Since so many wingnuts want to paint objections to the disaster in Iraq as unpatriotic, it’s time to remember that anti-war traitor A. Lincoln, congressman from Illinois, who in December 1847, sponsored a resolution requiring President Polk to provide the House with “all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed, was, or was not, our own soil.”
According to David Herbert Donald in Lincoln (1995):
In the manner of a prosecuting attorney, he demanded that the President inform the Congress whether that spot had ever been part of Texas and whether its inhabitants had ever “submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas, …by consent, or by compulsion, either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying taxes, or serving on juries, or…in any other way. ” Lincoln clearly intended to show that the American army had begun the war by making an unprovoked attack on a Mexican settlement, despite the fact that “Genl. Taylor had, more than once, intimated to the War Department that…no such movement was necessary to the defence or protection of Texas.”
Thanks to Political Animal for the reminder.