Comments on: The Dumbest Thing I Have Ever Read on the Internets

By: Gene

Gene — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 02:49:18 +0000

Z wrote: Lincoln would pee standing up. George Bush pees standing up. The two are obviously both equal in greatness.

W pees himself if anyone has the temerity to criticize him. Lincoln made an effort to understand why someone was critical of him. Two very different things.

By: Swami

Swami — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 02:46:28 +0000

Does anything stand out is this letter that gives a hint of the differences between Bush and Lincoln?

_Letter to General Grant. July 13, 1863_

My dear General, I do not remember that you and I ever met personally. I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country. I wish to say a word further. When you first reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, I thought you should do what you finally did–march the troops across the neck, run the batteries with the transports, and thus go below; and I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I, that the Yazoo Pass expedition and the like could succeed. When you got below and took Port Gibson, Grand Gulf, and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join General Banks, and when you turned northward, east of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right and I was wrong.

Yours very truly,
A. LINCOLN.

By: Swami

Swami — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 02:26:22 +0000

Bush is a turd !…Originally I gave Bush the benefit of the doubt in thinking that some people have difficulty in public speaking, and that his malapropisms were the result of unease in the public spotlight. After lenghty observation, I’ve come to the conclusion that Bush’s fumbling with words is the result of a confused and atropied mind struggling to express itself with a limited source of knowledge and understanding from which to draw. Bush is a joke that been played on the American public..a marketing ploy. And to try to put him in the same league as Abraham Lincoln is even a bigger joke. Lincoln exhibited brilliance in communication by both the written and spoken word, whereas the best Bush can do is repetitively belt out mindless little oneliners like..”we’ll stand down when they stand up”..” Freedom is on the march” ” we weep and we mourn”, Really, I can train a parrot to articulate better than that.
Come-on America, it’s time we pulled the plug on this clown and put him out of our misery.

By: Donna

Donna — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 23:01:36 +0000

Just a guess, folks. I think the rightie attempts to compare Bush to Lincoln had just got started when Maha swamped ‘em with history.
The second phase of comparison was supposed to dreg up all the 1860’s buffooning and cartooning of Lincoln which took place back then…..in an attempt to therefore explain away or diminish the fact that Bush’s tarnished image has become a laughing stock in the present.

By: Tennessean

Tennessean — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 21:23:23 +0000

One more thing about Lincoln, which Bray conveniently ignored: Lincoln’s initiative in the Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t all about freeing slaves as “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin delineates. It was partly about Lincoln’s political assessment that–at that particular moment in the war–issuing the proclamation would incite slaves in the southern states to migrate to the North. Lincoln surmised that allowing slaves who escaped North to join the Union Army would so demoralize the Confederates that it would give the Union a huge psychological advantage. Lincoln was a brilliant political strategist at his core. The Emancipation Proclamation was a tactic of psychological warfare in Lincoln’s mind; though he detested slavery, he was not an abolitionist–he was an astute politician, determined to hold the Union together. He supported the Missouri Compromise–until he realized the Emancipation Proclamation would have more far-reaching effects than simply abolition of slavery.

By: Mark Bernstein

Mark Bernstein — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 20:38:56 +0000

Just FYI, I'm sorry to report that Bray actually makes his living writing this nonsense, and spent 17 years as the editorial page editor of the Detroit News. Here's his bio from the Wall Street Journal online edition. I see his column once a week (I subscribe to the Detroit Free Press, a much better paper, and they do a combined edition with the News on Sunday), and while this is certainly the most idiotic thing I've seen him write, it's far from atypical.

By: Hammer

Hammer — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 20:31:56 +0000

Gen. McClellan wound up running for President against Lincoln in 1864 (http://www.presidentelect.org/e1864.html) on a peace at any price platform. His claim to not have enough troops was transparently disingenuous. He more or less refused to fight the war in order to run against it.

By: Jeff R

Jeff R — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 19:08:06 +0000

The “member of Lincoln’s cabinet who advised him to start a war with another country” in order to unite Americans and prevent a civil war was Secretary of State Seward, who appeared to have done that in a memorandum to Lincoln dated April 1, 1861 (April Fools Day, hmm). But not every historian accepts that Seward was trying to do anything like that. There is a discussion of this by Norman Ferris in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association at

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/12/ferris.html

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 18:31:10 +0000

I did not know that Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus when Congress was out of session and went out of his way to make sure Congress took charge of the matter the minute it was back in session.

Makes Bush look very very small.

By: maha

maha — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 18:26:29 +0000

Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t some of Lincoln’s cabinet advise him to start a war with another nation There was talk of putting down the foreign invasion of Mexico. The French-sponsored invasion occurred at the same time as the Civil War. Maximilian's troops took Mexico City within days of the battle of Gettysburg, as I recall. That's probably what you are thinking of. I don't believe it got past the talking stage. After the surrender at Appomattox, however, General Grant arranged to send some military support to the Juaristas without actually getting permission to do so. It's a long but interesting story, that.