[dufekin]

Dred Scott was an overt and sympathetic appeal to voters of color. I'd opine that he should have used Plessey v. Ferguson (1896) or Cummings v. County Board of Education (1898) instead of Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) because the latter decision predated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and the Civil War. The two segregation decisions, however, clearly contravened the Constitution--especially the 1898 decision, which ruled that blacks could be excluded from public education because they could pay tuition at private schools, which generally didn't even exist (like many poor blacks' financial wherewithal to afford such education, if theoretically it were available). Bush has to convince black Americans that he isn't a segregationist, as the Democrat media have persuaded them to believe.

But the slavery decision also might click into the Sudan issue.

[Lexinom]

See Liz's #19.

Let us conclude Dred Scott had an overt appeal, as you mentioned, and a more profound though and veiled meaning, as Liz and others have seen. That's how I took it, and I rather suspect that's the way Bush intended it.

BTW, the fact he made this statement in St. Louis - where Taney handed down that same Dred Scott decision some 146 years ago - added something to the poignancy.