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To: lentulusgracchus
Thanks to Lincoln and his adherence to the principles of the Declaration, following in the footsteps of Washington himself. Cue the violins. The third-graders will now bow their heads for the mandatory Honest Abe solemnities.

Nothing wrong with that!

One was responsible for creating the nation, the other for preserving it.

2,957 posted on 02/28/2005 3:39:33 AM PST by fortheDeclaration
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To: fortheDeclaration
Nothing wrong with that!

Plenty beaucoup wrong with that! Or do you not want to teach kids to think for themselves?

One was responsible for creating leading the nation, the other for preserving conquering it.

Try to get it right, will you? The North lost the Civil War almost as badly as the South -- they lost their future to the business interests, the railroads, and the robber barons.

Or did you not read about that in American history classes?

And furthermore, the connection of the rise of the robber barons to the election of Lincoln is not post hoc ergo propter hoc -- the Republicans were the party of business and industry (no matter what happened with slaves or ex-slaves), and they served those interests avidly all through the Gilded Age, right down to the present day. The only time their hold on the party has been threatened has been when Main Street, conservative Republicans briefly took over the GOP to nominate Barry and elect Ronnie -- and before Ronnie left office, the hand of Manor Bush had taken a steel grip on the whole party. I went to the 1988 caucuses, and they were a joke. We got Bush I rammed down our throats by a bunch of blue-haired ladies in upmarket pret-a-porter, who just sat there saying not a thing all evening, then voted the straight Bush ticket, got into their Lincoln Continentals, and went home.

The party has been subserving their interest at the expense of everything else ever since. Housemaids, gardeners, drywall installers -- what immigration problem? Basta! What this country needs is a serious reduction of the minimum wage!

Oh, and big tax cuts in the higher brackets. Better still, turn the entire income tax into a sales tax. Like Leona Helmsley said, "paying taxes is for little people!"

Point: the GOP has been, and still is, the party of really rich people running really large economic machines that the GOP privileges above the interests of mere voters (employees, hands, churls). Ergo, the common men who fought in Union blue to "save the Union" in 1865, gave their lives so that John D. Rockefeller could monopolize the illuminating-oil industry, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick could break the Knights of Labor with an army of Pinkertons and the Militia during the Homestead strike (in order to preserve Carnegie's sacred right to cut wages in half), the owners of the South Fork Dam (Carnegie and Frick again, among others) wouldn't have to face their responsibility for the Johnstown Flood (2200 dead, five years to recover), and Mrs. Vanderbilt could give out precious stones as party favors to her plutocratic guests.

Everyone else got Hobson's choice, time clocks, company stores and company towns, private armies of security police, mile-long assembly lines where workers lasted 18 months (maybe), ten-dollar death benefits for workers, and all the rest of the things we've been used to associate with 19th-century HR administration.

Only a few people won the Civil War, claywit. Smell the coffee.

2,973 posted on 02/28/2005 2:24:01 PM PST by lentulusgracchus ("Whatever." -- sinkspur)
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