Ohio Gov. John Kasich Criticizes Obama Tax Plan With Phony Lincoln Quote

John Kasich repeats apocryphal Lincoln quote on "Fox News Sunday" Jan. 25. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/john-kasich-cites-fake-lincoln-quote-on-fox/
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Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), a possible contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, invoked a dubious Abraham Lincoln quote while criticizing President Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the wealthy during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

“You cannot build a little guy up by tearing a big guy down,” Kasich said. “Abraham Lincoln said it then, and he’s right.”

The problem is, Lincoln never said it. The line comes from a pamphlet published in 1916, according to the website PunditFact.

The pamphlet, written by the prominent minister William J. H. Boetcker, included several authentic Lincoln quotes alongside what PunditFact describes “a collection of [Boetcker’s] personal truisms largely centered on the benefits of laissez-faire capitalism.”

In fact, PunditFact noted, Lincoln signed the first federal income tax into law in 1861—and the tax was progressive. The fact-checking organization rated Kasich’s statement as “Pants on Fire.”

Watch below:

h/t Mediaite

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Notable Replies

  1. FACTS?!?!? We don’t need no stinking FACTS! We are Republicans! We create our OWN reality.

  2. A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

  3. A Republican making up shit? That’s unpossible.

  4. Actual quote from Lincoln’s first State of the Union message, delivered* December 2, 1861:

    It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

    Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

    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. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation.

    Suck it Republicans. If he saw what his party had become, he’d have left it faster than Jefferson Davis left Richmond in 1865.

    Also, too, ALIW.

    *Literally “delivered.” Presidents sent the SOTU to Congress in writing in lieu of making it into a speech before a joint session in those days.

  5. potent stuff. thanks.

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