awthrawthr@gmail.com wrote:
> On Aug 9, 10:48 am, dillydally <clitte...@yahoo.com> wrote:
<snip>
>
> Yeah, you're right about it happening all over. It would be nice if
> all our leaders were like Abraham Lincoln, but that's rare, isn't it.
Are you sure it would be nice?
Lincoln was a "railroad lawyer". We still use the term "railroaded"
as a perjorative for acts perpetuated by that sort of person. Lincoln
suspended habeus corpus, then dared Congrefs to impeach him for it.
Lincoln was a good President for the Civil War, but he might have
been a lousy fit for other spans of time. He lucked into his
great generals. But this was a different sort of war, and there
was no thing he could have used to select them other than simple
cut and try. Grant's great innovation? Hold firm. Sherman's?
Total war. Neither were the sort of thing you could have discussed
in polite company prior to the war. GRant was perpetually
decried as insensitive to loss, and Sherman's sanity was never
firmly established.
I'm pretty biased by Shelby Foote in this regard; Lincoln was
a man of vision who had great good fortune not to be eaten by
the political process; there were a couple or four battles that
decided his second election. It was very near. The North
tried very hard to lose the War before Grant proved himself
in the Trans Mississippi.
Still, his contribution to, of all things, the American language
are unsurpassed (but built on by Sam Clemens).
"Good" and "bad' are subjective; especially in American politics, where
we tend to schism on Jackson/Jefferson vs. Adams/Hamilton. It's
still a living debate, although the Jackson/Jefferson camp has
tended to be obliterated by sheer economic power. Judging from Usenet,
the debate could use some time in the refrigerator. It's beginning
to smell a bit.
I suspect that historians will identify the weaknesses of the Bushies
as architectural flaws in our politics, and they'll get *mostly* a bye.
We tend to be pretty tired of the b*stard we elected eight years ago.
--
Les Cargill
Re: Now I get what Edwards meant by "Two Americas" 
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