Tonight at 8 PM EST the Distortion-of-History Channel will air yet another “documentary” on Lincoln. The advertisement for it on the Channel’s web site makes it sound quite critical, bringing up various well-documented but covered up (by the history profession) facts such as: Abe’s two nervous breakdowns; his decision as a young man to stop carrying a knife for fear he would kill himself with it; his poems about committing suicide; his talk in the White House about committing suicide; his worries that he, like a childhood friend, would lose his mind and go berserk; his belief that he lived with syphilis for decades, given to him by a prostitute in the 1830s; his disavowel of Christianity and attendances at seances, and more.

Here’s my prediction: While these facts may be briefly mentioned, most of the show will involve interviews with some of the usual excuse makers and propagandists, such as the Stalinist Eric Foner, who is such a wacko that he publicly opposed the breakup of the Soviet Union (arguing that his hero Lincoln would never have let the Soviet Republics go in peace like the wimpy Gorbachev did). The “spin” throughout the show will be that, in light of his obvious mental illness, Lincoln was even greater than we ever imagined. He accomplished all that he accomplised despite being a pshycho. His mental illness strengthened him, as is stated in a recent book on Abe’s mental illness by another court historian.

A more plausible interpretation would be that a suicidal madman was elected president with 39% of the popular vote in 1860 and proceeded to manipulate his country into the bloodiest war in history up to that point, killing some 600,000 soldiers, maiming several times that number, and destroying the system of government established by the founders (federalism and states’ rights)in the process.

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Well, it wasn’t quite a hatchet job, only a big deception, as usual. Big surprise. After interviewing me on camera for 90 minutes last summer, the Distortion of History Channel only used the three 5-10 second soundbites in the entire interview that had nothing to do with any of the facts documented in The Real Lincoln. All of them were taken out of context, and one of them actually made me sound like a Lincoln sychophant. No mention of the bombing of southern cities and the killig of civilians, the suspension of habeas corpus, Lincoln’s views on “colonization,” his racist/white supremacist speeches, the shutting down of the opposition press, the mass arrest of war protesters, the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to “rebel territory,” or the consequences of the abolition of federalism and states’ rights. Certainly no mention of tariffs. Only endless blather about how depressed Abe supposedly was about all the death –which he was primarily responsible for. As though they know his mental state. Somebody must have gone through my interview with a fine-toothed comb to pull those brief statements out. I don’t think they presented a single, solitary negative fact about Abe during the entire show, relying 99% on the sappy sentimentality of Hillary Clinton pal and Mario Cuomo co-author Harold Holzer, the Elmer Fudd-sounding communist Eric Foner, and liberal/leftist/nationalist /statist James McPherson. The producer who contacted me said they wanted to do somethng different from the same, old sappy love-fest. Ha!

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