Posted by
beltway girl on Wednesday, September 03, 2008 3:40:04 PM
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. --George Orwell
In August of 1864, Abraham Lincoln called a cabinet meeting. A spring campaign in Virginia had just ended badly, and Lincoln had a memo he wanted some officials to sign. It began in a rather interesting manner. "This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected."
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/27.2/monroe.html
President Lincoln knew he was not revered among the masses. And he knew it even though Gallup did not yet exist.
One might write this off as a transitory moment for Lincoln's administration, owing only to a low ebb in the morale of the citizenry riding the tides of war. But Abraham Lincoln was never particularly popular while he was in office. One writer attributes this to "Confederate sympathizers in the border states and lower Midwest; and the peace wing of the Democratic Party, often referred to as 'Copperheads.' The latter group believed that the Civil War was undermining the Northern economy, civil liberties, and states' rights. Particularly objectionable to the Northern Democrats were two Lincoln administration policies: emancipation and the military draft."
http://elections.harpweek.com/1864/bio-1864-Full.asp?UniqueID=17&Year=1864
Tonight, on televisions we would never have had in the time of Lincoln, we saw another president, also not terribly popular at the moment. George Bush made references to an angry left in his speech.
It seems like history truly may repeat itself, whether the writers at Salon want to believe it or not.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/08/23/bush_lincoln/
Lincoln was not a beloved president. He was not adored by those actually living his administration's policies. The average person walking down the street had little time for Abe Lincoln, and the peaceniks of his time, well, even less.
And so it has been with George Bush. Mocked and despised by the left and its incredibly objective Fourth Estate, he has been beset upon. Once again, it was the same with Lincoln. "Lincoln was called just about every name imaginable, including 'a grotesque baboon,' 'a third-rate country lawyer who once split rails and now splits the Union,' 'a coarse, vulgar joker,' a dictator, an ape, and a buffoon. The Illinois State Register [published in his adopted home state] labeled him "the craftiest and most dishonest politician that ever disgraced an [American political] office."
http://mistersnitch.blogspot.com/2005/08/bad-press-for-president.html
Bush has also been besieged by haters of his nation (who actually exist in ready suppoly outside of his own nation as well) and natural disasters. With 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, Gustav, and a host of other storm names to boot, this president has run the gamut of catastrophe.
Has he run it well?
Although Gallup won't reflect it now, history books and the children of our time may someday do so. Should George Bush's Iraq produce a more temperate and just Middle East, with a strong foothold for the west to better protect its ally, Israel, George Bush will go down in history as one of the greatest presidents in it.
He will have brought change as Lincoln did, as Kennedy did, and as Reagan did. It will be change of such a magnitude as to alter the world as we have known it in todays long gone by, and in the todays before us, which will themselves be discarded. And like the dying leaves of the autumn now just ahead, they will one day be cracked and brittle, the pages of a decades-old history text. George Bush will quite possibly find his place in this book. His opponents now say they are on the right side of history, and they are the ones fighting for change. But Lincoln's legacy shows its own bright-line rule, and that is that the vast majority of people often don't at all care for the right kind of change while they themselves are the living history.
As the discarded warrior prepares to vacate his office, one has to realize that the battles he has fought have not been just those abroad. George Bush has known the angry left, indeed. And they have revelled in his every faltering. But the right kind of change owns the future.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. This is another quote by George Orwell.
In the end, this man will have been like an ensign on a hill. Having owned the present, past, and future for his string of moments, he will have delivered his nation into a new global landscape.
It is a little-discussed fact that Winston Churchill lost the 1945 election in Britain in a landslide to the Labour Party. That May, his approval ratings were at eighty-three percent. Popularity is not always a reliable measure of either just or unjust result. That result, being history itself, will endure to speak for itself.
Pundits today saracastically note that You, George Bush, are no Lincoln.
And by the way pundits of Lincoln's own time responded, we would have to note that today's pundits are no different. No, they are more of the same.
You, the members of the Fourth Estate, are no change. And in the end, you'll be no judge, either.