Lincoln is the Deity of the American empire and its civic religion. Or, at least, its messiah.
Tonight, Obama was asked on a show about faith and politics (for some reason it's okay when "liberal" politicians discuss this stuff) whether he thought God took sides on war, and, in particular, on the US war on terror.
What a slick politician. He said he agrees with Lincoln: The real concern is whether we're on His side. This sounds very humble, superficially, but it still implies something odious: it is possible for politicians to take us into war with the faith that they are doing the Lord's work.
He kept quoting Lincoln. He said the war on fascist persecution (WWII) was a just cause, and so was Lincoln's war, so he's not totally antiwar, and, by implication, he thinks at least some acts of mass murder are on the side of God. But Obama has also said that he
"cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. As a law professor and civil rights lawyer and as an African American, I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a military document than a clarion call for justice."
So if he didn't even free the slaves and wasn't the Great Emancipator, how could his war of unbelievable destruction to the Bill of Rights, Southern lives and Northern liberties possibly be just? Well, according to Obama, "it is precisely those imperfections--and the painful self-awareness of those failings etched in every crease of his face and reflected in those haunted eyes--that make [Lincoln] so compelling." And as if to concede openly what Lincoln's agenda really was, understandably without any fear that American voters would find this outrageous, Obama did say that Lincoln "didn't just talk or write or theorize. He . . . pushed for new bridges and roads and waterways."
Half a million dead Americans. The death of the old Republic. The nationalization of slavery in the form of conscription. The precedent for what would become one of the most arrogant empires, and certainly the largest, the world had ever seen. Was all this on the side of God, even if emancipation was not the purpose nor a goal that could not be more peacefully achieved? Sure. Because Lincoln's flaws only made him even more a man to worship, and his war to preserve the union and transform it into a consolidated, corporate state, is a just cause if there ever were one.
Sadly, of all the media's picked front-runners, this slick Democrat disgusts me less than the others -- Lincolnians all, of course.
