Not a Lincoln But a Fraud

Scott Horton

A few days ago, on Lincoln's birthday, I posed a quick commentary on how the legacy of America's greatest Republican president – perhaps our greatest president overall – was under attack. Lincoln's views, I argued, were being perverted by the exponents of aggrandized presidential power. He and his acts were being portrayed as the legitimating predecessors of Bush's imperial presidency. This effort, I said, was historically disingenuous, or at least blind to the Lincoln of the forties and fifties, who was passionate in his advocacy of a constrained executive and the role of Congress as a vital counterweight to the president's war-making powers.

In the following seventy-two hours, we were treated to an excellent demonstration of the sort of fraud that I described. Republican strategist Frank Gaffney authored an op-ed in the Washington Times, which in its original form led with the words

Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.

Gaffney attributed these words to Abraham Lincoln. Two days after it was confirmed that this quotation was a fraud, the Washington Times edited the web posting to remove them. Gaffney went on to spew venom against Democrats and "white-flag Republicans" who were supporting resolutions expressing a lack of confidence in President Bush's Plus-Up plan, under which American troop strength in Iraq has been bolstered in connection with a fresh plan to restore Iraqi control over Baghdad. Gaffney's vituperations include the words "treason" and "hanging offense." He uses this language to refer to lawmakers who are doing no more than engage in open debate on a non-binding resolution in an exercise of their Constitutional advice function.

Anyone familiar with Lincoln's life and works knows that there is no chance that Lincoln ever would have uttered such words. Why? For a very simple reason: as a member of Congress, and before his election to Congress, Lincoln himself was an exceedingly harsh critic of the president's decision to wage a war against Mexico. After the war began, his criticism actually got a good bit sharper. And Abe Lincoln was certainly too clever to condemn congressmen for things he himself did while in Congress.

The introduction of this fraudulent quotation, in another publication controlled by Rev Moon and close to the Republican Party, Insight Magazine, and its subsequent proliferation in rightwing publications, has been traced with admirable skill by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com.

This over-the-top language was characteristic of much of the GOP-led floor discussion and, indeed, within a day the bogus Lincoln was making an appearance on the floor of Congress in remarks offered by GOP Rep Don Young of Alaska. Watch them here.

This year Republican stalwarts have marked Abraham Lincoln's birthday by perverting his legacy. They propagate the image of a power-mad, intolerant, war-mongering president. This is a base slander of the intellectual founder of the Republican Party. As Andrew Sullivan writes in The Atlantic blogozine, "It says everything you need to know about the state of the Republican Party: that they would knowingly lie about the words of the greatest Republican president in American history." But the more distressing point is this: it shows how far the Republicans have fallen from Lincoln's vision. Our country as a whole, and the Republican Party, which should be the guardian of his legacy, would benefit from more attention and more fidelity to this titan of the American political culture.
Posted 12:13 PM by Scott Horton [link]