This week’s Liberal Media Scream features a noted presidential historian drawing a direct line between Republicans who seek sensible voting reform expansion to Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
On CNN to plug her Presidents Day book on Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin Sunday showed again how unhinged liberals are on the matter of ballot reform, even proposals advanced by Republican governors and legislatures to make it easier to vote than in President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware.
Goodwin made the connection by suggesting that the last speech Booth heard from Lincoln, a Republican, was one calling for giving blacks the right to vote.
Lincoln, she said, hoped to extend the right to vote to “African Americans who had fought in the war. He then loses his life because that speech was where John Wilkes Booth heard him give that speech and decided now it’s time to kill him.”
Drawing parallels to today, she charged, “Here we are, 150 years later, and there are people in the country now trying to get the idea that voting rights should be pulled back, rather than pushed forward.”
Goodwin during on Sunday’s CNN Newsroom With Fredricka Whitfield:
“I think the most important lesson that Lincoln provides for us today is on that larger challenge of the big crisis of, is our democracy in peril? In the first days of the Civil War, he said, right then, the central idea they had to fight was if the minority that loses an election, as the South did, could decide to break up the Union simply because they wouldn’t accept the peaceful transition of power, it would prove that democracy was an absurdity. And that’s why that war had to be fought right from the beginning. In the last speech he makes before he dies, just a few days before he dies, is talking about extending the right to vote to African Americans who had fought in the war. He then loses his life because that speech was where John Wilkes Booth heard him give that speech and decided now it’s time to kill him.
“And here we are, 150 years later, and there are people in the country now trying to get the idea that voting rights should be pulled back, rather than pushed forward, people unclear about what happened in that election and claiming that an election fairly won was not fairly won. This is the fight that we have to be fighting. I think Lincoln would tell him, ‘This is your fight right now. Voting rights is central.’”
Brent Baker, vice president of research and publications for the Media Research Center, explains our weekly pick: “That’s some unhinged hyperbole, arguing those who prefer 10 days to 12 days of early voting, or are part of the majority of all races who support voter identification, are on a moral par with a pro-slavery murderer who wanted to deny basic human rights based on race.”
Rating: FIVE out of FIVE SCREAMS.
