One Utah

Via Think Progress:

Fox News Channel reporter Bret Baier has put together an adulatory one hour documentary, “George W. Bush: Fighting to the Finish.” The show will air on Sunday. Baier said that what surprised him was the President’s repeated efforts to link himself to Abraham Lincoln:

We talked a lot about President Lincoln. And there’s going to be a lot of people out there who watch this hour and say, is he trying to equate himself with Lincoln?

I tell you what — he thinks about Lincoln and the tough times that he had during the Civil War. 600,000 dead. The country essentially hated him when he was leaving office.

Bret Baier apparently doesn’t remember that Lincoln was assassinated just after being re-elected by an overwhelming margin.

Salon’s Garrett Epps noted that Bush bears more similarity to one of our least successful presidents, Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson:

Johnson was another untutored figure from the frontier. Personally, he and Bush are goober peas in a pod: stubborn, arrogant, intolerant of anything but complete support, convinced that compromise is weakness and criticism is treason. Like Bush, Johnson relied on a few sycophants; like Bush, Johnson would scarcely meet with, much less compromise with, his critics. Once in 1865, when the Radical Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts pleaded with Johnson to change his Reconstruction policy, the president responded by spitting tobacco juice in Sumner’s silk hat. Johnson had his own struggle with alcohol — during his vice-presidential inaugural address in 1865, he was falling-down drunk. He was rigid, angry, resentful, impulsive and grandiose. He liked to compare himself to Jesus…

And, let’s add that Bush is no Honest Abe.

This entry was posted Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 12:46 pm and is filed under George W. Bush, National Politics, This Blog, War. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.