I’ll be short tonight, I’m afraid. I have a dentist appointment coming up (God bless a dentist who schedules evening hours!), with all the gladness and merriment inherent therein.

By way of The View From the Foothills, here’s a neat little utility to clean up your computer desktop.

Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Although he’s one of the great heroes of my life, I’ve gotten into the habit of arguing against him in recent years. For instance, I consider his constitutional argument extremely weak.

And yet…

And yet, he operated from a transcendent vision of America. He truly believed that this country was the laboratory of the future, that a better world was being created in these states. Nothing, he believed, should be permitted to destroy what was being done here. Slavery was a double threat, first because it made a mockery of the American vision, and second, because it was a political threat to national unity and purpose. Abolitionists derided him as a weakling because he wasn’t prepared to go straight in and get it abolished. He preferred a gradual, peaceful approach. That approach became impossible, and so he made the fateful decision to go to war to preserve the Union.

He himself was the living embodiment of the American dream. He’d been born in a dirt-floored cabin, to people who many considered only marginally human. He’d taken the opportunities this country gave him and used them to rise to the highest office in the land. He believed that everyone should have the same opportunities, and he never wavered from that commitment. In the end he died for it.

I’ve been to his birthplace, one childhood home, New Salem, his Springfield home, the White House, Ford’s Theatre and his tomb. I can’t get free of the man, and I don’t want to.