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one2many: This thread is about responding to an article by DiLorenzo.

rdf and others were defending themselves against DiLorenzo's apparently baseless charge that they unfairly accused him of calumny. That is part of what this thread is about, namely commenting on the worth, if any, of DiLoranzo's article.

You suggested that the topic change to something you wanted to talk about.

rdf said he would cooperate with your desire to change the subject and address the topics you raised if you answered a couple of questions.

Then you said repeatedly that because you asked, he had some kind of obligation to answer.

You seem to think that if you want to change the subject of a thread and others don't go along with you that gives you some reason to say nasty things about them. If they won't let you evade difficult questions and won't cooperate in your trying to redirect the thread, you characterize them as running away in disarray.

That doesn't make sense to me. To me your demand for them to dance to your tune is unjustified.

DiLorenzo says: Lincoln used the war to "remove the constraints that Southern senators and congressmen, standing in the Jeffersonian tradition, placed in the way of centralized federal power, high tariffs, and subsidies to Northern industries." Indeed, Lincoln's 28-year political career prior to becoming president was devoted almost exclusively to this end.

I can't believe DiLorenzo isn't ashamed to keep repeating this fantasy. There is NO evidence that Lincoln thought about economic policy AT ALL from his return to political life in 1854 until his election as president. We have repeatedly shown that the two pathetic attempts he makes at such evidence (his misreading of the Dred Scott speech and his completely false claim about the Lincoln Douglas debates) show instead only that Lincoln thought and spoke only about the danger posed by slavery expansionism to the Union. These are not details -- they are the crucial pieces of evidence (not!) to support the central claim that Lincoln was motivated to seek and use power in support of a corrupt economic agenda. All the DiLorenzo supporters who trust his reading of the secondary sources he (fitfully and inaccurately) cites might have the decency to respond to his claims about these famous Lincoln speeches. I have laid out the case the DiLorenzo is either lying or incompetent to read historical texts.

DiLorenzo has utterly failed to make the case that Lincoln was motivated by an economic agenda. His use of particular texts to give the appearance that he has done so is either dishonest or incompetent. And all of you who keep happily parroting this thesis, with never a single bit of Lincoln's words from the relevant decade to support it, because there is none, are not helping the cause of reasonable discussion.

Some people might think a complete lack of evidence supporting a thesis, and a clear pattern of distortion of the record in place of such evidence, would count against the thesis, but not the epic poets of the tale of the perfidious ape - it just gives them more room to imagine things.

The DF is in its death throes before our eyes. That group always seemed a little off to me, just as Dr. Keyes seemed just the least bit odd. My mother, rest her soul, supported Dr, Keyes in the last primary held before she passed on in '96. I doubt she would support him after learning of his association with this misguided social club called the DF.

Lincoln and Webster both based their fantastic notion that the union preceded the states on the DoI. They tried to hold the DoI up as superior to the US Constitution, just as the DF is doing today, and their purpose was to circumvent the Constitution. I can only conclude that circumventing the Constitution is still the aim of people who will use such a weird construct to support their agenda.