I have been wondering since Obama wants to be like Lincoln, if Obama's end goal is to start another Civil War. Looks like things may be going his way....

cowgirl, please. Enough with the ignorance.

Owlie - enough of the name calling. Oh that is right, when you have no facts, you name call. I believe it is called Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.

If taking offense to your "view" that Lincoln's "end goal" was to start the Civil War means that I am an Alinskyite, so be it. This kind of "conservatism" you are pushing fiddles while Rome burns. "It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns." Alinskyite, indeed.

If name-calling were the only requisite to the practice of this dreaded ideology, I would submit that you could very well be its poster child, cowgirl. Shall we count the names which you have called your various enemies on this board?

Bottom line is, most people around here respect Lincoln, and Obama's posturing on immigration in no way parallels 1860. This is at least recognized by Adams, who says of then and now, "Both touch upon the same issues, albeit from opposite directions."

Oh, I dunno, seems to me Lincoln's war against the South started a tradition of using force to overcome popular will. That's certainly true in the Arizona case. Perhaps if Lincoln had respected the right of Southerners to go their own way things would be different today.

You mean "things would be different" in the sense that the right to own property in other people might have been retained?

I personally doubt that institution would have survived to the modern day. It died out (without war) elsewhere, and I think it would have ultimately died out in North America.

Regardless, Mr. Nightflyer, that's the same tired old argument that dictators always use -- the end justifies the means. Yea, Lincoln ended slavery, but in the process he began a process whereby the whole people are enslaved to an overly-centralized federal government.

If you want to talk about slavery, check out 'Reconstruction' (a misnomer if ever there was one). A whole national population (the South) became a colony of the North, and that didn't begin to change until the 1970s.

The whole episode in American history was deeply unfortunate (slavery included, of course), but surely there was an easier way to fix it than killing so many young men and driving a whole region to its knees for a century.

Redwald: You say that I used "the same tired old argument that dictators always use" by supporting Lincoln (i.e., by letting the ends justify the means). That is true in a certain sense, and false in another. In the first place, if this were the same argument that dictators always use, that would mean that we are unable to *distinguish* between *ends.* Nay, the dictator uses any means to meet onerous ends. I'm not aware of any one of them ever issuing an Emancipation Proclamation.

In the second place, what you are saying is that ugly means should never be used, which seems to me at least to entail the killing of young people. But is slavery or death worse? (Or was the generation of 1776 wrong when they cried "give me liberty or give me death?")

Oh, I know. Stalin and Hitler had good intentions. Of course. Sigh....

Or we could be like the modern left, who seems to me at least to use means to justify...means? They don't know their rears from a hole in the ground.

I truly am sorry to have had to get in this spat with you, Redwald. But Obama is no Lincoln.

What I am trying to say is that if you want any consistency, be wary of "no ends justify means." Wouldn't that outlaw revolution -- whether righteous or not?

The Civil War divides the Right in this country. Such spats are inevitable, but that shouldn't stop us from agreeing on the present. Obama is an empty suit, this we agree on.

As for Lincoln, he was smart, deliberate, and (in his own way) courageous. I don't like what he did, but I don't like what slave-owners and slave-traders did either. It was an unfortunate situation all around.

Thank you, Redwald, for burying the hatchet on the issue of the Civil War. There have been plenty of mostly-civil threads about it on this site before, but as Owl indicated it is absurd to have this argument while President Obama and the Democratic Congress are demolishing our institutions.

Lincoln's end goal was to start War. He unconsitutionally invaded the south, knowing that the south would fight back. That is called starting a war. Lincoln like Obama wanted big government. The south would not oblige. The Constitution at the time allowed any state to secede from the Union. Lincoln would lose power as the South accounted for $90 million of the Federal Goverment's $120 million budget. If all the southern states left the Union, Lincoln would have no federal government.

I considered no one on this board my enemy. We all have rights to own opinions. However, no one has the right to distort facts. The fact is that Obama is tearing this nation up - much like Lincoln before the civil war. He is tearing it up with racial issues after declaring throughout his campaign many, many times that he would never use race as an issue. He now is using immigrant as another tool to stir up racism as he desparately needs the votes of the 12 million illegals here in the U.S. in order to win elections. The man is a fraud.

By the way, please spare us on this board your ignorance. How is that for name calling?

cowgirl, please.