He was a "war president." In fact, the war over which he presided may have claimed more American lives than all other wars combined. But he's not remembered that way. You wouldn't catch him strutting around in a flight suit.He was the poet president. The man with the kind yet sad smile. And he hated the killing business. Though born and raised in the frontier, he never hunted, not even as a boy. He'd give Dick Cheney a raincheck. Although religious revivals were all the rage, he never joined a church. He'd give Pat Robertson a raincheck, too.
To his generals' dismay, he had an annoying habit of pardoning young men who fell asleep on sentry duty or who deserted. "If Almighty God gives a man a cowardly pair of legs how can he help their running away with him?" He often asked whether a "soldier can better serve the country dead than living."
Happy birthday, Abe. The country misses you.
Lincoln was a Republican, but his was no party of oppression. erialism. Iraq (and Iran) would have no appeal to him. Here's what Kurt Vonnegut thinks.
[I]t is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln in a speech about something or somebody else. He always steals the show. I am about to quote him.
Lincoln was only a Congressman when he said in 1848 what I am about to echo. He was heartbroken and humiliated by our war on Mexico, which had never attacked us.
We were making California our own, and a lot of other people and properties, and doing it as though butchering Mexican soldiers who were only defending their homeland against invaders wasn’t murder.
What other stuff besides California? Well, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.
The person congressman Lincoln had in mind when he said what he said was James Polk, our president at the time. Abraham Lincoln said of Polk, his president, our armed forces’ commander-in-chief: "Trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood — that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into war."
Holy smokes! I almost said, "Holy shit!" And I thought I was a writer!
