In the rush to deify Barack Hussein Obama, and to see his birthday disappear in an amalgam of "Presidents" whose birthdays are celebrated on "Presidents Day," apparently to make room for people of the correct color to have their OWN holidays, I think it's being largely forgotten that the greatest statesman and President in US history (southerners, sorry, but the war's over) would be 200 years old this year.
Lincoln has his supporters and detractors. Neoconfederates constantly talk about Lincoln the Tyrant, who misused the powers given to him by the Constitution of the United States. They claim that it's all his fault that states' rights have been trampled by the federal government. But they seem to forget that there were a couple of things at stake back then: the Union falling apart, and slavery as a disease in a country which ostensibly believed that all men were created equal.
Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room cabin in Kentucky, poorer than the proverbial churchmouse, and had less than a second-grade formal education. His prospects for success were almost non-existent, and, if not for his brilliant mind and love of country, he would no doubt have been some hayseed living out his life and dying in some shack in the backwoods of America somewhere.
Oh, I know there are the screamers out there, typically from the South. They've never gotten over the fact that they overreached and lost. They claim that very few Southerners ever owned slaves, and that the war wasn't about slavery anyhow. What they choose to ignore is that while, yes, only the wealthy owned slaves, every Southerner viewed ownership of slaves as a birthright that they hoped someday to fulfill. One of the premier conservative scholars of today, Dinesh D'Souza, wrote a great article entitled Lincoln: Hypocrite or Statesman? in which he reminds people of a speech never mentioned in the South's revisionist history where slavery and Lincoln are concerned; this speech, given by CSA Vice President Stephens, is reported on by D'Souza thusly:
This approach to rewriting history has been going on for more than a century. Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, published a two-volume history of the Civil War between 1868 and 1870 in which he hardly mentioned slavery, insisting that the war was an attempt to preserve constitutional government from the tyranny of the majority. But this is not what Stephens said in the great debates leading up to the war. In his “Cornerstone” speech, delivered in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861, at the same time that the South was in the process of seceding, Stephens said that the American Revolution had been based on a premise that was “fundamentally wrong.” That premise was, as Stephens defined it, “the assumption of equality of the races.” Stephens insisted that, instead, “our new [Confederate] government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. Slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great and moral truth.”
Abraham Lincoln originally hoped to stop slavery from spreading to states where it did not as yet exist, which is why the South freaked out and started bailing out as soon as he was elected. They didn't need to do this, as Lincoln never went along with the strict abolitionists until the South forced his hand. He didn't want to be the President under whose watch the Union dissolved, and once the southern states seceded, it went hand in hand with the reason they seceded: fear that Lincoln would abolish slavery. He came to realize that "a house divided shall not stand," and that the Constitution did not say "all men are created equal, except for Negroes." And for Lincoln, that was the end of the discussion.
While some point to Lincoln as striking a serious blow against states' rights in favor of centralized control by the federal government, it's still a fact that state constitutions override federal control where laws are concerned. Gun control is a prime example of that, to name one thing.
Lincoln had a solemn promise to protect and defend the Constitution, and to keep the United States of America whole and inviolate. At the cost of many of his countrymen, all due to the bull-headedness of the south, I might add, he succeeded, and ended slavery with the passage of the 13th Amendment in the bargain. Either, Lincoln said, the Constitution works for all people, or it works for none of them, and regardless of all the freaking out by people over his suspension of habeas corpus, later found to be necessary for the President of the United States to carry out his sacred duty to the country in emergency circumstances, Lincoln DID preserve the Union, and WAS the Great Emancipator. Whether or not there are people who believe that Lincoln did all this just to be a tyrant, and in fact, as Lincoln's law partner Billy Herndon noted that Lincoln's ambition was "a little engine that knew no rest," (hell, he was in politics -- what do you expect?) Lincoln loved his country and kept her in one piece.
So, Barack Hussein Obama may very well be deified, as noted, as being the first black president, regardless of his qualifications for the job. But is this important because of his qualities, or simply because of his skin color? It would seem to me, when it has been reported that about 90% of blacks in this country voted for BHO, that there's racism involved, but, by God, not by whites. You see, ALL the blacks in the US could have voted for BHO, and if all the racist evil white devil slavemasters had voted for McCain, Obama would have lost by sheer numbers. What does this mean? It means, dear friends, that a whole bunch of white people voted for Obama. Hopefully this spells the deathknell for White Guilt in this country. But one thing that blacks need to remember on February 12 -- they need to ponder the fact that, had there been no Abraham Lincoln looking out for the constitutional rights of ALL people in the USA, Obama probably wouldn't have been in any position to run for ANYTHING.
It seems to me that Martin Luther King, Jr. would want blacks to celebrate Lincoln's birthday on this 200th anniversary, far and away above celebrating the godlike "accomplishment" of Barack Obama. And King might want to remind blacks of the line in his "I Have a Dream" speech that we hear constantly at this time of year -- you know, the one about dreaming about his little children one day being judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin.
In this day and age, when it was outright stated by blacks that if you didn't vote for BHO you were racist, how do you think people were judging Obama? Do you think King would approve?
In any case, in this year celebrating the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, you might want to give a little thought to the man who made this event possible, regardless of the motives of the voters involved. I urge you to go to http://www.abrahamlincoln200.org as a starting point, and do a little research on the life of this great man, who embodied the Great American Story.
Barack Obama is no Abraham Lincoln. Let's just hope he's up to doing the job, whatever color he happens to be.
Herp
