Today’s sign of doom for the republic — Phillip Klinkner at Polysigh notes that some attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference were upset about Rudy Giuliani’s praise of Abraham Lincoln:

In interviews afterward, some attendees said Mr. Giuliani lost momentum when he heaped lavish praise on Abraham Lincoln.

While many conservatives regard the Civil War president as the spiritual founder of the Republican Party, others deeply resent him as a man who ruthlessly suspended constitutional rights and freedoms in order to militarily challenge the South’s belief in its right to secede. Some saw similar disdain for individuals’ rights in Mr. Giuliani’s successful war on crime in New York City.

Update 3/6 9:51 PM: A friend asks if I’m saying Lincoln should be beyond criticism — I can see how the post can be read that way, and it’s not what I meant to imply.

To clarify, here’s what Giuliani actually said.

We’re all different religions. And we’re all different races.

Since we’re not identified that way, what identifies us as Americans? The thing that identifies us as Americans are our ideas. And our ideas are wonderful ideas. And they’re ideas that the world is moving toward.

Ronald Reagan understood that. He understood that and he was able, therefore, to make very difficult decisions and to stick with them even when they were unpopular.

I remember when he deployed the cruise missiles and pointed them at the Soviets. Very, very unpopular. ABC did a documentary about the end of the world when he did that.

And then I remember when he walked out of Reykjavik — very, very unpopular.

A typical politician wouldn’t have done either of those two things. Maybe even a typical president wouldn’t have done either of those two things, because they made him unpopular. His unfavorability went up; his favorability went down.

So why did he make those decisions? He made those decisions because he could consult something broader than just public opinion. He could consult a set of ideas, a set of principles, a set of goals. And he could say: Well, right now public opinion actually isn’t correct.

Abraham Lincoln had to do the same thing during the Civil War. The Civil War was very, very unpopular. Draft riots in New York in 1863. Three generals that turned out to be failures.

Lincoln was viewed by many, many people as an incompetent president. The war took too long.

Well, Abraham Lincoln actually didn’t have to listen to polls on CNN. They didn’t have them then.

But I suspect, even if they did have polls on CNN, and ABC and NBC, Abraham Lincoln would have made exactly the same decision, which is: It’s my goal to keep this union together. It’s my goal to end slavery in order to extend freedom. And I’m not going to cave in to the immediate pressure of public opinion because, if I do and we end this war and we entreat frustration, we’re going to have two separate countries and they’re going to go to war with each other who knows how many times in the future and we’re going to lose a lot more lives.

It’s fine to criticize Lincoln’s suspension of civil liberties in principle (though I’m not a historian and don’t know enough about the Civil War to evaluate the wisdom of his decision). But I mocked the passage from the Washington Times because it smacks of anti-Lincoln agitprop from the neo-Confederate wing of the hard right. Giuliani didn’t get up at CPAC and praise Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus; he praised Lincoln’s determination to persevere in the Civil War.

To put it a different way, do liberals get upset about the Japanese internment whenever a Democrat offers general praise for FDR? No, because they still view Roosevelt as one of our greatest presidents on balance. Somehow I’m suspicious that the people the Washington Times talked to are really mad at Lincoln about civil liberties. Remember, this is a newspaper that is edited by racists…