I am not a Republican. Not everyone who is a conservative thinker is a Republican. I try to apply libertarian principles to political questions because I don't believe in anyone opposing their will on others. I can't name a president we had in the past 100 years that I approve of. And obviously I don't claim Lincoln. I can't speak to who reveres who more or less than other people. Actually one of the curious things about all of the presidential rankings is they don't largely differ between the political parties. They seem mirror what is taught in school. Lincoln and FDR always fall in the top three or five. Harding and Nixon are always at the bottom. But what does anyone actually know about Harding? I'll guarantee they don't know about the 1920-21 recession that only lasted a matter of months because the Harding administration kept its hands off and let it run its course. Remember this was less than 10 years prior to the Crash of '29 and subsequent Depression, which was the most protracted in history at the same time that it was the most regulated by the government. The New Deal was a disaster, and it's never called out for what it was. A fascist experiment that mirrored what was going on in Germany and Italy at the time. Sounds kinda like what's going on right now actually.

Outsidelookin really hates the presidents who took the fight to the Nazis and slave-owners.


Coincidence?

Why stop there? Why not go after all of the "bad people" on the planet? Why were these the so-called good wars but anytime the same standard is applied to Saddam Hussein we get the old argument that he was no threat to us? Which I wholeheartedly agree with. But the standard must be applied the same way across the board. Why did we fight the Nazis? They didn't attack us, and we didn't know all the bad shit they were into until after the fact. Why don't we attack the Sudanese, they've been murdering and raping for years now. Why not the Soviet Union? They made the Nazis look like pussycats with all the people they wasted. Why not China? How many cases of modern-day slavery need to be uncovered in that country before we invade. Could it possibly be that BS reasons for these wars have been cooked up and served to you by the government-controlled propaganda centers/educational system so you don't question how your government built its empire?

OutsideLookingIn:

You're right to mythbust the "good war" myths that have been built up over the two most important conflicts our country has faced since independence was assured. To answer the question about why we fought the Nazis: We declared war on Germany in WW2 after it declared war on us (Dec. 11, I think, 1941) under the terms of its alliance with Japan, which we declared war on (December 8) after their suprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Lincoln's goal in the Civil War was to preserve the Union, and I think in hindsight he did well to do so. While the U.S. would have survived in the short term without the seceding states, the precedent would have been set for other states to leave over who knows what--- notably the four slave states that did not secede. Thinking about other divisive issues in our history since then, we could be certain that the U.S. would not exist in 2009, except perhaps as a rump-state alliance.

Lincoln did suspend habeas corpus. He also instituted our first draft and supported his generals' "scorched earth" campaigns. It's also clear that no law prohibited the Confederate states from seceding. Indeed, the war itself began when CSA forces attacked a US Army fort (inside Confederate territory). As for the Emancipation Proclamation, it is a standard law of war that an occupying invader has jurisdiction over the territory it occupies. The fact that it only applied to rebel territory, and that it only came into effect many months after its signing, shows that its main goal was to punish the Confederacy, not to push for freedom.

It's not just the leaders' misdeeds we've swept under the rug... it's the soldiers' war crimes as well--- the pillaging, rape, murder, and prisoner mistreatment. These weren't systematic like they were in the Japanese Army, but they were widespread, as you might expect if you gave a million young men guns and let them loose. If only 1% in that million commit an atrocity, you've still got 10,000 atrocities.

As for the government-controlled education... the myths that arose from the Civil War and World War 2 were not government creations, but societal ones. It only makes sense that a country's education system--- public or private--- reflect the values of that country's society. For instance, the losing myth of the Civil War, the noble lost cause, was certainly not created by government. No matter what these myths' origins are, they can be damaging. A good bit of the unpopularity of the Vietnam war stemmed from comparing it to the "good" war the previous generation had fought.