At an event in Iowa Monday, President Obama explained that venomous political rhetoric is nothing new in American history, noting "Lincoln -- they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me." Judging by the immediate and furious reaction from the conservative commentariat, right-wingers are none too happy about Obama's passing Lincoln analogy. After all, the comparison to Abraham Lincoln is one Republicans reserved for George W. Bush, and President Bush for himself.
It was Byron York's reporting of Obama's remark on the stump which prompted conservative apoplexy:

"When you listen to what the Federalists said about the Anti-Federalists, and the names that Jefferson called Hamilton and back and forth -- I mean those guys were tough," Obama said. "Lincoln -- they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me. So democracy has never been for the faint of heart."

That was more than John Hinderaker of the Power Line blog could handle. "If a narcissist like Obama were capable of shame," Hinderaker raged, "This would be an appropriate time to show it." Of course, when George W. Bush (a man Hinderaker once compared to an underappreciated artist possessing "extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius") presented himself as Honest Abe, the Republican amen corner cheered.
For his part, George W. Bush is quick to identify himself with the Great Emancipator. In August 2006, the White House with great fanfare announced that Bush would be reading two Lincoln biographies during his upcoming vacation at his Crawford ranch. At the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2005, Bush defended both his faith-based initiative and the struggle in Iraq by analogy to Lincoln:

In November 1864, after being reelected to his second term, Lincoln declared he would be the most "shallow and self-conceited blockhead" on Earth if he ever thought he could do his job "without the wisdom which comes from God and not from men." Throughout a terrible Civil War, he issued many exhortations to prayer, calling upon the American people to humble themselves before their Maker and to serve all those in need.

Not content to rest there, President Bush argued that he and Lincoln did not merely serve as commanders-in-chief during times of crisis, but presided over a new American religious awakening in their times. As the Washington Post detailed in September 2006, Bush told a group of conservative journalists that in this sense, too, he was Lincoln's heir:

President Bush said yesterday that he senses a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as "a confrontation between good and evil"...
...Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln's strongest supporters were religious people "who saw life in terms of good and evil" and who believed that slavery was evil. Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms.

(That's a far cry from Lincoln's message in the Second Inaugural, an address with which President Bush should be well acquainted. Bush, after all, in the summer of 2006 claimed to have read Ronald C. White's excellent analysis, Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural. In his March 1865 plea to the American people for national reconciliation with their Southern brothers, Lincoln cautioned that "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other" and that "The Almighty has His own purposes." Bush must have skipped that part.)
Back in September 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice introduced the shockingly inappropriate Civil War analogy to defend President Bush's stay the course strategy in Iraq:

"I'm sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold," Rice said in the new issue of Essence magazine.
"I know there were people who said, 'Why don't we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves?'" Rice said.

Vice President Dick Cheney tried the same ploy in March 2008. In an interview with ABC's Martha Raddatz on the five year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Vice President Cheney scoffed at polls suggesting overwhelming opposition to the war. In response, Cheney presented the quagmire in Iraq as comparable to the American Civil War, and President Bush as a modern day Abraham Lincoln:

"No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. Think about what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had paid attention to polls, if they had had polls during the Civil War. He never would have succeeded if he hadn't had a clear objective, a vision for where he wanted to go, and he was willing to withstand the slings and arrows of the political wars in order to get there. And this President has been very courageous, very consistent, very determined to continue down the course we were on and to achieve our objective."

The parallels, of course, are laughable. The Civil War saw the Union confronted with a threat to its very existence. After a total mobilization of men and resources, the North completely defeated and occupied the devastated South after a conflict that claimed over 600,000 American lives.
But that didn't stop President Bush himself and his conservative water carriers from equating Dubya with Honest Abe. As ThinkProgress noted, "the list of conservatives who have sought to frame Bush as Lincoln is long; it includes Newt Gingrich, John Gibson, David Brooks, and Rudy Giuliani." In February 2008, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales during an address at Washington University "repeatedly made references comparing himself and the Bush administration to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, suggesting that Lincoln was highly criticized during his presidency and is now highly revered." And in January 2008, Fox News reporter Bret Baier portrayed Bush as a latter day Lincoln during the network's comically hagiographic special, "George W. Bush: Fighting to the Finish":

"We talked a lot about President Lincoln. And there's going to be a lot of people out there who watch this hour and say, is he trying to equate himself with Lincoln?
I tell you what - he thinks about Lincoln and the tough times that he had during the Civil War. 600,000 dead. The country essentially hated him when he was leaving office.
And the President reflects on that. This is a President who is really reflecting on his place in history."

(That Lincoln didn't "leave office" but was instead assassinated just one month after his second inaugural is one of the more humorous errors produced by Fox News in its efforts to rewrite history on behalf of President Bush and the Republican Party.)
As President Bush prepared to exit stage right in January 2009, the right-wing echo chamber kept up the effort to anoint him as the 21st century Abraham Lincoln. As inauguration day approached for Bush's Democratic successor, Sean Hannity announced, "In Your America tonight, Barack Obama is doing everything he can to convince Americans that he is the rightful inheritor of Abraham Lincoln's legacy." That was impossible, Richard Connor explained at CQ, because:

"History may see Lincoln-like greatness in George W. Bush."

Back at Powerline, John Hinderaker fumes, "Obama: I'm just like Lincoln." Of course, on June 25, 2004, Hinderaker was angrier still:

"It's hard for me to see how President Bush can withstand the current hate campaign against him. No American public figure, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, has ever been subjected to such a vicious, unprincipled assault."

Or as he put it a year earlier after President Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, "Yeah, we've had better leaders," adding. "Their names were Washington and Lincoln. And maybe Roosevelt."