How can the GOP get away with calling itself the Party of Lincoln?

[jj_frap]

I mean, what do Bush and his cronies on the religious right and in corporate America have in common with a man who freed slaves while they run around calling non-Whites Macacas, valued labour over capital while they hack at the rights of American workers, was in correspondence with Karl Marx while they work to destabilise and overthrow democratically elected socialist governments, and was a secularist and a social liberal while they shove their Bibles and their authoritarian morality down the throats of people bright enough to no better.

[Nielsio]

Given that Lincoln was the first American dictator, they have a lot more in common than you think.

Or are you part of the cult of Lincoln?
http://www.mises.org/multimedia/MP3/...Lorenzo-MC.mp3

[Misfire]

Either you don't know much about Lincoln, or you don't know much about Republicans.

[Bill Haywood]

what do Bush and his cronies on the religious right and in corporate America have in common with a man who freed slaves...

The Republican Party was formed as an antislavery replacement for the old Whig party. Abe was an early member. This is why until the past 20 years or so, the GOP was always weak among southern whites -- it was the party of Lincoln.

There is a dissident flavor of GOPer known as "log cabin" Republicans. They are the ones that believe in freedom and try to maintain the actual values (as opposed to the gloss) of the party of Lincoln. Log cabin Republicans believe that laissez faire is truly in the best interests of the little guy, but lament how the GOP has become the party of the ultra rich monopolists and police statists.

The GOP is the party of Lincoln in the same sense that the Chinese Communist Party is the party of working class socialism -- they kept the name.

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
what do Bush and his cronies on the religious right and in corporate America have in common with a man who freed slaves...

The Republican Party was formed as an antislavery replacement for the old Whig party. Abe was an early member. This is why until the past 20 years or so, the GOP was always weak among southern whites -- it was the party of Lincoln.

There is a dissident flavor of GOPer known as "log cabin" Republicans. They are the ones that believe in freedom and try to maintain the actual values (as opposed to the gloss) of the party of Lincoln. Log cabin Republicans believe that laissez faire is truly in the best interests of the little guy, but lament how the GOP has become the party of the ultra rich monopolists and police statists.

The GOP is the party of Lincoln in the same sense that the Chinese Communist Party is the party of working class socialism -- they kept the name.

[/ QUOTE ]

You have a very distorted view of Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln was anything BUT a supporter of laissez faire capitalism. He was the Great Centralizer, a brutal dictator who implemented almost every one of the planks in Alexander Hamilton's and Henry Clay's plan (the so-called "American System") for American empire: centralized Federal supperiority over the (formerly) sovereign state, brutally high tariffs to protect priveleged Northern manufacturers, massive corporate welfare subsidies for corrupt "internal improvements" schemes, an aggressive expansionist military foreign policy, a central bank floating an inflationary fiat currency not backed by a hard money to pay for it all, and on and on and on. Not to mention the first American institution of military slavery (the draft), throwing 13,000 northern civillians into military prisons without charges or trial, shutting down 400 Northern newspapers for daring to editorialize against against his policies and incite for Northern seccession. Oh yeah, and creating entirely new states out of whole cloth, by dividing conquered southern states in two and installing puppet governments so that he could pack the house and senate (ever hear of West Virginia)? Or house about arresting entire state legislatures so they could not convene to vote on seccession (I think that one was Maryland, IIRC). Or how about printing Republican and Democratic ballots on different colored paper, and turning away voters with the wrong color ballot from the polls at bayone point (where do you think the red vs. blue came from)? How about that wonderful Emancipation Proclamation, that didn't free a single slave (you knew it only applied to slaves outside of Union control, and explicitly excluded slaves in Union territory, right?).

Oh, and killing 800,000 Americans.

All for the express purpose of protecting his Northern industrial cronies who would have lost there shirts if the Southern states were not compelled to pay ruinous import tariffs for foreign goods (thus forcing them to purchase goods of Northern manufacture), not to mention the Northern cronies being funnelled all fo the "internal improvement" money collected from the Southern import tariffs.

Pretty much the only plank that Lincoln didn't get done was the universal deportation of every black man, woman, and child in the United States to either the Caribbean or "back to Africa."

God I hate that douchebag. And little kids are taught to worship him like some Greek God, with his own temple and giant marble statue.

If I could go back in time and strangle one baby in a crib, it might not be Abraham Lincoln. But he would be in the top five candidates.

Also, I'm pretty sure that the Log Cabin Republicans do not stand for what you think they stand for. You're thinking of the Republican Liberty Causus, the (somewhat) libertarian wing of the Republican party.

[Bill Haywood]

I should have been more careful in attributing laissez faire to current republicans, not Lincoln. Otherwise somebody will come along and jump up and down about it for paragraph after paragraph.

Yes, you are right, Lincoln's civil war was about empire, not emancipation. The war was over whether empire would be an agrarian slave project, or an industrial empire. But the fact is, his civil war DID end slavery, even though it was a partly collateral effect.

RE: the North stacking Southern legislatures. The great betrayal of Reconstruction was when the north stopped doing that. That allowed the Klan and lawmakers to revoke the vote of the former slaves. You are probably about to launch a rant about the corruption of the carpet baggers. Yes, there was graft. But it was not as corrupt as disenfranchisement.

[Borodog]

I'm not going to get into it. Suffice it to say that white hatred of blacks was typically stronger in the North than it was in the South prior to the war, and it was Northern political use of freed Southern slaves in the various military dictatorship puppets governments that hardened Southern white racism for the next century.

Give DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln a perusal for an unvarnished non-apologetic view of Lincoln and his aftermath.

[BluffTHIS!]

[ QUOTE ]
Oh, and killing 800,000 Americans.

All for the express purpose of protecting his Northern industrial cronies who would have lost there shirts if the Southern states were not compelled to pay ruinous import tariffs for foreign goods (thus forcing them to purchase goods of Northern manufacture), not to mention the Northern cronies being funnelled all fo the "internal improvement" money collected from the Southern import tariffs.

[/ QUOTE ]

Boro,

Wow. That is some pretty sweet revisionist history. The lib revisionists are but pale imitators of you.

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Oh, and killing 800,000 Americans.

All for the express purpose of protecting his Northern industrial cronies who would have lost there shirts if the Southern states were not compelled to pay ruinous import tariffs for foreign goods (thus forcing them to purchase goods of Northern manufacture), not to mention the Northern cronies being funnelled all fo the "internal improvement" money collected from the Southern import tariffs.

[/ QUOTE ]

Boro,

Wow. That is some pretty sweet revisionist history. The lib revisionists are but pale imitators of you.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's not revisionist history at all. His speeches are clear. He, of course, used better spin, but his platform had long been that of implementing Henry Clay's (his political idol) "American System", of high protectionist tariffs, large internal improvements subsidies, and a return to nationalized central banking with an inflationary fiat money supply to pay for it all.

[Bill Haywood]

it was Northern political use of freed Southern slaves in the various military dictatorship puppets governments that hardened Southern white racism for the next century.

Better puppets than slaves. Puppets can eventually cut the strings.

The north was responsible for postwar racism? That doesn't sound like conservatives taking personal responsiblity for their actions.

Southern racism went through a growth spurt in order to control the labor supply -- with Northern connivance.

That's why you saw the resumption of slavery in the form of prison farms. Blacks got draconian sentences for nothing, then got rented out to plantations. That and share cropping kept labor under control, both for planters, and the northern textile mills that wanted cheap cotton.

And the reason you're "not going to get into it" is because your position is untenable. If the South should not have been occupied, then slavery could not have ended. The cult of the lost cause cannot be intellectually consistent without supporting slavery. Mr. Charlie.

No matter what the North did, it was better than the holocaust that preceeded the war.