According to some posters Gaffney's column is off of the Times site. As of this Saturday morning at 10:30 it's still on Townhall.com, entitled "truly 'innapropriate' behavior" (irony apparently not intended.)

You can read there all of the violent comments he elicted, including this thing from Diogenes:

"Didn't have to go beyond your first quote: it's true--it is time for blow back!!!"

Apparently the false quote alone was enough to get this guy going.

Shouldn't be surprised - Gaffney's just borrowing a page from the Bush handbook. If you can start a war with lies about WMDs why not pump up your culture war troups with lies from the mouths of great presidents?

Glenn,

I don't see the Abraham Lincoln quote in the Washington Times anymore. This is the first time I read the op-ed, so I don't know in what part of it Gaffney repeated that quote, but unless I missed it in my skimming, it's not there.

Kathy at Liberty Street

that I posted a diary on Don Young's reading on the floor of the house yesterday of the phony Lincoln quote that Gaffney cited in his Wash Times piece, and it got a fair number of responses and made it to the rec list:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2/15/19514/5077

Needless to say, Young is not a very popular guy on DKos, and the overwhelming sentiment is that he needs to pay a political price for what he said, as well as his party for allowing him to say it.

Silence is deadly.

Yes, Alan was quite impressive. I very rarely watch Fox so I don't know how well he's been doing on H&C lately, but it's nice to see that on his own he can more than hold his own (as of course can you).

Oh, and in my previous comment I hope that you didn't think that I was calling or comparing you to a gerbil. ;-) I was just trying to imply that Gaffney is such a coward (as all of the neocons or anyone who hides behind a tank and gun are) that even a harmless pet shop rodent could scare him. No conflation intended, of course.

Whatever Lincoln may have said or not said is beside the point. The important thing is that the Democrat congress-critters have misjudged the American people and overplayed their hand, and they will be held to account. They will be hanged, in effigy at least. President Bush and the Republicans in Congress are starting to win the debate. Watch for a political surge for President Bush, as David Broder notes in his WaPo column yesterday:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/15/AR2007021501271.html

The Iran war is off the table. Neener neener.

As I have said before (and will surely say again), Frank Gaffney and his ilk are not real Americans.

They do not have the courage necessary to be a citizen of a democracy - and they are incapable of understanding and fulfilling the duty of dissent required of all citizens by the Constitution of this Great Republic.

These psychotic authoritarian personalities are, instead, monarchist holdovers - the spiritual (and sometimes literal) descendants of the Tories of the Revolutionary Era.

In fact, they are quite like the ancient Hebrews. Recall, the Hebrews were given an early form of "government of laws and not of men" by God. Exodus tells of the giving of the law; and Judges sets forth a treatment of the Hebrew government under this law, as administered by God's Judges. However, the Hebrew people clamored for, and demanded of God (!), a king they could follow blindly, without thought or effort, so they could be just like their neighbors.

Today's neoCons are just like the ancient Hebrews, in that they reject the gifts of God (our Democracy and our Constitution) and, instead, they demand a king.

http://donyoung.house.gov/IMA/issue_subscribe.htm

To Uncle Glenny; thanks for the links. Back:

I think Gaffney is probably building his 2006 EMP story with respect to Iran from an earlier 1999 encounter/conversation entered into the Congressional Record by Roscoe Bartlett (Maryland) in 2005, which supposedly recalls comments made by former Russian ambassador Vladimir Lukin concerning the potential threat of high altitude nuclear explosion and subsequent eltromagnetic fallout. The Congressional Record entry is here:

www.fas.org/irp/congress/2005_cr/h060905.html

***

[...snip...]

Congressional Record: June 9, 2005 (House)

Page H4340-H4345

Mr. Speaker, I want to kind of put what we are going to say in context. So I want to indicate here some of the seriousness of EMP and its implications. In 1999, I sat in a hotel room in Vienna, Austria. I

was there with 10 other Members of Congress and several staff members. We had there three members of the Russian Duma...

[...]

But then it was translated, and this is what he said: "If we really wanted to hurt you with no fear of retaliation, we would launch an SLBM,'' which if it was launched in a submarine at sea, we really would

not know for certain where it came from. `"We would launch an SLBM, we would detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country, and we would shut down your power grid and your communications for 6 months or so.''

The third-ranking communist was there in the country. His name is Alexander Shurbanov, and he smiled and said, "And if one weapon would not do it, we have some spares.'' I think the number of those spares

now is something like 6,000 weapons.

This likely consequence of a high-altitude nuclear burst was corroborated by Dr. Lowell Wood, who in a field hearing at the Johns Hopkins University applied physics laboratory, made the observation

that a burst like this above our atmosphere creating this electromagnetic pulse would be like a giant continental time machine turning us back to the technology of 100 years ago.

[...snip...]

I think thats the scare-scenario Gaffney was repeating in 2006 as i mentioned in my earlier comment (Friday, February 16, 2007 1:22:20 AM):

[snip]

www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0224-07.htm

At a recent Committee on the Present Danger forum in Congress, he [Gaffney] warned that that Tehran "is working toward a capability that could destroy America as we know it".

Iran's missile programme, he asserted, appears designed to detonate a nuclear weapon "in space high above the United States, unleashing an immensely powerful electro-magnetic pulse (EMP)" that would destroy the U.S. electrical grid. The result could reduce the United States "to a pre-industrial society in the blink of an eye".

[/snip]

Except Gaffneys recast Iran as the imminent threat instead of the Russians in this new updated version.

*