This latter-day adoration of Lincoln by Barack Obama, and his worshipful party and press, is flummoxing. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you didn't care for George W. Bush then Abraham Lincoln would've had you fit to be tied. Look at the anti-war, surrender-ist Democrat Party platform of 1864, and the fire-and-brimstone indictments of Lincoln and the Union cause by the "Copperhead" Democrats and their many allies in the "international community" of the time, and you'd think you were reading the war against President Bush translated into Victorian. The 21st Century Left -- with Obama as their new philosopher-king -- are the very reincarnation of those 19th Century Lincoln-haters. It is the "neo-con warmongers" who are the legitimate heirs of Lincoln and his war to save the Union and free the slaves.
Following is a representative specimen of the Obama-as-Lincoln genre, this one from the Obama-ist Canadian Press newswire service, and specifically Lee-Anne Goodman, the swooning bobbysoxer whose reporting belongs in Tiger Beat: "Lincoln, Obama’s political hero, also figured prominently during the day’s events.... The man who came to be known as the Great Emancipator was also a lanky Illinois politician with a gift for oratory when he became president." Oh, well then: Both lanky, both associated with Illinois, both politicians, and both handy at public speaking. What matter if they would have been on opposing sides of the major issues of the day at least as often as not? Why, did you know they both enjoyed pie? Clear a space on Mount Rushmore!
Roosevelt and Kennedy are venerated in the popular culture and press, but I find the pair of them to have been miserable presidents, and I'm confident that would've been my appraisal in their times, so I couldn't in good conscience appropriate their latter-day veneration. (Roosevelt much more than Kennedy, incidentally. Roosevelt saw the United States and its government as his personal fiefdom, extended the Great Depression by seven years, and was almost uniformly wrong in his many disagreements with Churchill; whereas Kennedy was at least for across-the-board tax cuts and a strong, anti-Communist defense. Kennedy's problem was his remarkable knack for doing exactly the wrong thing, from the Berlin Wall to Cuba to Vietnam to Iraq.)
But the Left has this "thing" about celebrities and hero-figures, and just can't help themselves. A historical figure's hero-status will trump any pesky 180-degree disagreements of worldview for the Left, and they invariably try to claim inheritance of any celebrated hero-figure, including the ones from the Right.
And, for absolutely anyone who is on the Left in this 21st Century and presumes to carry the mantle of Churchill, may lightning strike them. You'd have been baying for Churchill's blood had you been alive in his time. Churchill is today understood to be the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, so there are plenty of pretenders who want to wrap themselves in the Churchill flag. But if you are still on the Left after the 9/11 attacks, then had this been the 1930s, you may be assured that you would have considered Churchill a reckless, dangerous, vile warmonger and imperialist, completely devoid of humanity, and you have no right ever claiming Churchill as a spiritual ally.
You may be assured that Churchill was an arch conservative, an English imperialist, a Zionist, and the foremost advocate in the English-speaking world for the efficacy of force in international relations; In other words, you leftists would have hated his ever-living guts and wished earnestly for his untimely demise. And it says something about Churchill's worldview that he is so indisputably the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, and absolutely towers over his more leftward contemporaries, Roosevelt chief among them. It's as George Orwell said of Rudyard Kipling: He holds up, while his leftist contemporaries become unreadably dated, because his brutal, natural conservatism brought him closest to understanding the world as it actually is and will be. Or, as Margaret Thatcher explained, "The facts of life are conservative."
"Turning in their graves" is the right expression. Poor Messrs. Lincoln and Churchill, appropriated to promote politicians and causes they would have fought against tooth-and-nail, by people who would have torn them down and subverted their efforts at every turn.
Following is a representative specimen of the Obama-as-Lincoln genre, this one from the Obama-ist Canadian Press newswire service, and specifically Lee-Anne Goodman, the swooning bobbysoxer whose reporting belongs in Tiger Beat: "Lincoln, Obama’s political hero, also figured prominently during the day’s events.... The man who came to be known as the Great Emancipator was also a lanky Illinois politician with a gift for oratory when he became president." Oh, well then: Both lanky, both associated with Illinois, both politicians, and both handy at public speaking. What matter if they would have been on opposing sides of the major issues of the day at least as often as not? Why, did you know they both enjoyed pie? Clear a space on Mount Rushmore!
Roosevelt and Kennedy are venerated in the popular culture and press, but I find the pair of them to have been miserable presidents, and I'm confident that would've been my appraisal in their times, so I couldn't in good conscience appropriate their latter-day veneration. (Roosevelt much more than Kennedy, incidentally. Roosevelt saw the United States and its government as his personal fiefdom, extended the Great Depression by seven years, and was almost uniformly wrong in his many disagreements with Churchill; whereas Kennedy was at least for across-the-board tax cuts and a strong, anti-Communist defense. Kennedy's problem was his remarkable knack for doing exactly the wrong thing, from the Berlin Wall to Cuba to Vietnam to Iraq.)
But the Left has this "thing" about celebrities and hero-figures, and just can't help themselves. A historical figure's hero-status will trump any pesky 180-degree disagreements of worldview for the Left, and they invariably try to claim inheritance of any celebrated hero-figure, including the ones from the Right.
And, for absolutely anyone who is on the Left in this 21st Century and presumes to carry the mantle of Churchill, may lightning strike them. You'd have been baying for Churchill's blood had you been alive in his time. Churchill is today understood to be the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, so there are plenty of pretenders who want to wrap themselves in the Churchill flag. But if you are still on the Left after the 9/11 attacks, then had this been the 1930s, you may be assured that you would have considered Churchill a reckless, dangerous, vile warmonger and imperialist, completely devoid of humanity, and you have no right ever claiming Churchill as a spiritual ally.
You may be assured that Churchill was an arch conservative, an English imperialist, a Zionist, and the foremost advocate in the English-speaking world for the efficacy of force in international relations; In other words, you leftists would have hated his ever-living guts and wished earnestly for his untimely demise. And it says something about Churchill's worldview that he is so indisputably the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, and absolutely towers over his more leftward contemporaries, Roosevelt chief among them. It's as George Orwell said of Rudyard Kipling: He holds up, while his leftist contemporaries become unreadably dated, because his brutal, natural conservatism brought him closest to understanding the world as it actually is and will be. Or, as Margaret Thatcher explained, "The facts of life are conservative."
"Turning in their graves" is the right expression. Poor Messrs. Lincoln and Churchill, appropriated to promote politicians and causes they would have fought against tooth-and-nail, by people who would have torn them down and subverted their efforts at every turn.
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