Garry Wills on Obama and Lincoln

It looks as if I am not the only one comparing Obama’s Tucson speech to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.  Check out this blog post from Garry Wills at the New York Review of Books:

Lincoln might have been expected in his Second Inaugural Address to trumpet the gains of the North and the setbacks to the South. Instead, he invited all Americans to grieve for the tragic war and to share blame for the historical crime of slavery. God “gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.” Death should forge a bond among the living. “The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better.” Obama stepped around the obvious and divisive sifting of wrongs done, to urge the doing of right.  

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LONG FORM: Frederick Douglass and the Challenge of Seeing Clearly On the slaveholder Jonathan Edwards and the Christians who read him Virtually every thing Jack Hibbs says in this video about Washington at Valley Forge is wrong “Societal Collapse Is in the Air—Or It Smells Like It”