Remember the Republican motto: In order to save the Union we have to destroy it

Publius Decius Mus rightly mocks Mark Levin's convention of the states

Not in so many words, but he does nevertheless, here:

"[I]n the federally consolidated super-state, what good do state legislatures do anyway? Does Voegeli or doesn’t he agree with me that federal and administrative state control will become more consolidated rather than less in Clinton II? We could have every statehouse in the nation, and everything we try to do (which, once again, is: not much) would just be overridden by judges and bureaucrats."

It was amusing to hear Mark Levin play an Antonin Scalia audio this evening, in which Scalia ridiculed the parchment barrier of The Bill of Rights, which Levin's grand scheme is to increase the length of with his manifold "liberty amendments". Does Levin even listen to Scalia, or just grovel at his feet?

Scalia clearly expressed in the audio that the separation of powers was key to our liberties, not the Bill of Rights.

Yet, yet, neither Scalia, nor Levin, nor Publius Decius Mus for that matter recognize that it was Abraham Lincoln, their hero!, who destroyed the separation of powers and arrogated all the power to the executive, the very heart and soul of the once and future "federal and administrative state".

That Lincoln did so over slavery was simply the pretext.

Hello Barack Obama. Hello Black Lives Matter. Hello . . . communism.

Dear Rush Limbaugh: Publius Decius Mus doesn't get it at all, and neither do you

From the conclusion of the anonymous conservative intellectual, here:

"The possibilities would seem to be: Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie liberalism as far as the eye can see … which, since nothing human lasts forever, at some point will give way to one of the other three. Oh, and, I suppose, for those who like to pour a tall one and dream big, a second American Revolution that restores Constitutionalism, limited government, and a 28% top marginal rate."

A 28% top marginal rate?

He must be kidding.

The income tax is the cornerstone of the contemporary part of the anti-American revolution which made big government and rabid anti-constitutionalism not just possible but plausible. The 16th Amendment shredded the intent of the Founders, so why not shred the rest? They have, and they will.

Dreaming big means shedding the shredding, and along with that the imperial presidency and the Leviathan State implied by that, which was bequeathed to us by Abraham Lincoln.

But the followers of Harry Jaffa will never be able to imagine that, which makes them nothing more than the hollow men of Conservatism Inc.

Lincoln lover Ralph Peters wants to level Raqqa, just like Trump

Here:

'Obama wouldn’t go to Raqqa. So the jihadis went to Paris. ... The generals who won World War II would start by leveling Raqqa, the ISIS caliphate’s capital. Civilians would die, but those remaining in Raqqa have embraced ISIS, as Germans did Hitler. The jihadis must be crushed. Start with their “Berlin.”'

Liberal contributor from The New Republic advocates for tyranny as all Lincoln lovers must

Here:

[T]here will be situations in which the common good demands and requires that the executive go beyond the letter and even the spirit of the law. In these extreme or emergency situations — situations in which an existential threat poses a grave danger, with the survival of the political community itself at stake — the executive's extralegal decisions effectively become the community's higher law.

Probably the clearest example from American history is Abraham Lincoln's 1861 suspension of habeas corpus, defiance of the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (who denounced Lincoln's actions as unconstitutional), and subsequent arrest (without charge) of pro-secessionist Maryland state legislators who appeared poised to condemn the suspension and vote to join the Confederacy.

Was Lincoln acting like a tyrant, as Maryland native John Wilkes Booth and many other critics of the time contended? You bet he was. And it's a good thing, too. Had Maryland seceded, Washington would have been surrounded by enemy armies and the South almost certainly would have won the Civil War quickly and decisively. Extralegal action was required to keep that from happening.

Larry Kudlow Says He Believes In Abraham Lincoln's Idea Of Political Persuasion

You mean like this, Larry?

Maybe Obama Learned Refusal To Negotiate From Lincoln At Ft. Sumter

The South sent delegations to Washington, D.C., and offered to pay for the Federal properties and enter into a peace treaty with the United States. Lincoln rejected any negotiations with the Confederate agents because he did not consider the Confederacy a legitimate nation and making any treaty with it would be tantamount to recognition of it as a sovereign government. However, Secretary of State William H. Seward, who wished to give up Sumter for political reasons—as a gesture of good will—engaged in unauthorized and indirect negotiations that failed.

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In which case, not a good thing, not a good thing at all.

Colorado Democrat Faces Recall After Narrow Victory Courtesy Of Libertarian Spoiler

Ross Kaminsky has the story in The American Spectator, here:

Forty-five miles north, Senate President John Morse is in even bigger trouble. Although his senate district includes the quirky (and liberal) town of Manitou Springs, John Morse won his 2010 election by only 252 votes in a race in which a Libertarian candidate won five times that number. In other words, if not for the presence of a third party candidate, Mr. Morse would likely have lost; this is not a safe “blue” seat, despite redistricting since 2010 having made the district lean slightly more Democratic than its prior configuration. ... [P]erhaps most galling, even to Morse’s liberal constituents, were comments he made on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show in which he proudly said (while claiming the mantle of Abraham Lincoln) that he counseled fellow Democrat senators to avoid reading e-mails from constituents. To be fair, Morse probably assumed that nobody was watching the show.

Commentary Magazine Defends Reagan's Liberalism

Peter Wehner, here:

"[I]magine the Norquist and Shirley standard being applied to Reagan in the 1970s. If Jeb Bush’s comments unleashed heated attacks, even given his sterling anti-tax record, think about what Reagan’s support for unprecedented tax increases–including higher taxes on top rates, sales taxes, bank and corporate taxes, and the inheritance tax–would have elicited. The Gipper would have been accused of being a RINO, a pseudo-conservative, unprincipled, and a member of the loathsome Establishment. Fortunately for Reagan (and for America) the temptation to turn conservatism into a rigid ideology was not as strong then than it is now."

Let's face it.

Reagan was a Democrat in recovery who brought a substantial number of Democrats in recovery to the Republican Party, where they met fellow liberals with whom they could forge an alliance around the liberalism bequeathed to them by Wilson and FDR, without the communist fellow traveling. Conservatives got pushed to the side, or taken for a ride.

Reagan defended the welfare state but on a scaled back basis with emphasis on less reliance on government and lower income taxes. The New Deal was not scaled back, nor was The Great Society. Even the ramped up Cold War to defeat the Soviets was interventionist and therefore arguably anti-conservative in its basic impulse. The resulting glorification of the US military would horrify the founders who feared them as instruments of tyranny in the hands of an American Caesar.

And now here we are with an enlarged welfare state in OBAMACARE, and actually having a public kerfuffle about an administration which resisted abjuring the use of said military on American soil to snuff out people it and it alone decides are a threat. You know, like gun owners. Are we really supposed to be charmed by the likes of the Krauthammers of the world who insist what Obama has been doing is entirely consistent with the model of Abraham Lincoln who put fellow Americans Confederates to death based on a private interpretation of the constitution?

Nothing's changed, except for the worse. His truth keeps marching on.

Sen. Rand Paul Is Dreaming If He Thinks "Libertarian Republican" Can Win In 2016

Here:

"You know, points have been made and we'll continue to make points, but I think the country really is ready for the narrative coming, libertarian Republican narrative, also because we have been losing as a national party. We are doing fine in congressional seats but we're becoming less and less of a national party because we don't win on the West Coast, we don't win in New England. We really struggled all around the Great Lakes."

"Libertarian Republican" is an oxymoron, kind of like "Reagan Republican". The Libertarian Party in the United States characteristically considers itself successful when it defeats Republicans, not Democrats. Taking over the Republican Party from within is simply another version of this.

Both libertarians and Reaganites are essentially Democrats on the social issues but Republican to the extent that Republicans believe in the free market, which actually is where the rub is. They make a lot of noise protesting their social conservatism, but when the rubber hits the road they do nothing about it legislatively. Meanwhile the country continues to reset to the left on the social issues with every passing year. This is not by accident.

Since neither group gains traction in the Democrat Party on the economic front, the Democrats having sold out long ago to socialism and social license, they both naturally come to the Republican Party to play, where they are partly welcome but eventually cause trouble. The problem is both groups alienate the social conservative base of the Republican Party to one degree or another, and then can't quite convince the Republican establishment either, which is still economically liberal in its orientation and currently is based in the Bush clan. There's a reason, after all, why the Republicans continue to nominate economic liberals like Bush 43, McCain and Romney who do not naturally exude free market principles.

Reagan Democrats succeeded in the Republican Party because they made successful alliances with both Republican factions, which are otherwise so divided they cannot stand on their own. They need liberals of one kind or another to win, either libertarian social liberals or Democrats recovering from the economic radicalization of the Democrat Party, like Ronald Reagan. When Republicans do win with this help, they call it conservatism but still govern from the left, whether it takes the form of Reagan's 1986 tax reform with its hidden mandates and expansions of middle class welfare or George W. Bush's guns and butter in the Wars on Terror and Drugs for Seniors.

The libertarians will not be able to reduplicate this achievement, however, because under their banner fly all the fruits, nuts and flakes Republicans have always identified as socially fringe characters with whom there can be no agreement, while their doctrinaire free market devotion will preclude compromise with the Republican establishment's tax and spend liberals which they will need to win.

As ever, the Republican Party is a house divided against itself, which is why Pres. Obama just loves Pres. Abraham Lincoln.

The Model For All American Authoritarians Is Pres. Lincoln

So Ralph Peters, here:

"But no president should murder American citizens. Tell it to Abe Lincoln, Hollywood’s celebrity-president of the season, who invaded the South (which had not even threatened acts of terror). The result? Perhaps 750,000 dead Americans. I believe Lincoln was our greatest president after Washington, but he wasn’t just about emancipation."

Funny how emancipation for 4 million black people required the deaths of 750,000 and the repression of liberties of millions ever after.

Well, at least he's honest about The War of Northern Aggression. And Lincoln was a murderer. I'm glad we cleared that up.

One key to surviving in the future will be making sure we don't all move to the same geographic location. Another is refusing to wear the Star of David. You know a third.

By 1875 One Third of Federal Revenues Came From Taxes on Alcohol

According to Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition:

After lapsing in 1802, the alcohol excise was reimposed under James Madison to pay for the War of 1812, suspended in 1817, and then brought back by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 to finance the Civil War. This time the tax did not fade away . . . For most of the next thirty years the impost on alcohol annually provided at least 20 percent of all federal revenue, and in some years more than 40 percent. By the time the excise was doubled to cover the cost of the Spanish-American War, the brewers had finally realized that the tax they had once so strongly opposed might be their salvation, and they patriotically (and shamelessly) declared that they had financed 40 percent of the war's cost.

By way of comparison, tariffs in 1875 funded 55 percent of the federal budget. Seven years after the passage of the Income Tax, tariffs in 1920 funded barely 13 percent of the federal budget.

The significance of Daniel Okrent's recent history of Prohibition is not in the least that it shows how much federal government had depended on liquor taxes in addition to tariffs and property taxes to fund itself.

The perfidy of Prohibition is that it was brought to us by the same folks who gave us the Income Tax in the first place. They knew something would be needed to replace the federal revenue which would be lost when alcohol sales were finally banned. But when Prohibition got the boot, the Income Tax did not.

So the flipside to the Temperance movement is its Intemperance toward the original intent of the constitution, which was to prohibit direct taxation without apportionment by population in favor of tariffs, excises and ad valorem taxes.

Declaration of Independence 'Decidedly Un-Revolutionary'

John Fea seems to agree with historian David Armitage that ours was a revolution not made but prevented, and takes the view that Abraham Lincoln was a revisionist in his reading of the Declaration:

Historian David Armitage, in a fascinating book entitled The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, has argued convincingly that the Declaration of Independence was written primarily as a document asserting American political sovereignty in the hopes that the newly created United States would secure a place in the international community of nations. In fact, Armitage asserts, the Declaration was discussed abroad more than it was at home. This meant that the Declaration was "decidedly un-revolutionary. It would affirm the maxims of European statecraft, not affront them." ...

Lincoln was a revisionist. He found the Declaration useful for reasons that were not primarily intended by its writers.

Treasure Trove of British Archives Undermines "Lincoln Freed the Slaves" Myth

The Washington Times has the details:

Newly released documents show that to a greater degree than historians had previously known, President Lincoln laid the groundwork to ship freed slaves overseas to help prevent racial strife in the US.

Just after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Lincoln authorized plans to pursue a freedmen’s settlement in present-day Belize and another in Guyana, both colonial possessions of Great Britain at the time, said Phillip W. Magness, one of the researchers who uncovered the new documents.

Historians have debated how seriously Lincoln took colonization efforts, but Mr. Magness said the story he uncovered, to be published next week in a book, “Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement,” shows the president didn’t just flirt with the idea, as historians had previously known, but that he personally pursued it for some time. ...

"What we know now is he did continue the effort for at least a year after the proclamation was signed.”

The newly discovered evidence will give greater credence to the argument that Lincoln crucified the country in the Civil War over his crusade for an extra-constitutional Sovereign Union of states, in the middle of which, when things were going badly in 1863, Lincoln the demagogue hit upon slavery as a new way to salvage support for the war of Northern aggression.

Read the whole story here.