For crying out loud.

Christian Science Monitor:

‘Fiscal cliff’ meeting at White House: Will it be ‘Lincoln’ moment for Obama?

Many Senate Republicans say that with Congress deadlocked on averting the fiscal cliff, it is up to Obama to force a deal. The lesson from the movie ‘Lincoln,’ they say, is ‘the president has to lead.’

Bloomberg News:

Obama’s Lincoln Legacy

The predecessor that President Barack Obama most often channels is Abraham Lincoln.

Despite obvious differences — Lincoln was a Republican and was born more than 150 years before Obama — there are striking similarities. They are the only two presidents from Illinois, though neither was born there.

As the historian Garry Wills said when Obama was first elected president: “Both came onto the national stage as an outsider, without the customary credentials and connections of national politics.”

Lauren Thompson at Newsbusters has chronicled the media’s contrived notions of Obama = Lincoln:

In the run-up to Obama’s re-election and in the weeks since, as the movie “Lincoln,” opened, the media have hyped similarities between the two presidents. It’s helpful to them that the film is a product of high-profile liberal Steven Spielberg and associated with Participant Media, the same lefty company that produced Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”

On NPR on Nov. 30, sparring with the New York Times’ David Brooks over the “fiscal cliff,” E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post compared Obama’s zealous insistence on raising taxes to Lincoln’s abolitionism. When Brooks offered the “Lincoln” movie’s depiction of effective presidential negotiations, Dionne wasn’t having it. “Lincoln stood his ground on the fundamental principle that we needed the 13th Amendment and needed to ban slavery,” he said. “In fact, he was willing to have a Civil War on that question …”

MSNBC has particularly run with the theme. NBC Chief Political Correspondent Howard Fineman likened Obama to the Lincoln Memorial. “What Barack Obama was saying is, I was elected on the idea of hope. I was elected as a symbol, just like the statue of Abraham Lincoln on the Mall,” Fineman said.

MSNBC commentator and profession rabble-rouser Al Sharpton amped up his praise for Obama and offered more negative rhetoric toward conservatives.

On the Nov. 8 broadcast of “Politics Nation,” Sharpton gushed, “Becoming the 44^th president of the United States or even the first African-American president to hold the post has never been enough for Barack Obama. He spoke unabashedly of becoming one of the greatest presidents, a transformative figure like Abraham Lincoln.”

It makes a certain amount of sense, considering that a few days earlier, Sharpton had compared the Republican party to Confederate slave owners. But MSNBC has never missed an opportunity to associate today’s conservative movement with the Confederacy, secession, slavery and racism in the past.

Sharpton and MSNBC guest Ana Maria Cox belittled Republicans over state voter ID laws. “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863,” Sharpton said. “This is 2012. Somebody might want to tell them to find some Republicans at least this century. Maybe last century. This is ridiculous.”

Enough.

I guess when Obama has no real accomplishments of his own, the media finds it must associate him with a consequential historical figure in the hopes that some of the shine will rub off on him.

Lauren Thompson gets it exactly right:

One was a self-educated rail-splitter and circuit lawyer in humble frontier towns. The other is an Ivy League-educated radical who only ventured out from his comfortable Hyde Park digs for some day work stirring up trouble as a “community organizer.”

This is yet another example of the propaganda reminiscent of the heady old days of the Cold War and the USSR and what is currently produced in places like Venezuela and North Korea to glorify Dear Leader and validate his position. It’s bullshit. Obama isn’t remotely like Lincoln – he is the antithesis of Lincoln. If there is a parallel to be drawn it is more accurate to compare him to Woodrow Wilson…Wilson was a lawyer who never held a real job outside academia and politics – just like Obama.

Obama clearly exhibits the same disdain for the Constitution that Wilson did. Obama shows the same distaste for dissent that Wilson did when Wilson pushed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 through Congress to suppress anti-British, pro-German, or anti-war opinions. Obama only wishes that he could round up his opposition like Wilson did in the Palmer Raids.

Lest we forget, Lincoln was president as the Civil War raged, when an advancing army was within a cannon shot of Washington and had driven all the way into Pennsylvania.

Perhaps the media is foretelling the future.