Comrade "Honest Abe"
Abraham Lincoln was called many things: Honest Abe. The Rail-Splitter. The Great Emancipator. Lawyer. Orator. Statesman. Peacemaker.
Marxist?
Lincoln established the Federal income tax in 1861. What's more, he used the power of what's called "transparency" nowadays to ensure that people paid their taxes, by making taxation records public for everyone. (Wonder what Mitt Romney thinks about that?)
Lincoln's tax was progressive, too, starting at a 3 percent tax rate for earnings of $600 and above and rising to 5 percent for earnings above $10,000. Very few people earned $600 per year back then, so yes: It was a tax on the rich. Why, it almost sounds like Honest Abe held "views that replicate failed European countries about redistribution of wealth, you know, and all these failed policies."
We can almost picture the Rail-Splitter saying to the millionaires of his day: That railroad over there? You didn't build that. I did.
Quotations From Chairman Abe...
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.""Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."
"I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it." (That one's gotta sting Romney a little too.)
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
Comrade "W"
George W. Bush stood shoulder to shoulder with Republican House Speaker Denny Hastert and signed a $286.4 billion infrastructure bill.
That alone makes him too Red for today's conservatives. But his rhetoric was even more subversive: "If we want people working in America, we got to make sure our highways and roads are modern. We've got to bring up this transportation system into the 21st century."
Bush expressed these Comintern-style sentiments while dressed as a proper proletarian: no shirt or jacket, collar open and sleeves rolled up. As he triumphantly shook hands with Hastert outside a quonset manufacturing building, they might have been posing for the cover of Soviet Life.
It gets worse. "I mean," said Bush, "you can't expect your farmers to be able to get goods to market if we don't have a good road system. You can't expect to get these Caterpillar products all around the United States if we don't have a good road system."
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