That Lincoln Fellow

Anthony Gregory has penned a fabulous piece on the backlash from Russert's attempt to trip Ron Paul up with a question about Lincoln's War.

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.

The fact that "conservatives" have flocked to and supported the GOP over the last half century is really more a result of the Democrat parties abandonment of its roots than any real redeeming conservative principles in the GOP itself. I have voted Republican in with the only excpetions a couple of votes for Libertarian and Constitution Party candidates when I had an option. The legacy of Lincoln is written all over the GOP and if it does not shake that legacy, renouncing it outright it deserves to fall and crumble.

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.

Indeed he has, but who really wants to listen? To listen to such truth requires a fundemental change in the way one sees the world. It is too comfortable to accept the status quo, not to ask the hard questions and not to hear real truth. No real conservative, no real lover of liberty could look at Lincoln as anything more than a murderous tyrant - a man that simply ignored the law off the land to force his idea of a perfect union upon the people via force.