The establishment’s admiration for Honest Abe appears to
grow in proportion to its dishonesty. A week of low national
deceptions culminated in celebrations of Lincoln’s
200th birthday. Out came historians known for
plagiarizing to deliver pious speeches before politicians who
lie.
It is like an endless Charlie Rose panel, with the usual
strained and pretentious throat-clearing. “Somehow Lincoln has
worked himself into Obama’s heart and mind, and it’s a good thing
to have Lincoln as your mentor,” Doris Kearns Goodwin, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning plagiarist, said to the press.
This revival of Lincoln nostalgia has to be a form of
delusional self-aggrandizement. Obama seems to be encouraging
this renewed cult of Lincoln in egotistical anticipation of his
own. Lincoln made “my story possible,” he said. CNN teed up its
coverage with the modest title, “From Lincoln to Obama.”
A nodding liberal elite trots out Goodwin to extol
Lincoln’s virtues of probity while presiding over an age of
non-stop fraud — an age that solves recession by printing money,
solves crime by repealing laws, solves illiteracy by eliminating
tests, and solves homelessness by mandating bad loans.
And they are shocked at Alex Rodriguez? Why? Haven’t they
noticed that lying has become the national pastime? He cheated on
the field; they cheat in Congressional offices, board rooms, and
bureaucracies. He took steroids; they take special-interests
stimulus.
Nothing is what it appears, not even the inevitable
confessions which are as carefully contrived as the crimes. A
daily, indistinct mass of dishonesty washes over the public in a
boring cycle of indifferent sin and contrition. Every crime, no
matter how high or low, is merely a “mistake,” something on the
order of lost car keys.
Would Abraham Lincoln have voted for Barack Obama or any of
the Dems honoring him on Thursday at the Capitol? It is highly
unlikely. He would have found their politics unfathomable, not
just for its crassness and feeble corner-cutting but for its
aphilosophical stupidity.
A president who says, as Obama did in his inaugural
address, that the central question for the federal government is
not whether it is “too big” but whether “it works” has snapped
the mystic cords of memory stretching back to the founders. For
them, the proper size of the federal government was the most
fundamental question, and they feared that without a sound answer
to it tyranny would follow.
And it has. Obama is practicing the soft tyranny of low
expectations and high government spending. That supposedly
heart-warming spectacle in Florida this week was ludicrous, a
scene worthy of a Mel Brooks movie. The Brave New World doesn’t
look like it is progressing but regressing; the world is back to
piracy in the Gulf of Eden and quasi-kings holding court as the
lucky few get to pitch their pleas.
Statesmen now take down the cell numbers of the homeless,
provided that the petitioner is good for ratings. Obama casts his
cheap, showboating pragmatism as Lincolnian — as if fighting for
pork is akin to holding the union together. This is all about as
soulfully Lincolnian as his calculated “I screwed up” apologies
last week.
Where Lincoln was serious, Obama is glib, framing debates
dishonestly so that his run-of-the-mill liberalism goes
unchallenged. Where Lincoln measured progress by the perfection
of the Declaration of Independence, Obama identifies it in the
creation of a new one (as he said in Philadelphia shortly before
his inauguration).
The Democrats shouldn’t be honoring Lincoln but Darwin,
whose 200th anniversary is also this year. Surely
Darwin, given enough time, would have come up with some sort of
flattering evolutionary explanation for the habitual lying and
self-delusion on display in D.C., a theory with which the
Democrats could congratulate themselves while leaving Lincoln’s
legacy of quaint honesty in tatters.
