It's a Monday -- Why Not?

It's a Monday in mid-February, and AFSCME can deliver votes for a fee -- so it must be time for another crap "holiday." Here we go:

Abraham Lincoln comes in first again in C-SPAN's second Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership -- an index that takes the views of 65 presidential historians and ranks the 42 former presidents according to 10 "attributes of leadership."

Ah, yes, good old Dishonest Abe, the tyrant who had no trouble closing newspapers, imprisoning political opponents, and spilling oceans of American blood to "save the union" -- in the form of a continent-sized prison, but who's quibbling? Father Abraham declared free those slaves that he had no power to free, carefully and explicitly not freeing the ones that he did have the power to free. To his dying day, he dreamed of shipping all the former slaves to Africa, to Central American colonies -- anywhere outside the United States. Here's the Great Emancipator on race relations, from one of his debates with Stephen Douglas:

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything."

But it really doesn't matter ... the great thing is that there's no mail delivery today, and that our public servants masters will have a day's leisure in which to contemplate, and be inspired by, Our Glorious Leaders of the Past. Huzzah!