Lincoln stuff

Finally finished downloading the 36 discs of Doris Kearns Goodwin's book about Often-Honest Abe and his cabinet, Team of Rivals, to the Drunkablog I-Pud. At roughly six and a half minutes per disc, it took (hmmm, 36 times 6.5--that's a shoes off problem) almost four hours of downloading.

Not sure it's going to be worth it, either. I don't know much about Goodwin except that she used to be on Don Imus a lot and that she improperly footnoted, er, misread her notes, er, plagiarized in several of her books, big-time. And I read one of her Kennedy hagiographies many years ago--Schlongs of Our Fathers, I think it was.

Anyway, Team of Rivals is a little too Lincoln-looney even for me (I've listened to five or six discs). It's also convinced me that Lincoln was definitely gay. Wait, did I say "definitely gay"? I meant "definitely an astute politician" (who was gay).

James M. McPherson sure liked the book. But he would.

Everybody's probably seen the newly discovered pictures of Lincoln's second inauguration. I don't care. Here's one of them, from the same Library of Congress that mislabeled them in the first place:


Soldiers lining up.

Australian multi-blogger John Ray last month posted some little-known (he claims) Lincoln quotes, like this: "My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery." Maybe they're little known to Aussies. But Ray is solidly in the Lincoln-was-a-fascist camp (as you'll realize by reading his post, "Abraham Lincoln: Fascist"). I maybe even understand why somebody might feel that way, but: tough. Why does everyone think the South, if allowed to go its own way, would eventually and peacefully have rejoined the Union? They might just as well have committed genocide against their slaves before or after becoming a socialist paradise and nuking New York. Nobody knows (he said sententiously).