I have cited many, many authors, historians, law professors, and jurists in support of my views. I find Farber's arguments to be quite fair and balanced (unlike the tripe upon which this thread is based).
I admit, quoting Prof. Paul Finkelman was difficult, but it did illustrate that even the lefties recognize Taney for the schmuck he was. How do you reconcile that Finkelman on the left, and Jaffa on the right, share the same lack of regard for Taney's pro-southern judicial activism?
For the most part your "citations" consist of a narrow select handful of persons. For a while you were using Bill Rehnquist until you discovered that he endorsed a view contrary to Lincoln's in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. That effectively leaves you with only three persons you've quoted in any substantial degree. One is a left wing Southern Poverty Law Center-funded slavery reparationist. Another is a left wing "metaphysical" Berkleyite law professor. The third is nominally a conservative, but a crackpot one at that who has more or less managed to piss off the rest of the movement with his pompous and intellectually shallow ways, save for his own narrow cultist following at his own school, most of whom are equally pompous and shallow.
I admit, quoting Prof. Paul Finkelman was difficult
So I take it you are no longer denying that your use of him was part of a secret and intentional plan to slip in a left wing wacko to see how we'd respond? As if the gobs of egg dripping off your face didn't already give that away...
but it did illustrate that even the lefties recognize Taney for the schmuck he was.
Odd. Most people would take virtually anything a left wing nut job like Finkelman said with a substantial grain of salt, yet here you are giving credibility to him since in this (lone?) case he happens to agree with you. I, of course, prefer Justice Curtis' assessment of Taney as both credible and credentialed.
How do you reconcile that Finkelman on the left, and Jaffa on the right, share the same lack of regard for Taney's pro-southern judicial activism?
That's a question for Jaffa to figure out and it may even raise the issue of just how truly conservative he really is. On a similar note, how do you reconcile Jaffa with Karl Marx, who was one of Lincoln's biggest and most outspoken admirers in the president's own lifetime and one of the few public writers who lavished gushy praises upon Lincoln before the assassination when most GOP radicals had not yet discovered that the man they despised almost as much as the south could be used as a martyr for their cause in death. And how do you reconcile the fact that the Claremont Institute writers love to quote civil war "history" from James McPherson, a known marxist red daiper baby who writes lots of books on the civil war?
Put another way, Harry Jaffa's views of the civil war have placed him in some extremely odd and very leftist company.