While Kentuckian's observations are well taken, one cannot help but think that Mr. Lincoln, after having shut down the democratic routine in Maryland with strategic house arrest of crucial delegates (who would most certainly have voted the Old Line state into the Confederacy), was painfully aware that if Maryland swung the wrong way the Nation's Capitol would be landlocked on 3 sides by a Confederate state and looking across the river at the very Flower of the Confederacy. Had General Jubal Early's troops made it to Fort Stevens just a little sooner, had Lincoln's hat actually been shot off by one of those troops (or his head)as legend has it, had the reinforcements arrived just a little later that day, Washington (and Lincoln) would have fallen and our Capitol would now be Richmond. It was a matter of degrees.

Yes, I know, it sounds like more "Fergit, hell!" talk, but it's not. It reflects the potential for today, for right now. Lincoln very nearly met his waterloo at the brief seige of Fort Stevens and only got that far because he had effectively shut down the full vote in Maryland, and when the tide did turn in the Union's favor at Fort Stevens he saw to it that his army persued the ragtag remains of Early's fleeing near-heros and massacred them at Grace Church. Still no clue? OK, I'll draw a picture: Bush is in a similar position right now, but more politically than militarily. He isn't looking down the barrel of an opponent's musket, but he is looking down a bottomless pit of failure; if Douglas MacArthur really did attempt a military coup against Harry Truman in 1951 (as has been speculated for many years) such a scenario is even more of a potential today. If Fort Stevens and the Union came that close to falling during the American Civil War, then this Civil Cold War in which we are engaged today could result in the undoing of a President whose contempt for the rule of law is far more blatant and far less understandable than Lincoln's. If the citizens of this nation had been educated properly in their own history they would understand the potential to dethrone a tyrant, since it is far too late to strangle it in its cradle. And it needs to be a thorough dethroning, because if anyone tries and fails, they will most certainly meet a fate similar to that of Jubal Early's retreating troops. He'll take no prisoners save to torture them, and we've already been tortured enough.

We stand on the brink of a new sort of Civil War - one that may actually be civil in nature - and all we need to do to wage this war here on the home front is to show up and vote, to show up in our representatives' mailboxes, to show up in person in Washington, DC and make a noise loud enough to wake the deaf, if not the dead. To borrow from the Maryland state song, "The tyrant's heel is on thy shore...His torch is at thy temple door..."*

Indeed it has happened on our soil before - and it certainly could happen again. This time what we would have, however, would be more apocalyptic in its portent than any literal violence, because either we will allow ourselves to be run over by an idiot tyrant, or we will ourselves run over him. "War in Heaven." The choice, this time, seems clear enough. The prize is every bit as huge. To fail could mean that Keilor is right - we will not have seen it coming - nor maybe even cared.

*for the entire song, in its shocking context, see:

http://www.mdarchives.state.md.us/msa/mdmanual/01glance/html/symbols/lyricsco.html