The liberal fetish for Honest Abe

In response to Hillary Fails History: Calls Lincoln a ‘Senator from Illinois’ :

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Smartest Woman in the World, who also didn’t know when the Marines got to Tripoli even though she was Secretary of State, and thinks “working moms” are people who “struggle” to “piece together the resources” to pay the mortgages on both of their huge mansions.

This Lincoln goof is exactly the kind of thing lefties used to blow into week-long hatefests against Sarah Palin… undaunted by the subsequent discovery that she was right, and they were wrong.  Liberalism is all about working backward from conclusions accepted as gospel, from “global warming” to the dazzling brilliance of people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  It’s a bit like the way no liberal in good standing can ever be accused of racism, sexism, or homophobia, no matter what they actually say, while every conservative faces an uphill climb to prove everything he says isn’t straight out of a deleted scene from “Birth of a Nation.”

This particular boo-boo is also a side effect of the Left’s bizarre attempt to rewrite history so that Abraham Lincoln is one of their own.  Barack Obama compares himself to Lincoln, or claims to be Lincoln’s spiritual successor, so often that his consultants probably had to talk him out of wearing a stovepipe hat to the State of the Union address.  

Lincoln might be the only figure left from American history, following years of vandalism by post-modern multi-culti vandals, who still has an aura of pure mythic resonance, so that merely invoking his name – in virtually any context, even in a frivolous aside – automatically makes the speaker seem classier.  Mentioning his campaign, as Hillary does here, elevates yours by association.  Also, liberals love the idea of presenting Lincoln as a noble ideal that today’s Republicans have fallen far short of.  The unspoken subtext of just about every Obama invocation of Lincoln is that Honest Abe weeps as his looks down upon the radical extremist right-wingers his party has become.

It’s funny to watch The Smartest Woman in the World get her Lincoln history wrong, but for my money, her dead-fish laugh line at the beginning is even funnier.  The way her voice climbs when she says “I asked him not to read it before we did our interview” is comedy gold.