(FYI: This is a post about the Israel lobby and our public life.)
Lincoln wrote the following brilliant lines in 1858, at the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. This scholar here believes it to be a fragment of a speech. I don't. It seems too self-indulgent/self-pitying to be a speech. I think he is consoling himself on the failure of his own enormous ambition. He'd lost one race for Senate, was about to lose another.
I have never professed an indifference to the honors of official station; and were I to do so now, I should only make myself ridiculous. Yet I have never failed – do not now fail – to remember that in the Republican cause there is a higher aim than that of mere office – I have not allowed myself to forget that the abolition of the Slave-trade by Great Brittain [sic], was agitated a hundred years before it was a final success; that the measure had it’s open fire-eating opponents; it’s stealthy “don’t care” opponents; it’s dollars and cent opponents; it’s inferior race opponents; it’s negro equality opponents; and it’s religion and good order opponents; that all these opponents got offices, and their adversaries got none – But I have also remembered that though they blazed, like tallow-candles for a century, at last they flickered in the socket, died out, stank in the dark for a brief season, and were remembered no more, even by the smell – School-boys know that Wilbe[r]force, and Granville Sharpe, helped that cause forward; but who can now name a single man who labored to retard it? Remembering these things I can not but regard it as possible that the higher object of this contest may not be completely attained within the term of my natural life. But I can not doubt either that it will come in due time. Even in this view, I am proud, in my passing speck of time, to contribute an humble mite to that glorious consummation, which my own poor eyes may not last to see –
Thanks, Phil. Lincoln is justifiably honored so high. "…who can now name a single man who labored to retard it? "
Keep fighting the good fight. Ignore the likes of chris berel, SOG, Suzanne, Thom, etc. Every comment they make defames what they think they stand for–