Last Thursday marked the 146th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. On the afternoon of November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln dedicated the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with the Civil War still raging, with the definitions of liberty and justice still being drafted in blood and bone. To mark the occasion, Lincoln’s latter-day successor delivered his own version of that address. On the afternoon of November 19, 2009, Barack Obama dedicated a Bud Light in the Rose Garden, with his trip from China just concluded, with the definitions of liberty and justice growing more legislatively and economically perverted by the second. Shoreline Out & About was there and filed this transcript of the President’s comments:

Eleven score and thirteen years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Entitlement, and dedicated to the proposition that all men can be made equal by legislation.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate this administration as a final resting place for those who gave their lives that liberty, initiative, hard work, fair taxation, private industry, and the sovereignty of the united democratic republics that comprise this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we bury that nonsense.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground … yet. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. So, we have to continue to berate and demonize their desire to have their wishes represented by the government. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget that we tried to give everybody everything.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work of government to tell the poor saps who resist what’s good for them. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from the honored history we daily revile and revise, we take increased devotion to absolute power — that we here highly resolve that the bills we’ve fabricated out of whole cloth shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under me, shall have a new birth of totalitarianism — and that government for all things, for all people, for free shall not perish from the earth … except in the places where they’d rather have nukes and terrorism. We’ll be huge pals with the folks in those places.

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