On the one hand, it shows how desperate the MSM is that they will attack Paul on one of the popular wars in American mythology — Lincoln's war on the American people — rather than on the current war, on which most Americans agree with Paul that it's time to get out. But it is great to see Ron Paul refuse to back down. I remember when I first read Harry Browne's Why Government Doesn't Work, back in 1996, and it had a little dose of Civil War revisionism, and I found it fascinating and refreshing, and sensible. Since then, I have been astonished by the number of pro-Lincoln libertarians I've met. It seems that in the name of freedom (and, more important, nationalism) it is seen as totally justified to enslave people, murder them, set civilian towns on fire, rape, pillage, torture, censor, and destroy habeas corpus. But by bringing the Late Unpleasantness up as a campaign issue, as an attack point against Ron, the MSM has exposed our national mythology's most crucial element — the Sainthood of Abe — to the scrutiny of a consistent opponent of war and militarism. Big mistake.
George W. Bush and the Republican establishment are, if nothing else, Lincolnian, regardless of what anyone might say. The party of corporatism, imperialism, centralism, economic fascism, dictatorship, aggressive war, militaristic duplicity, conscription, direct taxation, cronyism and police statism has never strayed much from its 1860s roots. And it has always advanced despotism in the name of liberty and national honor, from Lincoln to Teddy, from Nixon to Reagan, from the Bushes to Benito.
Ron Paul is indeed an exception within the GOP. And he has stood up, heroically, to the Lincoln myth. This will get people thinking — perhaps there is something similarly wrong with aggressive war on the Iraqis and on the Southerners, a continuity between the rape of Atlanta and the rape of Fallujah, between Lincoln's internal improvements and Bush's Haliburtonization of Middle East policy. Maybe Operation Iraqi Freedom and the War Between the States were both murderous and deceitful. Maybe the two Republican administrations to suspend habeas corpus unilaterally, only to have their kept Congresses rubberstamp the tyranny, have a lot in common, after all.
No one serious who really thinks about it for more than 45 seconds can conclude there would still be slave plantations in America if not for Lincoln, so that smear just won't work. Black Americans won't fall for it either, despite the PC establishment that has taken for granted this demographic for so long. Americans of color can tell which Republicans are a genuine and grave threat to their liberty, and it's not the one who challenges the corporatist warfare state that has always depended upon blacks as cannon fodder.
But Ron Paul has done something that no presidential candidate of any prominence has done in many, many years — he has challenged the cult of Lincoln, the ideological godhead of the modern American regime. The Federal Reserve, the Income Tax, the Wilsonian empire and now the Lincolnian central state have all become national issues of discourse again. Thanks, Ron Paul. Once again, you have told the American people what they need to hear. If we want America to become a free country, we must go further than overturning the legacy of George W. Bush. We must overturn much more, and replace it with liberty itself. We are closer to that goal than ever, as the ideological basis for the modern American system is crumbling at every moment of exposure to Dr. Paul's truth serum.
