Today the Republican Party decided to mark Abraham Lincoln’s birthday with the following tweet.
Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Lincoln ever uttered or wrote these words. Amazingly, the manager of this twitter account has yet to take the tweet down or issue a correction. It is certainly not the most egregious example of fake history to come down the pike, but it does point to how easy it is to fall for it.
More than likely the quote was pulled without question from a website. One or two critical questions about the quote’s source would have been sufficient to avoid this little embarrassment.
But as long as this tweet is still up we can be guaranteed that it will continue to be passed on by people who extend their trust without a critical eye. That includes the president, who during the campaign admitted, “All I know is what’s on the Internet.”
The manager of the GOP’s twitter account and our president could just as easily shared the following: “And in the end, the love you make is equal to the love you take.”
Help make America great again. Consult with your school librarian and devote just a little time to showing your students how to search and assess information from the Web.
How could anyone believe that Lincoln or any of his contempories would have spouted that sort of Facebook-friendly triteness?
Come on. Get a wife, I mean life. 🙂
It would take a tin ear to think that sounded like anything Lincoln would have said.
Well, close. The actual quote is
And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make
(Sorry–couldn’t resist)
🙂
Lincoln was the 5th Beatle? I thought that was Billy Preston…
C’mon Kevin give credit where credit is due, they did get the right day.
And in other news, the Department of Education tweeted a quote from W. E. B. Du Bois and misspelled his name.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/education-department-misspells-apology-for-misspelling-w-e-b-du-bois-name
Saw that as well. Tough to keep up with this administration. 🙂
And to complete the trifecta:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/library-of-congress-trump-poster-includes-commemorative-typo.html
If only this incompetency were confined to trivial matters. Sigh.
And then they misspelled “apologies” in the first of 2 correction tweets. So little Betsy’s Dept. needed 4 tries to get less than 150 characters right.
OMG! WTF? AL? LOL! (looking for appropriate emoji, but WordPress doesn’t seem to have any)
But what’s way worse is that if Lincoln were alive today he’d be anything but a Republican. He’d be either a Democrat or perhaps an independent. He was much too liberal to be a modern Republican.
I am not even sure Ronald Reagan would be welcomed into today’s Republican Party.