Monday, February 22, 2010

Do Presidents Lie?


I don't know if Washington lied or not, but like modern-day Republicans, Lincoln was aggressive in denying citizens constitutional rights (Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus), and like modern-day Republicans, he misrepresented his motivations in fighting the Civil War.

Slavery was an abomination–no question about that! But the North fought to establish the expedience of Big Business over the integrity of Southern Agrarian Life. Today, we all fight the same fight. Republicans fight for business, Democrats for humanity. Witness the Bush Court's establishment of corporations having the same Constitutional rights as individual citizens.

And don't forget: There was, as is well known, the famous youthful-Lincoln bed-mate, Joshua Speed, but more to the point, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Chamberlain, a 19th century historian (as well as others), wrote that in Mrs. Lincoln's absence, the president would sleep, share nightshirts (Lincoln, like me, liked the smell of a good man), and conduct an "intimacy" with David Derickson, captain of Lincoln's bodyguard Company K. Many written accounts of that!

The original (and very leaky) DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL. You see, the South (like today), was just a little too "out."

This poem written by Abraham Lincoln:

For Reuben and Charles have married two girls,
But Billy has married a boy.
The girls he had tried on every side,
But none could he get to agree;
All was in vain, he went home again,
And since that he's married to Natty.

We can all live together in Integrity, but to do that we must marry honesty and integrity with business acumen. We all have North and South within us, and our true Civil War is within each one of us.

Choose Love: Love of God, love of Country, and love of your Fellow Man/Woman.


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