posted by kaya man:
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No offense, I usually enjoy you're posts, but I'm surprised about your comments on Lincoln. If you wouldn't mind elaborating on your views on him I'd be interested in seeing them. I'm not particularily well read on Lincoln. I am aware that giving him so much credit for liberating the slaves is probably off as it wasn't his primary interest. However it is also my understanding that his real interest was in maintaining the union.
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Abraham Lincoln transformed our country into a military dictatorship.
No one wanted to fight his war, so he started the draft.
No one wanted to pay for his war, so he started an income tax (declared unconstitutional and struck down) and numerous other new taxes, as well as pushing for increases in existing taxes to raise revenue.
Members of Congress and the Supreme Court opposed his war, so he instituted the despicable Executive Order as a means to make end runs around the Legislative and JUdicial branches of the government.
Members of the media spoke out against Lincoln and found their papers shut down, their property seized and themselves in prison.
Lincoln suspended
habeus corpus, which is an essential cornerstone of justice, to achieve his goals of persecuting Northerners who worked to undermine his war.
Lincoln was a documented hypocrite on the issue of slavery and abolition.
The southern states, in breaking away from the Union, were asserting the sovereignity which is clearly defined as not only a right, but a
duty, in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln had no right to infringe upon this sovereignity in the first place -- the Lincoln invasion of the Confederacy of Southern States was no different from the Bush invasion of Iraq -- a hostile takeover of sovereign territory, with a convenient smoke screen of an excuse.
Many of Lincoln's policies and practices were either reversed by the Congress or declared unconstitutional or even illegal by the Supreme Court, after his death.
Lincoln was far and away the worst president and greatest traitor to the American way of life who ever sat in the Oval Office, and over and above the damage he did in his own lifetime (The Civil War killed more Americans than the Spanish-American, WWI, WWI, Korea and Vietnam
combined) he set precedents for future generations of would-be tyrants, and history has shown that there are no shortage of same seeking to hold office in the United States.
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I've always heard and pretty much believed that had the nation divided the U.S. wouldn't have developed into such a powerful nation.
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Perhaps so, but would that be such a bad thing? Take away all of that power, and America is still a great nation, one of the greatest in the history of the world. Conceived in liberty, virtually unique in all of the history of man, and regardless of whether or not the global village likes to admit it, the pattern on which many newer governments have been designed.
I believe that America will be split in half or thirds or fourths before too much longer; but the founding principles will always be applied somewhere, and it will be where they are applied most truly that the best success willl be found.
Phaedrus
