Giuliani compares Bush to Lincoln. Seriously.

January 27, 2007

Rudy Giuliani has been reluctant to talk too much about the war in Iraq, in large part because he apparently realizes how incredibly unpopular it is, and the extent to which the crisis has brought nothing but ruin to Bush’s presidency.

But now that Giuliani is getting closer to launching his presidential campaign in earnest, and as other candidates begin to take clear positions on the war, he’s having to pick a side. For reasons that aren’t quite clear, Giuliani is backing Bush rather enthusiastically. Last night, the former NYC mayor spoke to 500 people in New Hampshire.

Holding up as examples the top two presidents in the Republican pantheon, Lincoln and Reagan, Giuliani explained their leadership qualities.

“I don’t imagine that they had those favorable/unfavorable things back during the Civil War,” but Lincoln would not have fared well, Giuliani said.

Seeming to draw present-day comparisons, Giuliani noted that Lincoln even faced riots in New York City because people were unhappy with the war. “They wanted to quit because it was getting too tough.”

There were extensive casualties, the conflict dragged on and Lincoln had to fire many of his generals, Giuliani reminded the salad-eating crowd.

So, to hear Giuliani tell it, Bush is Lincoln, and the war in Iraq is the U.S. civil war. Giuliani did not appear to be kidding.

For good measure, Giuliani also said we could balance the budget by embracing the “budget discipline” of “the Reagan years,” which tells us a bit about Giuliani’s understanding of recent history.

Remember when Giuliani considered himself a serious person?

Somehow, it seems that the litmus test for GOP presidential contenders is “who needs the bigger straight-jacket?”

  • Not as surprising as it might seem. Before he can run as a moderate in the general election, Giuliani must get past the the hard-right gatekeepers of the Republican nomination. Running away from Bush at this point can only hurt him further with this group, who already are suspicious of the cross-dressing, gay apartment-dwelling, multiple divorced Giuliani. Right now his only option is to out-catholic the pope, so to speak, if there’s to be any hope whatsoever of the nomination.

  • So, to hear Giuliani tell it, Bush is Lincoln, and the war in Iraq is the U.S. civil war. Giuliani did not appear to be kidding.

    It’s like a U.S. Civil War where the slaves rise up in fanatical militias to kidnap, blow up and decapitate the Union soldiers, instead of forming units of their own to fight the Confederacy.

    In that sense, I see that Rudy Giuliani is entirely correct.

  • This is a pretty clever pander. The first law in Wingnuttia is to avoid any fact at any cost. On that count, Rudy’s broadcasting his wingnut bona fides in hi def widescreen .
    For the rest of the country, he may be trading his title as America’s Mayor for America’s Village Idiot.

  • That’s just great. I like the idea of Rudy planting long deep kisses on the President’s chocolate starfish because any polititian too stupid to know that BushBaby is the equivalent of an ebola/plutonium martini is too fucking stupid to be in the White House.

  • Harrumph! That’s all very well, lads, if you think facts matter. Facts don’t matter anymore. It’s all about the “narrative.”

  • Wow, is Giuliani promising us Reagon budgets and Bush wisdom? He’ll need to hire Kerik back from the Guayans to quell the riots.

  • It’s like a Civil War where the enemy wouldn’t have ended up controlling our economy if we lost.

    Sorry, I left that out before.

  • Before or after Lincoln had a hole in his head?

    I think we should ask the same question of candidates like Guilliani and McCain, who are pissing away their supposed broad appeal to look like extreme, partisan Bush-Cultists, at a moment when brain-dead-ism has been unanimously rebuked by the thinking electorate.

  • Well, I think a comparison of Bush and Lincoln is not altogether incorrect. The modern deification of Lincoln glosses over the fact he was terribly unpopular in his own time. The Civil War was not popular in the north, where cities in Maryland and Pennsylvania were invaded at various times, and people were unsure whether the South might invade into places like Delaware and New Jersey. There were huge riots in NYC. The casualties blow away anything like what we have had since, not even WWII had as many casualties (as % of population) as the Civil War. Lincoln was the first president to enact war powers to suspend constitutional rights (such as habeas corpus), and he decided he had the authority to draft soldiers(which was unheard of in the U.S. prior to the Civil War but which, based on Lincoln’s example, has been done in every war since EXCEPT for Iraq). Alot of people in the north felt that a war to compel the South to stay in the union was unnecessary and I would argue even undemocratic (if the people of the south didn’t agree with the people of the north, why should the north be able to compel the south to agree with them by force?)
    I am not a slavery sympathizer. Slavery is and was repugnant, and so is racism. Like many other ugly things in history, I’m glad the slavery era of the U.S. is over. But consider that Bush (and other imperial presidents) have based alot of their powers on Lincoln’s example and you will see that this sort of comparison is not that much of a stretch.

  • Giuliani is about as much a student of history as Bush is. The only similarities between Bush and Lincoln are cursory at best, though both were chief executive with the nation’s armed forces embroiled in a civil war and they both have slept in the Lincoln bedroom. After that it’s polar opposites.

    Rudy needs to study the history of the city he was once mayor of. The riots on New York had to do with racism and a very unpopular draft among recent immigrants who looked at the newly freed blacks (this is post Emancipation Proclamation) as competition for their jobs on the low end of the wage spectrum. And what riots has Bush faced?

    Lincoln fired generals like McClellan because of their “stay the course” attitude. Bush fires them when they want to change the course. Lincoln even planned for the post-war period. Bush? No so much.

    “Giuliani also said we could balance the budget by embracing the ‘budget discipline’ of ‘the Reagan years,’ which tells us a bit about Giuliani’s understanding of recent history.” – CB

    Rudy and the rest of the Repubs had better quit using history to fuel their bullshit factory. Quite frankly, it’s embarrassing to this nation’s past for it to be so perverted.

  • “I don’t imagine that they had those favorable/unfavorable things back during the Civil War,” but Lincoln would not have fared well, Giuliani said.

    Comparing Bush to Lincoln, or Iraq to The War Between the States is ridiculous on numerous levels, but more likely than not, the statement above is true.

    In typical Republican style, Guiliani takes an absurd premise (the comparisons), combines it with a true statement, and reaches a conclusion that sounds reasonable to the intellectually lazy and those predisposed to such a conclusion.

    Making such disingenuous arguments, solely to take advantage of an audience’s stupidity, is contemptible. No wonder they have to demonize intellectuals as elitists — they can’t afford for the general public to wise up.

  • Lincoln had to deal with a secessionist rebellion that was on THIS side of the planet. A rebellion which, by the way, had several hundred thousand angry Confederate gentlemen with guns in their hands who all wanted to shoot Lincoln. One even managed to succeed in that endeavor—so comparing Bush to Lincoln could be a subtle hint that someone ought to shoot Bush in the back of the head with a pistol.

    Now—where are those extraordinary-renditionating CIA guys when you need them? Let’s send Rudy to Syria and torture him….

  • Of couse, there were these things called “battles” in the Civil War, and after a certain point, the United States kept beating the Confederacy, taking control of Confederate territory, and grinding down their army. In ither words, there was a certain amount of measurable progress made throughout the latter years of the war.

    BTW: In about seven weeks, the war in Iraq will have lasted longer than the American Civil War.

  • Whenever I read/hear somebody arguing that slavery wasn’t the main cause of the Civil War, I say this: read “Apostles of Disunion” by Charles Drew. It’s about the secession commissioners sent by early seceding states to the rest of the South in hopes of getting these other states to secede as well. These speakers pitched the secession crisis entirely as a response to Northern attempts to abolish slavery. To them, secession was the surest way to preserve the institution. The vast majority of economic and social arguments that purport to explain that the war was caused by something other than slavery have been grafted on in the years since Reconstruction, in hopes of making Southern apologists feel less like racists.

    While it’s true that most Northerners had no love for African Americans, what matters in this case is the perceptions of the South in 1860 and 1861–and their main perception was that Lincoln’s election meant the end of slavery, and that the end of slavery meant the end of Southern society as Southerners knew it. Secession commissioners repeated this theme over and over, because it was the truth as they believed it to be. All the other stuff came later.

  • Hey scumbag, isn’t there a cross you should be burning somewhere?

    Your type, fortunately, is dying out in the modern world. Just not fast enough.

  • “Slave” versus “free” issue: Slavery did not seem to be a big issue, according to the historian of the time. The main reasons for the South’s secession from the U.S.A. was economic and political, rather than moral.

    LOL – well first off, the big economic difference between the south and the north was that the south used slaves and the north used free labor. You really just can’t get around the slavery fact no matter how you try and dress it up into something else.

    As for the “political” difference – check out a copy of the Confederate constitution sometime – pretty much word for word a copy of the Federal constitution – except for the parts where they specially prohibit the abolition of slavery. Whoops! There’s that pesky slavery thing again….

  • Paul at #14:

    You’re saying then that Bush is like Lincoln because:
    -Lincoln was a president during wartime
    -the war was unpopular
    -he expanded presidential powers at the expense of individual liberties

    (also you mention that Lincoln presided over a draft, when this is irrelevant).

    In that sense, Bush is like every leader who has:
    -led a nation or state during wartime
    -led a nation during an unpopular war
    -expanded executive powers at the expense of individual liberties,

    and he’s especially like every leader who has done all these things.

    That doesn’t go so far as a comparison, and there are many leaders throughout history who have matched some or all of these descriptions. Obviously there are lots of grounds left over on which one could distinguish Lincoln and Bush, and they include all the things that we’d be more interested in when comparison presidential psychologies and leadership styles (not in the least, because the war situations these two men are faced with are so different, so distinguishable).

    The best point you do have is that Lincoln is a predecessor (one among many) in the history of expansion of presidential powers, but obviously and as you can see, it doesn’t justify saying that Bush is “like” Lincoln, because when you use those words people will actually think that you are saying that Bush is “like” Lincoln in a way that makes much more sense to be mentioning. Don’t risk distortion!

  • Yup. Lot of similarities between Bush and Lincoln. Both are Republican. Lincoln got shot in a theater. Bush did shots and drove a Lincoln into a Theater. But other than that I can’t think of any similarities.

  • Well, I think a comparison of Bush and Lincoln is not altogether incorrect.

    If you want to tell us that a comparison of Lincoln and Bush is correct, you should tell us in terms of what.

    If the “what” isn’t something that’s immediately apparent as being an important criteria for making the comparison, then you should explain to us why it is.

    If you can’t explain it, or if the comparison could apply to a lot of people, then the comparison isn’t justified, especially when you’re comparing someone as auspicious, as you’ve written, as Lincoln, with someone like Bush.

  • Remember when Giuliani considered himself a serious person?

    You mean, when other people agreed? No, actually. (Except maybe Bernie Kerik, I guess.)

    He had the good fortune to behave well (and appear on TV) when faced with an enormous tragedy of the sort that even exceeded the amazing job description for Mayor of New York. He did have a world rooting for him at the time. But he hadn’t built a reputation for rhetorical brilliance as I recall. And after the Kerik embarrassment, it doesn’t surprise me if Rudy thinks he owes W some sucking-up.

  • Swan #12 “It’s actually not that much like the Civil War.”

    Exactly. At this point, it’s more like Reconstruction. At which point, Lincoln was dead.

    So, Bush is Johnson. Both of them.

  • They were all part of a worldwide movement, highly organized and well-financed.

    Wait, wait. Don’t tell me, let me guess … the Lavender Mafia set it all up! No? Okay, shhh! I know this … it was … it must have been … the Mysterious Jewish Guys that Control the Entire World. Yeah, everyone knows they control everything, even when evil fuckwits are killing them in droves, right Anti-Fuckherless?

    Jesus, Mary & Joseph smoking a cigar, playing banjo and riding on a god damned mutant hamster! CB can you please find a way to block by IP address?

  • I think anti-Federalist is absolutely correct. I say that we re-enslave all the negros, allow the natural freedom process to resume its course in freeing them, and then deport them all back to Africa. After that, we just need to find out who is running this worldwide movement that screwed us over, and then disorganize them and steal their money so they can’t do it again. And then the free-markets will reign supreme!

    Is it possible that nobody’s allowed him to finish the thought process of where he thinks he’s going with this? And yes, I’m using the term “thought process” very loosely

  • Bottom line. If Bush was enough of a president to stand on his own, no one would have to compare him to anyone.

  • I say that we re-enslave all the negros, allow the natural freedom process to resume its course in freeing them, and then deport them all back to Africa.

    [Doctor BioBrain]

    Here, here! But this will take some time. When you consider the current US definition of African-American is anyone who has even one ancestor of African descent (North Africans excluded) we’ll need mandatory DNA testing to make sure we get everyone. I suspect a lot of people will be surprised to find they’re not as lily white as they suppose. Maybe that could be the basis for some sort of reality show. However, all of those slaves toiling away will help boost the economy no end and the natural freedom process (revolts and uprisings) will be that much more effective and swift!

    Of course, after that we’ll need to round up all of the people who don’t fit the definition of Native American and ship them back to Europe, Asia, etc etc.

    True, this will empty out the country, but I promise to think of you all when I don’t have to wait in line at Starbucks.

  • ***CB can you please find a way to block by IP address?***
    —————-The Answer is Orange

    Actually, it would be a hot to find out the physical addresses of these clowns—and pretend that they were a part or Rudy’s “playbook.” That way, we could keep things in the spirit of the discussion….

  • Jesus, Mary & Joseph smoking a cigar, playing banjo and riding on a god damned mutant hamster! CB can you please find a way to block by IP address?

    For the record, I am. They keep coming with new IP addresses.

  • I’d be willing to consider comparing Lincoln to Bush if Lincoln had attacked Canada after the South bombarded Fort Sumter.

    Just as I’d be willing to consider comparing Roosevelt to Bush if Roosevelt had attacked Mexico after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

    But a preemptive attack of another country because it MIGHT be a threat, but had NO ACTUAL INVOLVEMENT IN 9/11? Right, that is just so un-American.

    But I’ll give Rudy a chance to a more through comparison.

    The American Civil War was obviously a war which threatened the very existence of the union, and Lincoln imposed unpopular draconian measures.

    Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Iraq did not and do not threaten the very existence of America.

    Bush has given the richest companies and people tax breaks and has told us all to “shop” to support America.

    Rather than freeing the slaves, he has turned our volunteer army into slaves.

    Of course, the biggest problem with comparing Bush to Lincoln or Roosevelt? Bush is losing these wars.

  • Welcome to the Bush cocksucking carousel, Rudy. What took you so long?

    Frank Rich is basically saying that Hillary’s not authentic or honest enough to provide the leadership that we crave. We’ve been saying that about her for years and this is far from Frank’s best but I still have to agree with him.

  • to find a true equivelant to Bush, you might have to look overseas and to history to find a comparable boob who brought down an empire solely due to their own incompetence.

  • As stated earlier, Rudy has about the same grasp of history as Shrub does. They didn’t want to “Quit because it was getting too tough”. The draft riots were not a bunch of peacenicks blowing off steam about the war, they were about gross inequality and a lack of fairness and poor immigrants (primarily Irish) being sent off to fight and die in a horribly brutal war via a draft, sometimes almost literally right off of the boat, while the rich and connected actually were able to pay others to fight in their stead (too bad that practice had gone out of favor while Georgie was dodging the draft in Viet Nam – would have been easier than having daddy strong-arm the draft board). There was also the aforementioned racial aspect of the prevalent racism all over the country at the time, and several black persons were lynched by the mobs for the old “taking our shitty jobs” reasoning. The parallels ring through the 14 decades to today in the demonization of the current batch of immigrants being wrongly accused of “stealing” jobs, and the fact of an “all volunteer” army largely recruiting form the economically disenfranchised strata of today’s society, thus placing the burden of our horribly brutal war on a fraction of our society as well. P.S. The following is a quote by Abe Lincoln: “If I could save it (the union) by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” So, slavery: the chicken or the egg?

  • “Remember when Giuliani considered himself a serious person?” – CB

    No, has anyone ever?

    Glen #43 gets it I think. Sure there are similarities between Bush and Lincoln or Bush and Truman. Of course Lincoln felt like he’d end up paying with his life for fighting a war that cost millions of lives. I doubt Boy George II suffers from a similar ominous sense of doom. Nope, BG2 just thinks that years (decades, centuries, millenium?) from now he’ll actually be thought of as “correct” by wingnut commentators like Tony Blankley and Pat Buchanan. Why that should be a comfort to him????

  • Giuliani is a shallow, self-serving piece of fuck with the brains and integrity of Bernie Kerrick(sp). Moronic egoists , as we know too well, don’t belong on the political stage.
    Anyway, the little twerp turns my stomach.

  • Rudy and his manboobs ain’t gonna make it. If not a straightjacket, the least he could do is invest in a manzier.

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