Lincoln The Impaler

There's been a lot of positive discussion in political circles recently about Abraham Lincoln, so I thought I'd give a digest of just how bad a president this man was.

Lincoln violated the Constitution on many points for the first time, setting a precedent that later presidents followed, thus starting the U.S. down a path of rights violations, government intrusion, free-market destruction and a welfare state. These are some of the direct violations, in which he was the first in history to do so:

1) Suspended habeas corpus, allowing police to hold thousands of people without those people getting to see a judge
2) Initiated conscription, forcing northerners to be in the military, whether they liked it or not
3) Levied an income tax (strictly prohibited in the Constitution)
4) Formed an army to invade the South without Congressional approval – an abuse that George Bush has used
5) Closed down hundreds of newspapers in the North for opposing his ideas
6) Had elected officials arrested (including former congressmen) for opposing his ideas
7) Censored the comments of a former vice president and many others
8) Created government banking that churned out “greenbacks” and devastated American currency
9) Gave the big railroad companies carte blanche on buying up farm land, and had the government fund the railroads
10) Consistently refused in public to denounce slavery, so that he could allegedly save the union (His “Emancipation” also emancipated no blacks in the North or border states)
11) Started a civil war that continued the oppression and terrorism of blacks for another century when economic realities were already starting to make slavery untenable in the South as the North’s industrialization was out-competing the South’s slave-based economy.

I could go on but won’t. The only reason I think Lincoln worse than FDR is that FDR wouldn’t have been possible without Lincoln blazing a fascist trail first. Btw, I’m not an admirer of the South, with its abominable institution of slavery. My point in the above is that Lincoln violated the very essence of the constitution in his attempt to keep the country together, ripping up the fabric of liberty.