Presidents Past -- They Haunt Us StillHappy to take another day off at taxpayer expense, government employees enjoyed the holiday. Perhaps you missed it. Presidents' Day marked the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, who have as much in common as a warrior and a weasel. To celebrate this occasion the Great American Mythology Machine generates lists and surveys of Americans' favorite presidents. Always atop the pile are the revered despot Lincoln and the beloved commie FDR. We learned in government schools from texts written by government professors that these men were great. And they were great — great at expanding government power and crushing individual liberty. The growth of one diminishes the other. Take Lincoln. We soak up the fable he freed the slaves, yet his speeches and letters reveal a bigot and white supremacist, a candidate for grand dragon of the KKK. His Emancipation Proclamation called for freeing slaves only in states not under Union control. Where his gunmen held the ground, the slaves remained chained. His eloquent piece of drivel, the Gettysburg Address, declared "all men are created equal," the truth of which a child would dispute. Jefferson used those words in the Declaration of Independence as part of a sentence containing a profound and revolutionary thought. But Lincoln was not a thinker. He was a lawyer beguiling a jury with catchwords and slogans. As a lawyer, he represented the largest railroad corporation in the world. After his war criminals Grant, Sherman and Sheridan raped and pillaged the South, they bravely marched west to butcher the Plains Indians, after which conquered land was given to railroads. This established the government practice of confiscation of property and taxes for the benefit of favored corporations. In the 19th century, slavery perished peacefully worldwide. In some countries too many slaves escaped to non-slave territories.
Lincoln opposed slavery in the new American territories. Textbooks imply he took a moral stand. His speeches and letters show otherwise. Lincoln argued that blacks were inferior. He feared debasement of the white race in the North and the territories. He wanted blacks barred from those places. Better yet, get them off the continent entirely. He negotiated with nations in Africa, the Caribbean and South America to colonize them there. Lincoln killed 620,000 Americans in the bloodiest war in world history to that point. The Reconstruction that followed impoverished the South, which before the war had generated more than half of federal tax revenue and most of the nation's exports. It left a legacy of racial bitterness. It created a class of slave descendents, too many of whom think like slaves to this day, chained to their new master, the government itself. As for Roosevelt, he carried on the Lincolnian tradition of confiscation of power to government. He blamed the Great Depression — caused by government — on capitalism. He prolonged the depression through economic mismanagement. He confiscated citizens' gold, their property. Warm-hearted, fireside-papa president that he was, he let them keep their pants. Roosevelt gave us Social Security, which rent the social fabric and now bankrupts the nation. He adopted the Keynesian model of borrowing and spending that every president since has embraced, piling the tax of ever-rising prices on the backs of all Americans. Lincoln and Roosevelt. Great men? They bequeathed us racism, inflation and all-consuming government. They sowed their sorry seeds. Their noxious weeds bloomed to consume the fertile fields of generations unborn. Our nation stands for something. These men stood for something else. Phil Lucas is executive editor of The News Herald in Panama City, Fla. Contact him at plucas@pcnh.com. To find out more about Lucas and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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