Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

The willow is too close to the house.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Second rate reporter says what?

In my day, never was longer.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Let there be snark.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / 2020 Elections / A Few Final Words From President Lincoln

A Few Final Words From President Lincoln

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A Few Final Words From President Lincoln

(Abraham Lincoln Before His Speech at The Cooper Union)

On 27 February 1860 a not yet president Abraham Lincoln delivered his Cooper Union address. Lincoln recognized that the problems the Republic was facing, specifically the people behind the problems the Republic was facing, had not suddenly popped up between the mid 1830s and the 1860s. Rather, these people had been with Americans since before the founding attaching themselves to one faction or party and then another to try to achieve their objectives. And those objectives had little to do with the grand ideals of the Constitution that they then, and their ideological and political descendants today, love to quote while they use it as a shield to deflect responsibility from their actions and a club to bludgeon anyone and everyone that disagrees with them. Those objectives then, just as they are now, had nothing to do with providing for the common defense or securing the blessings of liberty or promoting the general welfare. Then, like today, and like their attempts to overthrow our self governing democratic-republic in the 1930s by subverting FDR’s presidency, was solely about greed, about self enrichment by stealing from the public treasury, from every American and every American’s hard work. Lincoln, clear eyed, had them sized up (emphasis mine):

But you say you are conservative – eminently conservative – while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;” while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You are divided on new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers.

Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated. Consider, then, whether your claim of conservatism for yourselves, and your charge or destructiveness against us, are based on the most clear and stable foundations.

But you will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.

That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to deprive you of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution. But we are proposing no such thing.

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

This, plainly stated, is your language. Perhaps you will say the Supreme Court has decided the disputed Constitutional question in your favor. Not quite so. But waiving the lawyer’s distinction between dictum and decision, the Court have decided the question for you in a sort of way.

Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me – my money – was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone.This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them.

Rule or ruin. That was the crux of it in 1860.

It was the crux of it in 1933 when a group of ultra wealthy elites unhappy with how FDR was leading the US out of the depression sought to overthrow his presidency. The conspirators included Robert Sterling Clark, Grayson M. P. Murphy, and Prescott Bush among others. They conspired and attempted to recruit Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to turn the membership of the American Legion into an insurgency. An insurgency that would allow them to force FDR to accept a co-president, appointed by the ultra wealthy conspirators, who would secretly run the US on their behalf while FDR served as a figurehead. Fortunately they miscalculated and picked the wrong Marine. Maj. Gen. Butler played it cool, collected the necessary information, and went right to Congress and then the news media in order to expose the plot.

It is the crux of it now in 2020. Rule or ruin! The President, Senator McConnell, the Republican majority caucus in the Senate, the Republican minority caucus in the House, their surrogates, what passes for an intelligentsia within the conservative movement, the ultra wealthy donors like the Mercers, the Kochs, the DeVoses, the Uhliens, the Popes, the Thiels, the Zuckerbergs, and many, many, many others who now, like in 1860 and 1933, seek to enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense.

They seek to rule or ruin. It is all they have ever sought. They don’t care about party, when they finish consuming and using up what’s left of the Republican Party they’ll attach themselves to another party. Just as they abandoned the Democratic Party and attached themselves like the parasites they are to the Republican Party during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s when it became clear that they could no longer achieve their goals through the Democratic Party. All they care about is ruling or ruining. They don’t care about the ordered liberty, civic rights and responsibilities, and individual rights and responsibilities that animated the founders and framers. They don’t actually care about the Constitution or what it means. They don’t actually care about America and its ideals, the actual promise of those ideals, and the charge laid upon us all by the founders and framers to create a more perfect union. They certainly don’t care about providing for the common defense, securing the blessings of liberty, and promoting the general welfare. They don’t actually care about America or Americans except insofar as they can use America to protect themselves, their property, and their wealth and they can exploit every other American to further enrich themselves. If they cannot rule, then they will always seek to ruin.

Lincoln was clear eyed as to who they were and what they were about in 1860. As we go into election day tomorrow, even if you’ve already cast your vote by mail or in person during early voting, we need to be as clear eyed as Lincoln to the threat they pose to the Republic and recognize that voting tomorrow to disempower these anti-American wreckers is just the first step in a centuries long war for not just control of, but for the soul of, America.

Open thread!

Reader Interactions

87Comments

  4. 4.

    frosty

    A “centuries long war”
    Ever since i read Albion’s Seed I’ve been convinced we are still fighting the English Civil War, with the Cavaliers the antecedents of the Mercers et al and the Roundheads the antecedents of the rest of us. The analogy worked for the US Civil War; I’m not sure it holds for the fight we’ve been in since 1980.

  5. 5.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    It was the crux of it in 1933 when a group of ultra wealthy elites unhappy with how FDR was leading the US out of the depression sought to overthrow his presidency. The conspirators included Robert Sterling Clark, Grayson M. P. Murphy, and Prescott Bush. They conspired and attempted to recruit Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to turn the membership of the American Legion into an insurgency. An insurgency that would allow them to force FDR to accept a co-president, appointed by the ultra wealthy conspirators, who would really run the US on their behalf while FDR served as a figurehead. Fortunately they miscalculated and picked the wrong Marine. Maj. Gen. Butler played it cool, collected the necessary information, and went right to Congress and then the news media in order to expose the plot.

    The thing about the Business Plot, why did these powerful men go to Butler? Weren’t his political leanings well-known? Or at least I assume they would’ve done their homework on him

    I do wonder if it had somehow succeeded how WW2 would’ve went

  8. 8.

    Kay

    Jesse Wegman
    @jessewegman
    ·1h
    Replying to
    @RMFifthCircuit
    @stanleyeb_
    and 3 others
    Whichever way Texas ends up going, it’s pretty telling that Republicans are engaged in what is literally a last-minute atttempt to throw out 127,000+ votes from Democratic-leaning areas. They’re terrified.

  10. 10.

    Adam L Silverman

    @frosty: Did you see the twitter threads today about the chuckleheads in Britain quoting the Magna Carta to try to get out of complying with the COVID-19 restrictions? Absolutely hysterical.

  12. 12.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): They didn’t do their homework. They assumed that anyone who was that popular with the rank and file of veterans and a retired general officer must agree with them. They got cocky and it cost them.

  13. 13.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Kay:

    When I read that that effort failed today spectacularly it literally made my day : )

    Even the most right-wing federal judge couldn’t rule in their favor; they had no standing at all. And if Republican candidates have no standing, who would?

  15. 15.

    Al Z.

    I’m just trying to get over the fact that Abraham Lincoln wrote a speech were he said “That’s cool.”

  16. 16.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Kay: What is left unsaid in this attempt is that a lot of it is to protect Dan Crenshaw’s House seat. If you recall Crenshaw was actually trailing, despite the gerrymandered district he was running in around Houston, going into the final two weeks of the campaign. And then that unfunny idiot from SNL decided to make fun of his combat disability, causing a groundswell of sympathy for Crenshaw, leading to the same asshat from SNL public apologizing to him on SNL the Saturday before the election. If there is overwhelming turnout leading to a large Democratic wave, despite the district being gerrymandered, he’s largely out of Congress.

  19. 19.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Hmm. Maybe if they’d gotten Douglas MacArthur? Although, I’d think they’d draw the attention of the FBI (or it’s predecessor at any rate). I don’t think Hoover ever talked about the supposed plot, so we don’t know if he was ever aware of it at the time or how he might’ve reacted to it. It’s scary to think he might’ve gone along with it.

    And what about the state governments? I doubt very much many of them would’ve gone along

  20. 20.

    frosty

    @Adam L Silverman: I missed that, not being on twitter except for links from front-pagers. Sounds like it’s on a par with ruling only state legislatures can decide the results of an election.

  30. 30.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Kay:

    I wanted to ask you if you’d heard about that Rove whistleblower? Claiming they heard that Rove said that vote tallies could be “changed” if the margin is only 2-3% between candidates. The problem I have with this is that there’s a paper trail in Ohio, as you’re aware. How would Rove hope to get away with this? I’m extremely skeptical

  34. 34.

    Another Scott

    But, but, he suspended habeas corpus therefore was the real tyrant.

    On May 25 [1861, 5-6 weeks after the start of the Civil War], John Merryman, a vocal secessionist, was arrested in Cockeysville, Maryland. He was held at Ft. McHenry in Baltimore, where he appealed for his release under a writ of habeas corpus. The federal circuit court judge was Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who issued a ruling, Ex parte Merryman, denying the president’s authority to suspend habeas corpus. Taney denounced Lincoln’s interference with civil liberties and argued that only Congress had the power to suspend the writ.

    Lincoln did not respond directly to Taney’s edict, but he did address the issue in his message to Congress that July. He justified the suspension through Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution, which specifies a suspension of the writ “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”

    Although military officials continued to arrest suspected Southern sympathizers, the incident led to a softening of the policy. Concern that Maryland might still secede from the Union forced a more conciliatory stance from Lincoln and the military. Merryman was remanded to civil authorities in July and allowed to post bail. He was never brought to trial, and the charges of treason against him were dropped two years after the war.

    See, tyrannical tyrant was doing tyranny!!1

    (Groucho-roll-eyes.gif)

    Lincoln did indeed have their number. He had an amazing presidency, too. Land grant colleges (1862), the transcontinental railroad (1862), homestead act (1862) etc., etc.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  35. 35.

    danielx

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    They assumed, and under ordinary circumstances they might have been closer to right – if they’d found someone else to act as a front they might have gotten away with it. Unfortunately they picked Smedley Butler, a Marine general officer who knew how to call a spade a fucking shovel. If they’d picked MacArthur he would have at least considered it, I’d bet money on it. Thank god THAT asshole isn’t active in politics today.

    ETA:@Adam L Silverman:

    He was still active, but he already had a god complex a mile wide. He would have at least thought about it…I think.

    Thanks for the Cooper Union snip. As succinct today as it was then.

  38. 38.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Do you feel better about Biden’s chances to win, Adam. I remember you mentioning Biden needed to be up around 8% or so to overcome the rural advantage in the EC. If national level polling is accurate, he seems to be positioned very well

  39. 39.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @lamh36: I clicked around a bit, and the gov’s and senate races in MT are tight, but they’re having record turn-out, which usually favors Dems. And a top Gianforte campaign aide has been fired for a road-rage incident that is (I hope) reminding people about Gianforte assaulting a 130 lb reporter. Local police say they’ll investigate after the election, which seems to me as hinky as hell.

  40. 40.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): As I wrote last night:

    The political science PhD part of me, in line with Charlie Cook’s projections, looks at the data and information we have and recognizes the high probability that VP Biden wins without much difficult and the Democrats are able to achieve a 52 seat Senate majority. The low intensity warfare professional in me looks at what’s going on and is exceedingly concerned regardless of what happens on Tuesday.

  44. 44.

    Craig

    Thanks Adam. I really appreciate your clear, and passionate writing here. Onward toward a more perfect union we go.

  45. 45.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I honestly think in my gut, given all of the data and everything else I’ve observed, that Trump is going to lose. Maybe there will be some awful unrest between now and the inauguration. But the only way out is through. We’ll just have to take it as it comes and believe that we’ll succeed; there’s more of us than there are of them

  47. 47.

    Kay

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    He doesn’t need to win by 8% to win the electoral college. He needs to win by 3 or 4%. I mean, my God, the electoral college isn’t that bad. He doesn’t need an absolute blowout. Obama won the popular vote in 2012 by 3.5% and won easily.

  48. 48.

    Chris Johnson

    @Adam L Silverman: Sure, but I don’t think I’m alone in thinking: bring it.

    If they want persecution, then go ahead and fuck with us, just try and act like escalating the terrorism will get their way. Just fuckin’ TRY it. No mercy for fascists. This has been us being nice. We’re all out of nice.

  49. 49.

    Adam L Silverman

    @NotMax: No. When people with specific subject matter expertise recognize patterns because of that subject matter expertise it is wise to pay attention.

  53. 53.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Kay: He needs to be up by more than 3% to win the Electoral College vote. There has been significant demographic changes since 2012 that further concentrate Democratic votes in places where no matter how high the popular vote goes, it cannot increase the Electoral College vote. To overcome this, the Democratic candidate in 2020, just as in 2016, needs a much higher share of the popular vote and that higher percentage of the popular vote has to be outside places like NY and California and other Democratic strongholds.

  55. 55.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @danielx:

    Re: the plausibility of the Business Plot, from AH.com:

    Congratulations: you basically have a Fascist government controlling the Post Office. No State government is going to recognize the new regime as legitimate, and still have a grip on the majority of the levers of government power. Assuming there weren’t enough Senators and Representatives who escaped to form a “Rump” legislature, I imagine most of the Governors are going to immediately denounce the new junta, mobilize the National Guard to protect themselves, call up local militias and organize them to bolster their ranks, and either call for new snap elections to create a new Legislature at a mutually agreeable and defensible location (St. Louis or Minneapolis come to mind; somewhere on the Mississippi seems likely), or form an “interim government” out of representatives from their state legislatures (with emergency powers delegated to the governors). Without the centralization of power in Washington Roosevelt’s 4 terms created, the coup will very quickly fizzle out as they have no way to martial the resources of the country or implement policy, and the party of Business and the right-wing (I.E.: Republicans) get a knock to their reputation on a national level similar to how the Democrats fell following The American Civil War. Roosevelt is martyred, and the new government (Now with an even larger commanding majority of Democrats) honor his legacy by implementing his programs, which the Supreme Court isn’t going to feel safe in opposing as they did IRL.

  59. 59.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Adam L Silverman:

    This is related to the current election, right? So, what’s really going on, then? Rove et al trying to sow doubt in the legitimacy of the election in Ohio?

  60. 60.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I don’t know. All I know is that there were clearly apparent irregularities. That Blackwell seemed to be clearly involved. That Rove did as well. That there was a whistleblower and that the whistleblower died under questionable circumstances.

    ETA: I’m talking about an election from years ago when Ken Blackwell was the Ohio Secretary of State. What election are you talking about?

  64. 64.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Oh… I thought it was this one. I had heard he was leading some efforts here this cycle. There are two State Supreme Court seats up and those two races are what I’m hoping will flip, along with the presidential race

  65. 65.

    Citizen Alan

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    I do wonder if it had somehow succeeded how WW2 would’ve went.

    I don’t. If the Republicans of 1936 had had their way, we’d have had a peace treaty with Germany and stayed out of WW2. Pearl Harbor wouldn’t have happened because we’d have been allied with Japan and Germany against the Russians. The number of Holocaust dead would have been at least twice as big.  After the conquest of Britain, George V would have been taken out and shot, and Edward would have come back to take the throne.

    And in time, we’d have death camps in this country for all the lesser races too.

  67. 67.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Citizen Alan: Yep. The conspirators were very up front with Butler that they’d made an examination of the emerging fascism in France, Italy, and Germany and they had concluded that the US had nothing to worry about from it and should actively embrace it. And that’s what they were going to do, help FDR embrace it.

  68. 68.

    Citizen Alan

    @Another Scott:

    Lincoln did indeed have their number. He had an amazing presidency, too. Land grant colleges (1862), the transcontinental railroad (1862), homestead act (1862) etc.,

    Yeah, amazing, isn’t it, what America can achieve whenever the god-damned Confederate States aren’t around to fuck everything up.

  69. 69.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Citizen Alan:

    I’m glad it never came to pass. A lot of AH fiction and counterfactual history thought experiments focus on dystopias and what could’ve gone horribly wrong. It makes better reading because conflict is more interesting than perfect utopias most of the time, though I love reading about alt-US space program AH, for example if Apollo-Saturn hardware had continued to be used instead of the white elephant the Space Shuttle turned out to b

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Yes, but wouldn’t the state governments have resisted such a movement? FDR received over 57% of the popular vote a few years earlier. I don’t think the US public along with the state governments would’ve just gone along with it

  70. 70.

    Kent

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): But violence against who?

    Who are the MAGA faithful with the pickup trucks and guns going to go after if they lose?  The Federal government?  Police?  Black neighborhoods?  They going to burn their own trucks down?  They going to burn down their own Denny’s and Golden Corrals?

    Think about it.

  71. 71.

    jl

    @Al Z.: ‘ I’m just trying to get over the fact that Abraham Lincoln wrote a speech were he said “That’s cool.” ‘

    Mark Twain used ‘cool’ in a similar way in the dialogue of his characters with regional dialects. The history of the colloquial use of ‘cool’ must be interesting. Seems to have a shifting set of meanings that are very distinct but orbit around the same general idea.

  72. 72.

    Sebastian

    Tomorrow we will either witness the International Oligarchy’s final decisive win or America‘s Finest Hour.

    My faith is with her ??

  73. 73.

    jl

    Problem for us soyboy libs is the black letter text in Article X of the Constitution, verse 12 of the Book of Erasmus, which clearly states that all elections must be called at 11:59 PM on election day by Lou Dobbs. How’re we going to get around that? Madison said it had to be that way or our Constitutional Republick would blow up into smithereens.

  74. 74.

    NotMax

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    The Saturn rockets would have been terribly inefficient and wasteful as the main means for putting missions into near-Earth orbit, which the STS was designed for. Plus the payload design for the former would have been much less amenable to so many variable mission objectives.

  75. 75.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @NotMax:

    If we wanted to land on Mars sometime in the 1980s, we would’ve needed to keep that hardware in production. The Saturn IB launch vehicles were used to launch manned missions into LEO. The tech would not have remained stagnant. We could’ve built an even earlier presence in LEO and possibly on the moon or in Lunar orbit (or the Lagrange points), in preparation to travel to Mars or even a flyby of Venus. We had the technology 50 years ago to travel to Mars, with some more development

    Of course, the robotic explorer programs probably would’ve gotten canned and we would still know far less of the Outer Solar system than we know today, unfortunately

  76. 76.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The plan was to do it so that the state governments, let alone anyone else, actually had no idea what had happened. I have no idea who wrote whatever it is you posted because you didn’t provide a link, but what has to be remembered is that in the 1938 mid terms 2/3rds of Americans voted for openly pro-fascist, pro-NAZI, and/or isolationist candidates for the House and the Senate, as well as for state level positions.

  77. 77.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Kent:

    Probably against minorities, I imagine. We’ll just have to each do our part, along law enforcement, to resist them. Police might be fucked, but I don’t think the FBI are so captured, as the response to the MI kidnapping and murder plot show. They care about public safety and the rule of law

  79. 79.

    Sebastian

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Not only that but one could argue that the United States were inspiration and blueprint for (parts of) the Nazi society and ideology.

    One could also argue that the only reason America entered WW2 in Europe was the concern that Stalin and the communists might conquer all of Europe

  81. 81.

    Ruckus

    Adam.

    Bravo. You have it exactly correct, as did Lincoln.

    The ultra rich have never given a damn about anything but more money. They don’t care how they get it, who gets hurt or dead while they are getting it, and I doubt they ever will. In the past is has been more difficult to see what they are doing but that is no longer the case. People wonder why the FTFNYT regularly backs the wealthy, backs conservatives and hires quack conservatives to write for them, and it’s because the owners profit from and belong to the wealth class.

  82. 82.

    Comrade Colette

    @Adam L Silverman: Oy vavoy! I mean, there probably are, somewhere, Muslims named James Neville and Rick Shaw (!), but these goyim ain’t it.

    @frosty: @Adam L Silverman: The funniest part is that the cited right (of the nobles, not the [spit] people) to petition the government for redress without fear of reprisal is precisely the 1st Amendment right that our newest justice Amy COVID Barrett couldn’t name during her confirmation hearing. You can’t make this shit up, unless maybe you’re Mel Brooks.

  86. 86.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @jl: The history of the colloquial use of ‘cool’ must be interesting. Seems to have a shifting set of meanings that are very distinct but orbit around the same general idea.

    Off the top of my head, I wonder whether there isn’t some relationship between this use of cool and the colloquial phrase butter wouldn’t melt in his/her mouth.

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