In After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, Mark Steyn writes:
Abraham Lincoln, a predecessor of Barack Obama in both the White House and the Illinois state legislature, had eighteen months of formal education and became a soldier, surveyor, postmaster, rail-splitter, tavern keeper, and self-taught prairie lawyer. Obama went to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, and became a “community organizer.” I’m not sure that’s progress—and it’s certainly not “sustainable.” If he hadn’t become president, his resumé wouldn’t be anybody’s idea of a return on investment. His life would read like one of those experimental novels that runs backwards. But who cares? At every stage along the way, he got the measure of his guilty white liberal patrons and played them for saps.
QED: “Lincoln,” the president said today in Iowa, “they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”
At Power Line, John Hinder responds:
Almost as bad! Lincoln was “the original gorilla,” a sub-human, to the Democrats. It is impossible to imagine the hysteria that would result from any such depiction of Obama. But that was the least of it: the Southern states, in the grip of the Democratic Party, seceded rather than be governed by an anti-slavery President Lincoln. In the North, treasonous Copperhead Democrats bedeviled Lincoln’s administration throughout the Civil War. And a group of rabid Democrat/secessionists eventually assassinated him.
We have remarked before on Obama’s striking ignorance of history, but even he must understand that his claim to be more abused than Lincoln is disgraceful. If a narcissist like Obama were capable of shame, this would be an appropriate time to show it.
Nahh. I’ll take November of next year for said display.
By the way, what’s with the blacked-out Stealth Bomber Blunder Bus of Economic Doom that the president is currently traveling in? I wonder if Raymond Loewy’s presidential color scheme was rejected for it?
Update: “Tea partier heckles Obama: Why are you talking about civility when Biden’s calling us terrorists?”
If Obama loses in 2012, prepare for the Mother of All Pity-Parties, a 30-40 year whine about how awfully America treated him while he was in the White House (Obama won’t even have to overtly toss in the race card, because others in the Democratic Party and the big media will relentlessly do it for him, once they get over their mad at him losing to whichever Republican gets the nomination).
The difference between Lincoln and Obama in their attitudes toward their detractors is striking too. In his first state of the Union address Lincoln told secessionists, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” In a radio interview last year, Obama told Hispanic voters that “We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”
Thanks for the link: Obama certainly is riding the “Stealth Bomber Blunder Bus of Economic Doom.”