From the fever swamps of the conservatives at The Corner, we get a bizarre argument that Thoreau wouldn't have liked Obama.
When Obama hearkened back to Thoreau’s day to promote lavish government spending:
In the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry. From the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution came a system of public high schools that prepared our citizens for a new age. In the wake of war and depression, the GI Bill sent a generation to college and created the largest middle-class in history. And a twilight struggle for freedom led to a nation of highways, an American on the moon, and an explosion of technology that still shapes our world.
[Obama] broke with Thoreau, who wrote:
Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. . . Government does not educate.
link
Huh?
Thoreau wrote the words quoted in 1846, 14 years before Lincoln was elected and certainly not "in the midst of the civil war."
Furthermore, much of what Thoreau said about what government did and did not do at the time he wrote was true -- but has absolutely nothing to do with what government did in Lincoln's time and beyond.
In 1846, it was true that "government does not educate." Now -- we have much higher levels of literacy and education as a result of government run and funded education.
We cannot know what Thoreau, who was in jail because he did not want to pay taxes to support the Mexican war and slavery would say about life today. What The Corner has done is like holding a seance to call forth a figure from the past to speak to issues that were not issues in his time and in a context that simply does not apply. It is as they want to pretend that Thoreau was an Ayn Rand acolyte, a right wing tax resister -- and not someone who withheld his taxes because he hated making people into property that could be bought and sold and because he was against an unnecessary foreign war.
Sure, this isn't as clearly hysterical or obviously a fail like Jindal's speech, but it is yet another demonstration of intellectual dishonesty among conservatives.