Now THERE'S a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The hatred you display towards Lincoln and the Union is almost pathological.
Not at all. What Lincoln and his party did, is what they did. It indicates to me that we have a lot of homework to do, to unwind the abuses that have accumulated since then, to correct the historic mistakes and devolve again to the People and the municipalities closest to them the powers and responsibilities that the "permanent ruling class" have arrogated and accumulated since Lincoln's antipopular revolution, arrogations and usurpations that are institutionalized in the federal bureaucracy.
There's a thread currently running on FR about Swiss gun laws and the differences between Swiss and American society. One of the major conclusions of the discussion article is that the decentralization of Swiss government is one of the great strengths of the Swiss polity which simultaneously fortifies the public virtues of the people and the political virtues of the overall government. As William F. Buckley once pointed out, it's easy to embarrass the average Swiss citizen by asking him to name the last five presidents of the Swiss confederation. The reason for that is that the Swiss government, because of the modesty of its powers compared to those reposed in the localities, does not attract the kind of diseased personalities ours does, who wish to write their names on history in blood, guts, or -- in Bill Clinton's case -- semen.
We had something going before Lincoln, that we would do well to try to resuscitate in the American political experiment. Even if that means encouraging a lot of helicopter money and pigs at trough to pack up their stuff and get the hell off our continent.
That's not Lincoln hatred, my purblind, political-machine-power-mad interlocutor. It's just Jefferson's vision for a happy and free country, where men bear arms and women bear babies, and people don't spend a lot of time and money on flub-dubs, bribes, Guccis, and limousine service.