Gaffney Again Uses Lincoln to Hit War Critics

[babylonsister]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003547641

Gaffney Again Uses Lincoln to Hit War Critics
The Washington Times columnist who featured a bogus Abraham Lincoln quote last week returns today -- and advocates harsh punishment for critics of the Iraq war who are giving "aid and comfort to the enemy."

By Greg Mitchell

(February 20, 2007) -- You’d think that after embarrassing himself and his newspaper by basing a column on a fabricated quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln -- then hearing it cited in a key congressional debate on the Iraq war -- Frank J. Gaffney Jr. would just apologize and turn the page. Instead, in his new column today for The Washington Times, he draws on Lincoln again with the same goal: to lock up or otherwise punish critics of the Bush “surge” in Iraq, with Gaffney again charging them with “unacceptable treachery, if not actual treason” and giving “aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Last week, E&P and others quickly pointed out the fake Lincoln quote following Gaffney’s gaffe in his previous column. Yet it took the author and/or the newspaper more than two days to delete or correct the column, finally wiping it from the site on Friday and later carrying a correction. That quote, long hailed by conservatives in cyberspace, had Lincoln saying (at the very top of Gaffney’s column), “Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.” It had been debunked last summer by FactCheck.org.


Now Gaffney is back, claiming that while the quote was not real, it was a “paraphrase” of Lincoln’s actual views on dissent in wartime. Then he offers a new, and this time accurate, Lincoln quote, this one from a letter he wrote in June 1863 “as Robert E. Lee's army was on the march north to the fateful battle of Gettysburg.”

Lincoln wrote this letter to Erastus Corning and others after the arrest of a leading Confederate sympathizer, U.S. Rep. Clement L. Vallandigham (D-Ohio). Gaffney relates, “It forcefully explains the commander-in-chief's thinking about the latitude the Constitution affords to ‘silence’ anti-war ‘agitators’ whose conduct ‘damages the Army’ and threatens to leave the nation without the military means to ‘suppress’ its enemies.”

The Lincoln passage, via Gaffney, opens with: 
"Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier-boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?” Lincoln wrote that the Vallandigham “arrest was made because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops; to encourage desertions from the Army; and to leave the rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it.”

Gaffney then comments on Lincoln: “His views are all the more salient as congressional ‘agitators’ once again justify their vehement opposition to the incumbent president's war efforts.”

Putting aside the actual Lincoln quotes -– and the highly selective reading of the 16th president’s overall views on these matters -- consider Gaffney’s likening a civil war within our own country (with Lee marching north, no less), to a civil war 8,000 miles from our shores. It is, of course, the difference between our own nation torn asunder and another land experiencing that catastrophe.

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[Truthseeker013]

1. Gaffney Again Uses Lincoln To Hit War Critics

Yet again, revisionist history works its way into the culture of American thought. I'm waiting for Mister Bush to start revising his *own* past misspeaks to his own benefit.

[babylonsister]

2. Welcome to DU, Truthseeker013!

:toast:

That Gaffney is a single-, simple-minded jerk if there ever was one. He knows he's clouding the issue and apparently doesn't care.

[magellan]

3. Gaffney is a neocon -- none of them like democracy

...because it gets in their way. If anyone should be hung as traitors it's these bastards.

[shain from kane]

4. They are my enemy. I would give them no aid or comfort, unless it is to

end their misery by sending them straight to Hell.

[coda]

5. Some Lincoln quotes on the Mexican-American War

Actual quotes, not Gaffney "gaffes".


--

"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him,–"I see no probability of the British invading us"; but he will say to you, "Be silent: I see it, if you don’t."


The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

- Abraham Lincoln, on the Mexican-American war February 15, 1848



=====


- Abraham Lincoln, in a January 12, 1848 speech (while we were embroiled in the Mexican-American War), complaining that the President couldn’t justify the war without resorting to lies:



"The result of this examination was to make the impression, that taking for true, all the President states as facts, he falls far short of proving his justification; and that the President would have gone farther with his proof, if it had not been for the small matter, that the truth would not permit him.

That his justifications for war fluctuated constantly, and the President refused to respond to critics and answer questions: . But if he can not, or will not do this–if on any pretence, or no pretence, he shall refuse or omit it, then I shall be fully convinced, of what I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrongthat he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him. That originally having some strong motive–what, I will not stop now to give my opinion concerning–to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory–that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood–that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where. How like the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream, is the whole war part of his late message! At one time telling us that Mexico has nothing whatever, that we can get, but teritory; at another, showing us how we can support the war, by levying contributions on Mexico. At one time, urging the national honor, the security of the future, the prevention of foreign interference, and even, the good of Mexico herself, as among the objects of the war; at another, telling us, that "to reject indemnity, by refusing to accept a cession of teritory, would be to abandon all our just demands, and to wage the war, bearing all it’s expenses, without a purpose or definite object<.>"

<snip>

Again, it is a singular omission in this message, that it, no where intimates when the President expects the war to terminate. At it’s beginning, Genl. Scott was, by this same President, driven into disfavor, if not disgrace, for intimating that peace could not be conquered in less than three or four months. But now, at the end of about twenty months, during which time our arms have given us the most splendid successes–every department, and every part, land and water, officers and privates, regulars and volunteers, doing all that men could do, and hundreds of things which it had ever before been thought men could not do,–after all this, this same President gives us a long message, without showing us, that, as to the end, he himself, has, even an imaginary conception. As I have before said, he knows not where he is. He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show, there is not something about his conscious, more painful than all his mental perplexity!


- Abraham Lincoln, January 12, 1848