Civil War Analogy of the Day

"With its paranoid misreading of Obama as a socialist (echoing the 1860 South's misreading of Lincoln as an abolitionist), with its zeal for confrontation and its utter disregard, evident in its 2012 budget proposal, for the minority poor, today's Republican right betrays a mind-set that hearkens back to the secessionists who fired on Fort Sumter. Shutting down the government isn't comparable to shooting it down, of course, but the South's war on egalitarian government and labor standards threatens to diminish our country." -- Harold Meyerson in today's Kaplan Daily, discussing the grounds on which the Civil War is still being fought: whether Northern or Southern labor systems and versions of government will become the national norm. Read it.