MRS. SCHIAVO AND MR. LINCOLN: As everyone who watches C-Span knows, although everyone may be too strong an adjective to describe C-Span's audience, implying as it does a potential viewership high in the double digits, members of the House of Representatives may revise and extend their remarks when those remarks are published in the Congressional Record, a practice that once led my government documents professor to call the Congressional Record the longest ongoing work of fiction in the history of literature. Since the only federal office Abraham Lincoln ever held before his election to the Presidency, if you exclude his time as a postmaster, was as a one term Representative from Illionois, I am going to revise a set of his remarks in light of what is happening in Florida. (A news flash here: in case you haven't heard, Terri Schiavo died this morning)

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read in “all men are created equal, except the unborn.” When the liberals and the ACLU get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except the unborn, and the infirm and the religious of all faiths.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to North Korea, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.