Audacity of Truth
Rahmbo:
"Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil's spawn. He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive."
-Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) on Obama's COS, 3/7/10
Velvet Lair- Legends March 18, 2010
- Some things are just not cute March 18, 2010
- The adventures of the lady spider killer continue March 11, 2010
- Intermission February 19, 2010
- People who allow their dogs to poop in other people’s yards February 16, 2010
Gore uses fake quote in book?
This is interesting:
You can’t really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, “The Assault on Reason.” It’s a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I’d love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.
In a chapter entitled “The Politics of Wealth,” Gore argues that the ancient threat to democracy posed by rich people run amok has finally been realized under the man who beat him in the 2000 presidential race. Even Lincoln, Gore says, saw the age of Bush coming in 1864: “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
The quote is a favorite of liberal bloggers, which is probably how Gore came across it. And as a description of how many on the left see the country seven years into their Bush nightmare, it’s pretty much perfect.
Too perfect, in fact. If you’re familiar with Lincoln’s distinctive way of expressing himself, you’ll hear the false notes the passage strikes. For one thing, Lincoln just wasn’t the “trembling” kind — or if he was, he kept his trembling to himself. Words such as “enthroned” and “aggregated” are a bit too fancy for his plain, unclotted prose, and the phrase “money power” suggests a conspiratorial turn of mind that would have been foreign to him. Indeed, these words don’t show up anywhere else in “The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln” (which, thanks to Gore’s Internet, are now searchable at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/).
Make sure to read it all, as author Andrew Ferguson digs into why this popular quote used by Nutroots blogs has been falsely attributed to Lincoln.
Betsy Newmark writes in response:
As famed Lincoln biogapher, David Donald, once wrote, it’s been important since Lincoln’s death for public figures to “get right with Lincoln” even if that means borrowing our 16th president for your pet causes. As Ferguson points out, Gore isn’t the only one to fall for a phony Lincolnism. Nowadays, Lincoln is used by just about everyone to prove a point. Gays like to argue that Lincoln was gay. Depressives claim that he also suffered from melancholy. Supporters of the war in Iraq remind us of how bleak the possibilities of victory in the Civil War looked at key moments. Some libertarians have portrayed Lincoln as the origin of the big state government that denied citizens their rights. Yet such willingness to assume that Lincoln said what you wanted him to have said betrays more about the author than about Lincoln himself.
Indeed.
And isn’t there something, well, just icky about Dishonest Al using a quote by Honest Abe? 
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Yep. ICKY !
All’s fair in love and war, so they say.
This being the latter, of course…
algore is a proven liar so whats new — why won’t this loser just go away?
That somebody supposedly as knowledgeable and intelligent as Al Gore could have imagined that Lincoln would have written that quote is as scary as the fact that his editor (and/or his ghostwriter?) wouldn’t have called it to his attention.
Then, again, when you realize how far one can get in today’s non-education system without having taken a history course, maybe it’s not so surprising that this got by the editor.
The reference to “corporations” doesn’t fit with 1864…other than the railroads, there were few highly-visible and very large corporations at that time. An attack on money power written in 1864 would have been more likely to focus on individual wealthy *owners* than on corporations.
It’s a bogus quote; it’s hard to find anyone in the 1860’s using the word “corporations”, though you can find plenty of references to “robber barons” and “trusts”. Is Al and Tipper still the model for the couple in the novel “Love Story”, even though the author denied it?
Though the author of this particular quotation is unnknown, is is generally attributed to Abraham Lincoln. FYI
FYI yardman5508. I attribute a quote to you where you said you beat your wife. Why do you beat your wife?
I can’t rake the leaves.
You must rake the leaves!
But I can’t rake the leaves!
You must rake the leaves!!
IIIIII’ll rake the leaves!!!
Though the author is unnnknown, it is is generally attributed to Dudley Do Right.
Ah, fake but accurate! Again…
Don’t forget Lincoln’s greatest quote: Soon the paparazzi will inherit the earth and bring upon this country a global warming as it has never been seen before, please secure as many carbon credits as you can before they are all gone.
Lincoln sure was ahead of his time.