With Barack Obama's inauguration just days away, the conservative commentariat is outraged about comparisons between the 44th president and the 16th, Abraham Lincoln. The true successor to the Great Emancipator, the right-wing noise machine continues to insist, is George W. Bush. And as it turns out, no one has made that comical analogy more frequently - or forcefully - than Bush himself.
Over at CQ, guest columnist Richard Connor is just the latest to echo the right-wing line that "history may see Lincoln-like greatness in George W. Bush." Meanwhile, as ThinkProgress detailed, many among the usual suspects in the Republican amen corner cited Obama's repeated references to Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals" as proof that he seeks to usurp Lincoln's mantle. The always execrable Glenn Beck deemed "amazing" that Obama inauguration festivities include a "Lincolnesque celebration." But it was left to Sean Hannity and conservative author Larry Schweikart to fully regurgitate the Obama-as-false-Lincoln hysteria:

HANNITY: And 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.
SCHWEIKART: Lincoln, though, had a war to deal with. Obama doesn't. Lincoln is known as the great emancipator. If Obama spends money the way he's planning to, he'll be known as the great incarcerator because we're all going to end up in debtor's prison.

But even as President Bush's political allies wage their war to deny Barack Obama as a natural heir to Lincoln, their campaign to equate Dubya's adventure in Iraq with Honest Abe's victory in the Civil War has been underway for over two years.
Over the course of its six-year fiasco in Iraq, the Bush administration in vain has long tried to sell the conflict by referencing glorious American wars past. Its revisionist history has included failed parallels to the American Revolution, World War II, Korea, the Cold War and even Vietnam. Then in March, Vice President Cheney joined Condi Rice, a host of Republican talking heads and President Bush himself in a conservative chorus comparing the calamity in Iraq to the U.S. Civil War. And in that ever-growing White House tall tale, of course, George W. Bush is Abraham Lincoln.
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.

This spring, Dick Cheney tried it again. 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:

RADDATZ: Let me go back to the Americans. Two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting, and they're looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: So?
RADDATZ: So -- you don't care what the American people think?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: 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.
In Iraq, the United States instead plays referee in someone else's civil war, a sectarian conflict in which American national survival is not in jeopardy. As I previously suggested, there would be no - and could be no - fight to the finish when even the definition of "victory" itself remained elusive.
But that didn't stop President Bush himself and his conservative water carriers from the propagating the Dubya as Honest Abe myth. 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, 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 last January, 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.)
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 has 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 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 "The Almighty has His own purposes." Bush must have skipped that part.
For his part, Barack Obama hasn't been subtle in looking to Lincoln for inspiration and comparisons. Obama's victory speech in November, after all, cited Lincoln's admonition in his First Inaugural ("We are not enemies, but friends -- though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection") in placing himself on a continuum of expanding American freedom running from Lincoln through Dr. King. And on January 20, Barack Obama will take the oath of office with his hand on the same bible used by Abraham Lincoln in 1861.
Of course, the jury is still out on Barack Obama, a man who has yet to enter the White House. But for President Bush, the verdict is already in. Iraq is not the U.S. Civil War. And to be sure, George W. Bush is no Abraham Lincoln.