Abe Lincoln Speaks Out About President Bush

The Nation has a great column by Eric Foner in its March 12th Issue, about the Conservatives' practice of using fake quotes from Abe Lincoln to prop up their disastrous foreign policy. Here's a little excerpt from Foner's column that shows how Honest Abe really felt:

Lincoln's record as a member of Congress during the Mexican War utterly refutes the conservative effort to appropriate his legacy. Lincoln was elected to the House of Representatives in 1846, shortly after President James Polk invaded Mexico when that country refused his demand to sell California to the United States. Polk falsely claimed that he was responding to a Mexican invasion.
Shortly before Lincoln's term in Congress began, he attended a speech in Lexington, Kentucky, by his political idol Senator Henry Clay. "This is no war of defense," Clay declared in a blistering attack on Polk, "but one of unnecessary and offensive aggression." A month later, Lincoln introduced a set of resolutions challenging Polk's contention that Mexico had shed American blood on American soil and voted for a statement, approved by the House, that declared the war "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President."

Clay and Lincoln objected as strenuously as any member of Congress today to a war launched by a President on fabricated grounds. When Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, defended the President's right to invade another country if he considered it threatening, Lincoln sent a devastating reply. Herndon, he claimed, would allow a President "to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect.... If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him?" The Constitution, he went on, gave the "war-making power" to Congress precisely to prevent Presidents from starting wars while "pretending...that the good of the people was the object."