RUSH: Today is the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, and I watched a little bit of the Capitol Rotunda ceremony celebrating the bicentennial of his birth. For those of you who voted for Obama, 200 years is what bicentennial means. It’s years I watched as Obama came out, made his remarks about Lincoln. It’s amazing to me. No, no, it’s not. It’s depressing. It’s depressing how little is really known about Abraham Lincoln. There are myths and then there are quite a few things about him are true, but there are a lot of things out there about him that aren’t. Many of these are being taught. Here’s just a portion of what Obama had to say about Abraham Lincoln. Like a lot of politicians do, he took the body of Lincoln’s life and work and boiled it down to the fact that if Lincoln were alive today, he would want us working together in a bipartisan way for the stimulus package. Here’s what Obama said.
OBAMA: Even as we meet here today in a moment when we are far less divided than in Lincoln’s day, but when we are once again debating the critical issues of our time — and debating them sometimes fiercely — let us remember that we are doing so as servants of the same flame, as representatives of the same people, and as stakeholders in a common future. That is the most fitting tribute we can paint, the most lasting monument we can build to that most remarkable of men, Abraham Lincoln.
RUSH: Now, Obama is trying to make himself out to be Abraham Lincoln by this notion that Lincoln was some big bipartisan. Now, folks, I don’t know how in the world Abraham Lincoln could be called a ‘bipartisan’ by anybody. Abraham Lincoln was one of the most partisan presidents we’ve ever had, and you know what his bias was? His bias was the Constitution. He was biased toward the Constitution of the United States. See, at the time Lincoln was debating Stephen Douglas, in those debates — which Lincoln lost the election after those debates, the Lincoln Douglas debates in Illinois. They’re reenacted to this day. Those are the debates that gave Lincoln finally national acclaim. But at the time those debates were taking place, the United States was expanding into the western territories, and the slavery argument was raging, and Douglas and others wanted to apportion slavery state by state.
One state would be slave, one state would not be, and Lincoln vociferously opposed the establishment of a slave empire. He was totally opposed to a slave empire, for reasons that many people misunderstand. He just didn’t believe that, regardless what he thought of individual races, he did not believe that it was… I don’t know the word. It was intolerable. It was inhuman, the concept that one man could own another. He knew the nation would not survive. So he was a fierce partisan. Abraham Lincoln went through living hell fighting the Civil War. It ended up getting him killed, but he preserved and saved the union. Do you know how many generals he went through before he found Ulysses S. Grant? Ten or 12. He had ten or 12 generals that couldn’t do the job of defeating the South. Everybody that talks about Bush and how he goofed up by not putting Petraeus in at first.
Lincoln had no military experience. He had served briefly in an Indian war, but he never saw combat. He had no military experience. He was a traditional civilian commander-in-chief. But he was driven by principle. He was driven by a goal and an objective, and there was nobody that was going to talk him out of it. He was not about compromise on the thing that he said was the most important to him — and he said, ‘I hope I have got God on my side,’ or he might have said ‘I hope I’m on God’s side.’ He said one of the two, I don’t remember which, but he fervently believed there would not be a United States if the expansion of our country was taking place. The South back then wanted to make it a slave state. Lincoln was not tolerant of that, we hear about diversity and tolerance and so forth today. If Abraham Lincoln had been as Barack Obama just implied, why, the Civil War would probably never have happened, and who knows what this country would be like today? It would not be one country. Let’s go to further audiotape. This is CNN, Soledad O’Brien this morning, ‘From Lincoln to Obama,’ a feature that they are do and she said to co-host Don Lemon, ‘Are you finding out that people are learning about the president they may have thought they knew but didn’t know a lot about?’ Meaning Lincoln.
LEMON: They actually are, and we’re going to get into that as well, whether or not his legacy in some way has been romanticized. People are learning a lot more about him, especially now with the new president and his focus on Lincoln. Of course it’s being taught in classrooms and schools, and people are coming here in Washington learning more about the sixteenth president of the United States.
RUSH: And listen to Kyra Phillips next.
PHILLIPS: Yeah, we’re going to talk a lot about the controversies as well as and the differences, you know, having a chance to talk to scholars here and, uh, even professors here, the generational questions that are surfacing. The younger generation, for example, we’re going to talk with some college students coming up in a couple of hours that say, ‘Hey, we’re addressing the things such as Abraham Lincoln, the racist. Was he gay? Was his wife crazy? Did he suffer depression?’ These are sort of the controversial issues that are being discussed in classrooms here.
RUSH: Right, so Barack Obama is bringing Abraham Lincoln to a whole generation that’s never been taught about Abraham Lincoln, and they’re learning he might have been gay, that his wife was nuts, that he suffered from depression, that he was a racist. Thank you, President Obama. Thank you, CNN. You are doing the job that everybody expects of you: taking every tradition and institution that defined this country’s greatness and trying to rip it to shreds.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: There’s one more point I gotta make, I have to make about Abraham Lincoln. Sometimes my patience wears thin when I see these frauds, these pretenders like Obama try to attach themselves to the greatness of Abraham Lincoln. (doing Obama impression) ‘They would want us to behave in a bipartisan way, in the same way that he saved America.’ Abraham Lincoln put his opponents in jail, and I’m about in favor of us doing the same thing pretty soon. During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. That meant you could be thrown in jail without being told why. All they had to do was suspect that you were subverting the Union effort to win the war, and they could jail you!
Lincoln sent the equivalent of the National Guard in the day to the home of the Democrat back then that was running for governor of Ohio and had him put in jail, and after that they sent him to Canada. Because he was out there and he was ripping to shreds the United States of America. He was doing exactly to Lincoln what Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank and Obama and Hillary were doing to George W. Bush during the Iraq war. So Lincoln had them thrown in jail. Then they sent the guy up to Canada, and the Canadians didn’t want him, he was such a bad ass. They didn’t even want this character up there. So they sent him back. Lincoln put his opponents in jail. To say that he was bipartisan?
He was so singularly focused on preserving the union that he didn’t even tolerate dissent in his own ranks about it! He put people in jail or otherwise silenced them. He fired generals who couldn’t get things done until he found one that could. And, by the way, everybody says they found Ulysses Grant, and the only guy that could finally pull this off was an alcoholic. He was a reformed alcoholic, or a recovering, as we say — a recovering alcoholic. Yeah. There are so many myths about all of this. You know, only a drunk could have directed the Civil War. Only a drunk could have told Sherman what to do to Atlanta. So many myths about this. To hear Lincoln portrayed as a bipartisan today? I’ll tell you what the best thing about this ceremony was today, and I didn’t catch this man’s name, but I guess he did the invocation, and he had more great things to say about Abraham Lincoln than Obama knows.
He thanked God for the gift of Abraham Lincoln. He was well spoken. He had a great voice. But I didn’t catch his name because the Drive-Bys, on whatever channel I watched, had to run a graphic banner, ‘Obama Preparing to Speak at Lincoln Bicentennial.’ I said, ‘Would you please tell me who the guy is?’ Since I don’t have the sound up because I hate listening to the sound on television, I read closed-captioning. At any rate, thank God for Abraham Lincoln is absolutely right.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The name of the Ohio Democrat congressman that Lincoln threw out of the country and threw in jail, was Clement Vallandigham, in case you want to look it up. Clement Vallandigham was the one tossed by Lincoln. This business of Grant being a drunk. He was a small guy. He was like 5’7′, almost 5’8′. He weighed 145 pounds. He couldn’t hold his booze very well. It was what might be called today a ‘binge drinker,’ but he was not an alcoholic and he never drank on the job. He drank after the job, but he never drank on the job and when some people — you probably heard this anecdote. When people that were opposed to Grant (and everybody has enemies) went to Lincoln and said, ‘Look, you got a drunk here running your army,’ Lincoln said, ‘Send whatever Grant is drinking to every one of my generals,’ ’cause Grant was the only guy getting anything done, or getting the most done.