Bobcast: Score-settling

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Abraham Lincoln is easily the most famous American user of the word “score,” as in a measure of 20 years. It was his famous Gettysburg Address that began, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
With the celebration this month of his 200th birthday, it’s clear some are still trying to settle the score, as in airing old grievances against the man who saved the Union and freed the slaves.
A few misguided souls across the Internet, including comment-posters at the Anniston Star’s little corner of the Web, have labeled Lincoln a “tyrant,” “murderer” and “terrorist.” With the exception of Alabama and Louisiana, the Confederate states are staying mostly quiet on the occasion of the great man’s birth.
Even 140 years after his death and the end of the Civil War, there’s no accounting for bitter words and actions (or non-actions in the case of most Southern states) of the irrational, the dead-enders, as Donald Rumsfeld might call them.
The rest of us can vow to make good on Lincoln’s challenge “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”