A few points regarding Richard Posner’s NY Times review of the awful book, “Lincoln’s Constitution”: First, this is yet another in a long, long line of books that read like a defense brief in “The War Crimes Trial of Abraham Lincoln.” Question: Why, 138 years after his death, are left-wing and neocon legal scholars STILL writing long, torturous “defenses” of Lincoln’s trashing of the Constitution, suspension of habeas corpus, mass arrest of tens of thousands of political opponents, shutting down opposition newspapers, confiscation of firearms, deporting a political opponent, censorship, and rigging the 1864 election? If he’s the saint that he is always portrayed as being, why all the defensiveness?
Let me suggest an answer: Because the post-1865 American state, for which the left/neocon Lincoln idolaters are the ideological propagandists, is not based on a glorious “rebirth of freedom,” as the propagandists tell us in their Fairy Tale renditions of history. Instead, it is based on dictatorship, mass killing, waging war on civilians, political plunder of the South, consolidation of political power in Washington, protectionism run amok, the quest for corporate welfare and centralized banking, and total destruction of the voluntary union of the founding fathers. If word of this real history gets out, then the ideological edifice of the American state crumbles (and the state’s propagandists are exposed as frauds). This must be avoided at all costs; hence, we get a non-stop stream of bilge and B.S. about Lincoln and “his” constitution. (Funny, I was taught in school that it was “the peoples’ constitution” and not the property of any one man).
Posner is a University of Chicago law and economics luminary; his former colleagues at the law school published the book in question; and he’s from Illinois. So, one would hardly expect him to offer a serious critique of this absurd and pathetic book. (Just a little Chicago School rational choice theorizing there).
