Letters to the Editor
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Another connection
There's a more direct link between Lincoln and Bush than the article mentions: If not for Lincoln, Bush not only wouldn't be president, he wouldn't be an American citizen. Lincoln was a great human being and a very capable executive -- both major contrasts with Bush -- but that doesn't mean the Civil War was a good idea. The South wanted to leave the Union, and if it had, American politics today would be radically different; the Southern-based Republican Party as we now know it just wouldn't exist. (Nor would Southern Democrats have blocked civil-rights legislation for decades, at least not in the US.) But nooooooooo..... Lincoln and the Republicans of his day preferred to fight an immensely destructive war, at a cost of more than 600,000 casualties and any number of ruined communities and families, rather than negotiate a peaceable separation. Slavery was ended, but the North then abandoned the freed slaves to decades of oppression and terrorism. And to top it off, Lincoln -- well aware that he had been the target of assassins, and knowing how incapable Johnson was -- went to the theater with no security, thus courting the disasters the followed from his own death before Reconstruction could get underway. Today we're looking at world-threatening problems, like global warming, which are not being addressed as they should be because the world's most powerful government is in the hands of Southern extremists. That is at least in part Lincoln's doing. In a sense, he gave us Bush.