George W. Lincoln...? I don't think so.

Driftglass, after reading Michael Novak at NRO compare GWB favourably to Lincoln, wipes the vomit from his chin and offers this rejoinder as only driftglass can...

Go read the entire thing if you feel the need for a Yuletide emetic.

As for me, I could barely get past the ponderous piping-bag full of stentorioriffic treasures such as “was it not thus, also…”, “haughty”-freighted “remonstrations” and “No end to the bloodshed flickered in sight” larded onto this shitbrick to hide the taste of writing as flat and unappetizing as stamped tin, and poo truffles like “Wars are often darkest just before the light” peeping out from under every rotting log of prose to notice the basic argument;

That since Lincoln was called a fuckup, and Lincoln was great, isn’t is therefore reasonable to conclude that since Bush is being called a fuckup, he may also be proven to be great if we just wait long enough?

The short answer is: No. Not even close.

The idea that there is some clandestine configuration of facts and conditions that somehow transmutes every fucked up step that Dubya has taken into Fucking Brilliant Sense in a wider context – and that these Sekrit Circumstances will be the Bush Administration’s Big Reveal that makes all the dirty hippies look stoopid – has been floated by everyone from Dubya to Bobo to Bill Kristol in one form or another for the last four years.

And has been righteously laughed at every single time.

Because any hack writer desperately doing an elevator pitch can pull some wildly unlikely set of events out of his ass whereby, say, Richard Nixon comes winging back from his citadel on Io (where he has been hiding from a Kissinger-shaped killbot his enemies sent to assassinate him) to save Christmas.

And any first year philosophy student with a smattering of popular physics under his toga and deep in his cups at three a.m. has stumbled into the “revelation” that, given an infinite amount of space and time, every possible outcome for every possible choice can theoretically occur, each one branching off into its own, separate reality.

So there are undoubtedly realities where JFK never got shot. Where FDR did. Where Dr. King lived to be 90. Where “Homicide” wasn’t cancelled. Where Edith Keeler didn’t get hit by a car and instead spent the 1940s in a tantric fuckfest with Jim Kirk (occasionally enlivened by a ferocious three-way ponn farr with Spock) while Hitler builds a nuke. Where I didn’t get divorced.

And where Dubya “won” his Iraq War, by whatever definition of “win” the Eloi of that reality can be doped into believing.

But this Reality ain’t one of those. This is this reality, and in this reality only the mentally underclocked, the insane or the Last Defenders of Dumbalot would, at this late date, still dare to try an peddle reekingly bad science fiction masquerading as historical parallelism to justify backing a disastrously failed leader and his catastrophically failed war.

Or, to put it another way…

At no point had Lincoln “won the war” but lost the Peace.

At no point in leading us down the garden path to Baghdad did this Administration ever promise us anything but a cheap, ouchless victory followed by a rain of sweets, flowers, low-low prices at the pump and Jeffersonian democracies springing up throughout the region like toadstools.

At no point did Iraq attack us, or attempt to secede from us.

At no point did the Republican Guard shell our Fort Sumter. Or our Fort Anything.

At no point past the first few months has this been a war of fixed formations squaring off and duking it out Old School. This has been ferocious, urban, guerilla warfare and no Pickett’s Charge or Sherman’s March or Sheridan in the Shenandoah is a’comin’ to miraculously transform massed firepower or scorched earth into viable and decisive strategies.

At no point were gentlemen from Tikrit and Sadr City ever elected to Congress and argued in the aisles over slavery.

At no point was Iraq ever a basic and unresolved infection that was crippling the United States Constitution so severely that, sooner or later, needed to be lanced and healed or the country would die.

At no point did Iraq attempt to export a political system inimical to our own into our country.

At no point was there ever a Euphrates Compromise which attempted to avoid war at almost any cost by allowing the expansion of the United States into new territory, half Baathist and half Democracy.

At no point were the actual pros and cons – the actual costs and causes – of invading Iraq ever honestly and openly debated by Bush.

At no point was this about Slavery.

At no point did we and the Iraqis speak the same language.

At no point has our involvement in Iraq been a “brother’s war”.

At no point did the commanders now fighting on every different sides of the war all know each other and serve together.

At no point during the invasion of Iraq was the United States out-generalled.

After the collapse of he government of Iraq and the capture of its leaders, the war did not end.

At no point in Iraq have we fought on our home soil.

At no point are we ever going to be one of the two (or four) sides that have to live together in Iraq once this war ends.

And at no point has George Bush come within a hundred light years of earning the right to say to this nation:

“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil-war.

All dreaded it -- all sought to avert it.

While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war -- seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation.

Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.

And the war came.”

This was did not "come". This war was not "deprecated".

This war was pre-measured and mixed and cooked and served as deliberately as a little cake from George Bush's E-Z-Iraq Oven.

And finally, in history not every screwhead fighting for a bad cause is one turn of the historical revision card away from redemption. In fact this is rarely the case.

Which is why Grand Ayatollah Jefferson Davis is not on a fucking postage stamp.