Posted by
David C. Innes on Wednesday, October 07, 2009 8:39:27 PM
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) speaks homespun common sense in good
midwest American fashion here in his opening statement on the currently
proposed health care reform legislation. Let the Congressman have the floor. Click
here.
He's eloquent. He's sincere. He quotes Lincoln ("You
can't make a weak man strong by making a strong man weak.")
Of course, I was curious as to the source of this Lincoln
quote, so I went searching. It does not appear that Honest Abe wrote these
words, although they have been attributed to him for many years. Snopes traces
it to a Presbyterian minister named William John Henry Boetcker who was the
director of the Citizens' Industrial Alliance when he penned these truisms in
1916. The theory goes that they were later published on the back of a leaflet
of genuine Lincoln quotes and the confusion was inevitable. Nonetheless, the
ideas are Lincolnian.
Ronald Reagan quoted these pearls of wisdom at the
1992
Republican National Convention, and attributed them to Lincoln.
"I
heard those speakers at that other convention saying "we won the Cold
War" -- and I couldn't help wondering, just who exactly do they mean by
"we"? And to top it off, they even tried to portray themselves as
sharing the same fundamental values of our party! What they truly don't
understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: "You
cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the
wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying
the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and
should do for themselves." If we ever hear the Democrats quoting that
passage by Lincoln and acting like they mean it, then, my friends, we will know
that the opposition has really changed."
This clip does not include the spuriously attributed Lincoln
line (it follows just after), but it is well worth the five minute investment
to watch it.
You
can read the full text of the speech here.