Dispatches from the wingnut-O-sphere – Lincoln would NOT have been a Teabagger, cont…

President Obama won a major victory last night in his determined effort to impose his will on the American people. But far from striking a fatal blow to the cause of limited government and fiscal responsibility, Obama has awakened a sleeping giant.

Unlike past threats to the American way of life, this time the threat comes from within. Lincoln warned us that this would be so:

All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa . . . , with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Jeffery H Anderson - NRO

Here is another portrayal of Abe Lincoln as a Teabagger in response to Patient Protection and Affordable Care. Was Lincoln warning against health insurance reform back in 1837? Is the NRO on to something for a change?

No fraid not.

Honest Abe was warning against mob rule, violence, and intimidation and in favor of deference to the courts, the constitution, rule of law and to reason over passion. Had our wingnutty friend read the rest of the speech he would have read examples of Mob Justice, lynchings, burning folks, etc., along with Abe’s belief that such lawlessness posed a great danger to the existence of the very young American Republic.

Abe continues:

But all this even is not the full extent of the evil. By such examples by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished the lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice and having been used to no restraint but dread of punishment they thus become absolutely unrestrained. Having ever regarded government as their deadliest bane they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.

According to Abe this lawlessness will make good men, frustrated by lack of order, receptive to the siren songs of those who would promise to exchange freedom for order.

Whenever this effect shall be produced among us whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands and burn churches ravage and rob provision stores throw printing presses into rivers shoot editors and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend on it this government cannot last. By such things the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it and thus it will be left without friends or with too few and those who are too weak to make their friendship effectual. At such a time and under such circumstances men of sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the opportunity strike the blow and overturn that fair fabric which for the last half century has been the fondest hope of the lovers of freedom throughout the world.

Now just who, these days, has been excoriating the Government and gathering in mobs and threatening elected officials? If you answered the so-called Tea Party Wing of the GOP, you’d be correct.

So no, Honest Abe would not have been a teabagger.