Maggie Thatcher and Abraham Lincoln

[Thomas Thorne]

It was Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen,who was known as the 'Wizard of Ooze" for his oratorical style, who came up with the best description of our compulsion to believe that Lincoln would support each of us today in our various political positions.

Dirksen called it "Getting Right with Lincoln."

To Reagan and Thatcher he was a proponent of free market economics. To communists Lincoln the railroad attorney was an underground communist. Every February American communists held Lincoln-Lenin dinners. in the 1990's a prolific but awful alternate history writer with the implausible name of Harry Turtledove had Lincoln bore his readers to death with turgid recitations of "Das Kapital." Prohibitionists believed he was one of them. African Americans hailed him as their liberator. White Southerners believed he would have supported the redeemers and post reconstruction white supremacy.

Remember the fun brawl we had in deciding what Lincoln would have done if he had lived. But you can't plausibly extend the speculations to situations he was unaware of.

Now let me tell you what Lincoln would have thought of Baseball's Designated Hitter......
Tom