One does not expect to find insightful, cogent, or fair commentary on the editorial pages of the New York Times. Banal liberalism, provincialism, and insulation from the beliefs of flyover America are standard fare and thus to be expected. But every once in a while, a piece comes along which is so utterly devoid of reason, taste, or linear thought that it deserves to be pointed out for special ridicule. Such is this piece by Timothy Egan which equates – and I am dead serious – opposing Obamacare with supporting slavery:
Before he was immortalized for saving the union, freeing the slaves and giving the best political speech in American history, Abraham Lincoln was just an unpopular new president handed a colossal crisis. Elected with 39.7 percent of the vote, Lincoln told a big lie in his inaugural address of 1861.“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” he said, reaching out to the breakaway South. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”He was saying to a Confederacy that would enshrine owning another human being in its new constitution: If you like the slaves you’ve got now, you can keep them. It was a lie in the sense that Lincoln made a promise, changed by circumstances, that he broke less than two years later — and probably never meant to keep.The comparisons of President Obama to Lincoln fade with every day of the shrinking modern presidency. As for the broken-promise scale: Lincoln said an entire section of the country could continue to enslave more than one in three of its people. Obama wrongly assured about five million people that they could keep their bare-bones health plans if they liked them (later amended when it turned not to be true).
There’s a lot to unpack in this particular bowl of word salad, including some questionable historical assertions about Lincoln’s intent with respect to the South upon taking office, and the New York Times’ continued use of bizarre Orwellian language to avoid calling Obama a liar. Lincoln, on the one hand, told a “big lie.” Obama, on the other hand, “wrongly assured” people something that he “later amended” only after, due to circumstances completely beyond his control, “it turned out not to be true.”
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