Letters to the Editor
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Lincoln would have fired Rumsfeld years ago
Your article fails to point out the most massive difference between Lincoln and Bush, namely, the civil war in question happened HERE in the former case, to us, and cost the lives of half a million Americans versus the civil war we have ended up creating 5000 miles away from here for at best misguided reasons. There is simply no comparison between the two definining struggles -- not in scope, not in significance.
It's also important to note that Lincoln was extremely results-oriented as Commander in Chief, unlike Bush. As the Union Army failed to make traction early in the war -- within the first three years (!) -- Lincoln fired a number of generals before he finally found Grant. Bush, so far, has stuck with the one he thinks is doing a "fine" job, regardless of the obvious downward spiral everyone is witnessing. It's far too late now for the firing of Rumsfeld to make any difference in Iraq.
My money is on this historical bet: If Lincoln was the best that ever came from the Republican party, Bush will turn out to be its ultimate worst, by a long shot.
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I disagree with one statement
I appreciate the article. It resonates with what so many of us believe. I have one small disagreement. You state that “Like Bush, Lincoln found himself leading the nation in a war he didn't anticipate.”
If you are writing about the so-called “war on terror” I believe he not only anticipated it, but relished the idea—as most neo-cons do—of inventing a permanent “enemy” like the Soviet Union was through all the years of the cold war. The idea is to keep everyone off balance and feeling constantly threatened. To this end they created the proverbial “evil axis.”
If you are writing about Iraq, then there is no question that he not only anticipated invading the country, he was searching for an excuse even before he took office. The people with whom Bush surrounded himself clamored to invade Iraq. They lied to make it happen. They twisted facts to make it reasonable. They linked an improbable regime with the terrorists who attacked us in New York knowing there was no connection.
One of their goals is to drive the Federal Government into insolvency so that social programs and entitlements will have to be abandoned. One way or other these calculating extremists are determined to create a small government that can be dragged to a bathtub and drowned. If it takes a war or two to help that goal along, well so be it. Meanwhile, cut taxes for the very rich.
There can be no doubt that posterity and history will look back on these George Bush years as some of the darkest in our history, while Lincoln’s light will still blaze with bright honor, unless of course they manage to pervert or demonize the memory of true patriots.
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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.
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The 1864 election
Johnson wasn't impeached by his own party as Epps implies in the sentence "even though Bush has most of Johnson's flaws, he runs almost no risk of being impeached by his own party." Johnson was a Democrat impeached by Republicans--just like Bill Clinton!
Maybe Epps meant that Johnson was impeached by the party of the Republican-headed "National Union" ticket he was elected on. Lincoln cleverly split the Democrats in '64. He got one to sign on as his running mate. That Lincoln was one smart cookie all right.
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Additional correction
Spencer is absolutely correct to point out the war in Iraq was hardly one w hadn't anticipated. While in point of actual fact he may not have personally anticipated it, clearly, most of those close to him like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al, couldn't wait to be at war in Iraq from the very get-go.
Another, perhaps less significant quibble, would be with the characterization of w as a "goober" from the "frontier." It may be that the man is from Texas, however he is also "from" one of the blue-bloodiest East Coast families in the annals of the nation's history. He attended prep-school in the East, and bluffed his way through two of the country's most staid and mannered institutions of higher education.
By all rights, he was exposed to every convention of polite society and "good breeding" from the earliest days of his childhood. Whereas the rough-hewn edges of personal comportment exhibited by men such as Lincoln and Johnson might be winked at given their century and their backgrounds, w has neither to fall back on.
Either his "goober from the frontier" schtick is just that, or he really is a mannerless lout despite the advantages of his wealthy and privileged upbringing. In any case, he comes out a loser in the historical record.