hundreds of northern newspapers by military force for criticizing his administration, including imprisoning publishers and editors in military prisons
- His administration had pastors and preachers imprisoned for failing to include a prayer for the president in their sermons, as had been decreed by the White House
- He arrested and imprisoned the entire Maryland legislature so they couldn't convene to discuss secession
- He created an entire State out of whole cloth so that he could install a puppet government to tighten the Republican hold on Congress (West Virginia)
- His administration engineered election fraud on a massive scale to secure his reelection, including turning Democrats away from the polls with bayonets and issuing different colored ballots for the two parties, so that voters with the wrong color ballot could be arrested
- He created an income tax in direct violation of the Constitution (recall that the Constitution had to be ammended in 1913 to allow the income tax, but it didn't stop Lincoln)
- He imprisoned and exiled a sitting member of Congress for criticising his administration (Vallandigham)
- He discovered dictatorial "war powers" not enumerated in the Constitution to justify all of this
- He repudiated every clause of the Declaration of Independence (which was, after all, a declaration of secession), and either he or his party after his assassination reproduced each and every charge in the Train of Abuses leveled at the despotic King George
- All of this was undertaken for the express purpose of removing the Constitutional barriers to the so-called "American System" of corporate welfare, high tariffs, and centralized banking (with an inflationary fiat currency, his "greenbacks," to pay for it all) for the benefit of Republican party political cronies
This is just a tiny fraction of his crimes. Had the South won the war, Lincoln and his entire cabinet would almost certainly have been hung for war crimes.
So, is it just poor education that causes people to worship this evil [censored] and his Zeus-like marble statue?
If you despise Bush for his trespasses, can you admit that he's at worst a complete joke compared to the First American Dictator, Abraham Lincoln?
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