Lois Lerner: Lincoln Should’ve Let the South Go Instead of Civil War

Most Americans tend to agree that Abraham Lincoln was one of this country’s better presidents, having saved the nation from imploding on itself with the Civil War. Former IRS chief Lois Lerner, however, does not apparently have the same thoughts about keeping the South in the union.

“Look my view is that Lincoln was our worst president not our best,” Lerner wrote in 2014. “He should (have) let the south go. We really do seem to have 2 totally different mindsets.”

The Senate Finance Committee released a report yesterday that examined 1.5 million pages of IRS emails. A significant focus has gone to the fact that Lerner had a pattern of deriding conservatives as “crazies” and “assholes,” as well as the allegations that her leadership mismanaged the applications of Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status

“The report clearly shows that conservative groups were singled out because of their political beliefs, and gross mismanagement at the IRS allowed this practice to continue for years,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch.

Lerner is still reeling from renewed backlash after yesterday’s reports suggested that she once targeted an organization that once paid a fee to Bristol Palin.

Via: Mediaite

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The Mother of Thanksgiving

The 19th-century editor who pestered five presidents to make it a national holiday. 

It was 150 years ago that Sarah Josepha Hale gave us Thanksgiving as we know it.

The influential editor was the best friend Thanksgiving ever had. 

We are accustomed, in a more jaded and secular age, to wars on various holidays; Hale waged a war for Thanksgiving. For years, she evangelized for nationalizing the holiday by designating the last Thursday of November for it to be celebrated annually across the country.

Besides plugging for Thanksgiving in her publication, Godey’s Lady’s Book, she wrote Presidents Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan about it before hitting pay dirt with Abraham Lincoln. On October 3, 1863, Lincoln urged his fellow citizens to observe the last Thursday of November “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

Hale had succeeded in her long-sought goal, but kept — as Peggy Baker notes in an essay about her as “the Godmother of Thanksgiving” — writing editorials about Thanksgiving for another dozen years. You might say that she was a bore and nag on the topic, if her cause hadn’t been so splendid and her understanding of Thanksgiving so clear-eyed, clairvoyant even.

Hale saw the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving as the twin festivals of the American people, “each connected with their history, and therefore of great importance in giving power and distinctness to their nationality,” as she put it in an 1852 editorial.

Via: NRO

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Obama Includes Message to Gays in Thanksgiving Proclamation

(CNSNews.com) – In his annual proclamation on Thanksgiving, President Barack Obama signals his endorsement of same-sex couples – “no matter who we are or who we love” all Americans are alike, Obama wrote in remarks posted Tuesday at Whitehouse.gov.

“Thanksgiving offers each of us the chance to count our many blessings – the freedoms we enjoy, the time we spend with loved ones, the brave men and women who defend our Nation at home and abroad,” Obama wrote. “This tradition reminds us that no matter what our background or beliefs, no matter who we are or who we love, at our core we are first and foremost Americans.”

Obama’s proclamation invokes Abraham Lincoln’s reference to seeking God’s help “to heal the wounds of our nation” and notes the generosity of Americans who serve in the military or work as volunteers.

“This Thanksgiving Day, let us forge deeper connections with our loved ones,” Obama wrote in concluding his proclamation. “Let us extend our gratitude and our compassion.

“And let us lift each other up and recognize, in the oldest spirit of this tradition, that we rise or fall as one Nation, under God,” Obama said.

Via: CNS News

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The New York Times Equates Opposing Obamacare With Slavery

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.”

Via: Red State

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[VIDEO] Ted Cruz remembers Gettysburg…

Ted Cruz isn’t opting out of the Gettysburg anniversary like some presidents we know. Instead, he created this tribute:

Via: The Right Scoop

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Stephens: From 'Four Score' to 'Yes We Can!' - Sudden modesty from the selfhyperadulated president.

Seven score and 10 years ago, Abraham Lincoln delivered his sacred speech on the meaning of free government. Edward Everett, a former secretary of state and the principal speaker for the consecration of the Gettysburg cemetery, instantly recognized the power of the president's 272 words.

"I should be glad, if I could flatter myself," Everett wrote to Lincoln the next day, "that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes."

Barack Obama is not scheduled to be present at Gettysburg on Tuesday to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the address. Maybe he figured that the world would little note, nor long remember, what he said there. Maybe he thought the comparisons with the original were bound to be invidious, and rightly so.

If that's the case, it would be the beginning of wisdom for this presidency. Better late than never.

Mr. Obama's political career has always and naturally inspired thoughts about the 16th president: the lawyer from Illinois, blazing a sudden trail from obscurity to eminence; the first black president, redeeming the deep promise of the new birth of freedom. The associations create a reservoir of pride in the 44th president even among his political opponents.

Enlarge Image

In Lincoln's larger shadow. AFP/Getty Images

But, then, has there ever been a president who so completely over-salted his own brand as Barack Obama? "I never compare myself to Lincoln," the president told NBC's David Gregory last year. Except that he announced his presidential candidacy from the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Ill. And that he traveled by train to Washington from Philadelphia for his first inauguration along the same route Lincoln took in the spring of 1861. And that he twice swore his oaths of office on the Lincoln Bible. "Lincoln—they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me," he said in Iowa in 2011.

No, this has not been a president who has ever shied away from grandiose historical comparisons. If George W. Bush reveled in being misunderestimated, Mr. Obama aims to be selfhyperadulated. "I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president—with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln," the president told "60 Minutes" in 2011. Note the word possible.

Is Our Government Still "Of the People"?

Seven score and 10 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln delivered the greatest speech in American history. Standing on the bloodied battlefield of Gettysburg, Lincoln urged the fractured nation to dedicate itself to the “unfinished work” of the battle. In only 10 sentences—272 words in all—he made clear the far-reaching implications of the Civil War: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

It took a long Civil War and hundreds of thousands of dead, but America eventually rid itself of the scourge of slavery and the democratic cause triumphed, thereby confirming Lincoln’scontention that “ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successors of bullets.”

The challenge to democratic government, however, would not disappear. In the late 19th century, the Progressive movement emerged in America. The Progressives, like their liberal heirs today, had a paradoxical relationship to democracy.

On the one hand, they championed democratic reforms, like the referendum, the ballot initiative, and the direct election of Senators (liberals today favor the popular election of the President).

On the other hand, the Progressives—again like their liberal heirs—harbored a deep-seated distrust of the unwashed masses.

Via: The Foundry

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Obama's Stunning Snub

He almost was not asked to speak.

In October 1863, President Abraham Lincoln received the same plain envelope that was sent to hundreds of people, requesting attendance at a dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery here.

Col. Clark E. Carr, a confidant of several U.S. presidents and a member of the commission that organized the event, later admitted that commissioners scrambled to send a more personal invitation after Lincoln indicated he would attend.

Asking Lincoln to deliver a “few appropriate thoughts,” Carr said, was “an afterthought.”

You see, the dedication's real headliner was Edward Everett. A former secretary of State, U.S. senator, Massachusetts governor and Harvard president whose nationwide tour helped to save Mt. Vernon as a national shrine, Everett was considered the great orator of his time.

When Lincoln arrived, Gettysburg remained raw from the horrific battle that raged here for three days just five months earlier. More than 70,000 Confederate troops engaged 83,000 Federal troops around this crossroads town; the battle claimed more than 50,000 souls and 3,000 horses, and it changed the course of the war in the Union's favor.

The bones of dead horses still were strewn over surrounding farmlands; vultures hovered over the landscape, and unburied coffins stood stacked in town.

Lincoln had plenty of justifiable, honorable reasons to beg off from the ceremony: His 10-year-old son, Tad, lay sick with a fever in the White House; the war was going poorly out West; he was locked in a budget showdown with Congress; and his re-election bid looked grim against a general he fired for incompetence a year earlier.

Via: Fox News

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Historian: Americans Don’t Understand Meaning Behind Gettysburg Address

150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg 

Address this month

A historian said Friday that Americans often fail to recognize the meaning behind President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address ahead of the speech’s 150th anniversary this month.

Allen Guelzo, director of Civil War era studies at Gettysburg College and a renowned Lincoln scholar, said at the Heritage Foundation that Americans typically remember the address for its brevity orphrases like “four score and seven years ago” and “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Lincoln delivered the remarks—comprising just 272 words in 10 sentences—on Nov. 19, 1863, four-and-a-half months after the pivotal battle of Gettysburg left more than 50,000 soldiers dead or wounded. Only a third of the expected bodies had been buried at the cemetery at the time.

Guelzo said Lincoln was “a man of no verbal wastage,” providing the thousands gathered at the dedication with a past, present, and future vision of America. The Founding Fathers “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty” in 1776; the present crowd assembled to honor those “who here gave their lives that that nation might live”; and Lincoln urged the attendees to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

The last part, given the historical context of the speech, is the most important, Guelzo said.

“We do not see Lincoln’s subject, the survival of democracy, as Lincoln saw it,” he said. “For Lincoln, democracy was an isolated and beleaguered island in a world dominated by monarchies and tyrants.”

Lincoln studied the terror of the French Revolution and the military dictatorship of Napoleon, followed by the 19th century revolutions across Europe that were “crushed and subverted by nascent monarchies and romantic philosophers,” Guelzo said. Democratic government “lay discredited and disgraced,” he added.

Via: WFB

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