In yet another facile example of the Old Media equating President Obama’s presidency to the greatness of Abraham Lincoln’s, NBC News correspondent Kevin Tibbles used the occasion of the opening of the new Lincoln movie helmed by Director Steven Spielberg to do just that.
On Saturday’s NBC Nightly News, Tibbles reported on the opening of a movie that has widespread Oscar buzz, Spielberg’s Lincoln – a project that was more than a decade in the making.
Tibbles goes to the director himself, who gives us a line about why he wanted to do a movie about Abe Lincoln, our 16th President.
“Lincoln advocated things that we hold dear today. He advocated that government can be a positive force for the good of all people,” Spielberg said.
Then Kevin Tibbles kicks into high gear his facile equating of Lincoln and Obama:
No coincidence, perhaps, the film opens the week America’s 21st century President won re-election in difficult times fraught with partisan bickering. Times in which many ask, what would Lincoln do?
No coincidence the movie came out close to the election? More like it’s no coincidence that it came out just before Oscar season begins.
But to compare Lincoln’s turbulent times to Obama’s is the most idiotic, partisan blather that can be imagined. to say that Lincoln’s day was merely “difficult times fraught with partisan bickering” seems a bit of a soft selling of a civil war in which hundreds of thousands were killed. Common “bickering” is a bit less virulent than a shooting war, wouldn’t you think? Lincoln came to office in the midst of war, was re-elected during that war, and faced the decision of whether or not to free millions of human beings from chattel slavery. I’d say his day makes Obama’s trials seem trivial by comparison.
After all, Obama’s entire re-election milieu is a mess of his own making. There is no great civil war, no immediate question of the elimination of the forced servitude of a great number of Americans, and much of the “partisan bickering” is due to Obama’s own recalcitrance over actually reaching across the aisle to work with the opposition.
It is just absurd to act as if Obama’s political climate is somehow comparable to Lincoln’s. Ah, but we need to make Obama into a great American hero, don’t we? So logic and truth need not apply.