For the Rank-and-File Liberal, this was my Rosetta Stone for understanding them.

Sadly, the formula is different for understanding Liberals who wield the power from behind the blind of their media.

Very different. :(

With all due respect, the Lincoln quotation is wrong. The text is actually this:

"If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

That's from his first significant speech, January 27, 1838: "Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois". It's in "Speeches and Writings", Volume I, page 29, and "Collected Works", Volume I, page 109; it appeared originally in the Sangamo Journal, February 3, 1838.

http://weblog.theviewfromthecore.com/2009_01/ind_005659.html

It's more important to destroy the GOP Establishment than which Party wins the next election. Until the GOP Establishment removes it's tentacles from around the throat of the only possible opposition to the Commie-Lib agenda the GOP nominee will guarantee the Commie-Lib agenda is advanced.

Breaking the GOPe isn't something to be done AFTER the election. Voters only have power and leverage BEFORE the election, actually during Primaries. Many Republican voters' highest priority is make sure ANYONE with an R is elected. No matter how many times the GOP stabs them in the back, they think this time will be different. These people give Battered Wives a bad name. They side with their tormentor No. Matter. What.

And Lincoln did his very best to destroy America from within, starting a civil war that cost 700,000 American lives. And for some reason historians thinks he ranks only behind Washington in greatness. Lincoln was the worst president America has ever had, by so much that it is not even sensible to talk of who was second-worst.

And 30% of Americans would be just fine with this
http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/09/one-third-of-americans-would-be-fine-with-the-military-taking-over

Scott M: I agree

"I doubt the efficacy of teaching, though it's noble indeed to attempt it.
Witness the enormous learning, wit, and insight of so many wonderful bloggers whose voices can now be heard.
Still, as entertaining as their efforts are, it seems to me that the effect of their work in defeating the liberal, grifter enemy is marginal."

Colonel B. Bunny http://igst.blogspot.com/

@Donald S. 9-15-15
Yes, and do you suppose the Federal government bombarded their own Fort Sumter to start the violence, following Southern state's seizure of federal property.
Yes, and do you suppose the federals welcomed the expansion of slavery to the territories.
True though that the federals unfairly disbursed tariffs among the states -- reason enough for the South to develop their own manufacturing had they not spent their time playing vampire preying on their slaves' labor and lives.
The South could have simply seceded via their 10th Amendment right, and built their own trade relations with other countries. But no, greed and miscalculation by the South produced the unCivil War.

"If we falter, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

Mark that one nearly complete.

THEN, we will be destroyed from the outside in, like rust on old iron.

They're already replacing our military leaders with pussified Generals.

To Howard Nelson -

South Carolina had already LEGALLY seceded in December 1860. The feds were warned repeatedly to leave and the fort was bombarded only after Lincoln announced his plans to resupply.

Lincoln was a traitor to the US Constitution.

I've observed a lot of learned discourse on the Civil War from some pretty knowledgeable commenters. Feedback in proletarian terms would be appreciated.

Apparently the Tenth Amendment does not expressly permit secession.

“The Tenth Amendment was intended to confirm the understanding of the people at the time the Constitution was adopted,
that powers not granted to the United States were reserved to the States or to the people.
It added nothing to the instrument as originally ratified.” – United States v. Sprague, 282 U.S. 716, 733 (1931).

This from https://thegooddemocrat.wordpress.com/2007/05/22/there-is-no-right-of-secession-guaranteed-by-the-constitution/
That the American Republic was both federal and national was the dominant view among statesmen of the antebellum period. For instance, in his reply to Calhoun on Feb. 16, 1833, Daniel Webster observed that the state conventions, including that of South Carolina, did not accede to a league or association when they approved the Constitution, but ratified and confirmed that Constitution as a form of government.

Andrew Jackson made the same point in his “Proclamation to the People of South Carolina” during the nullification crisis.
The Constitution, said Jackson, derives its whole authority from the people, not the States.
The States “retained all the power they did not grant. But each State, having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute, jointly with the other States, a single nation, can not, from that period, possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of a nation.” And Madison, who presumably knew something about the constitutional theory of the American Founding, was horrified by the idea that the coordinate sovereignty retained by the States, as stated in the Tenth Amendment, implied the power of nullification, interposition, or secession.

So my limited comprehension indicates to me that any state in this day and age cannot secede.

from http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-secession-legal/

Can a state legally secede from the Union? Many, including Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, suggest no.
In a 2006 letter Scalia argued that a the question was not in the realm of legal possibility because
1) the United States would not be party to a lawsuit on the issue
2) the “constitutional” basis of secession had been “resolved by the Civil War,” and
3) there is no right to secede, as the Pledge of Allegiance clearly illustrates through the line “one nation, indivisible.”

Scalia is not the first Supreme Court justice to establish this position.
In the case of Texas v. White in 1869, Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase wrote that, “The union between Texas and the other states was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original states.
There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.”
The majority opinion struck down the Texas Ordinance of Secession, calling it “null,” and crafted a decision that rendered all acts of secession illegal according to the “perpetual union” of both the Articles of Confederation and subsequent Constitution for the United States.
Chase did leave an opening, “revolution or the consent of the States,” but without either, secession could never be considered a legal act.

All this comes down to: Congress or The Supreme Court are the only bodies with the power to grant or deny secession.

Chas,

I hope you noticed:

the “constitutional” basis of secession had been “resolved by the Civil War” - or in other words, victory by conquest.

One should remember the cost of 700,000 killed and 600,000 maimed.

We should also remember what Winston Churchill said, - "History is written (or spun) by the victors"

It was indeed Lincoln's war and many agree it was unnecessary and that the slavery issue could have been resolved without violence as it was in many other places in the world.

http://www.bonniebluepublishing.com/The%20Right%20of%20Secession.htm