Big Oil Don Young, Republican from Alaska, wants to see Democrats sent to the gallows. “I’d like to make a quote,” said Big Oil on the House floor recently. “‘Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.’”

Big Oil, called such because he fought to have American taxpayers underwrite the Trans-Alaska Pipeline for the likes of ConocoPhillips, BP, and Exxon/Mobil, believes he is reacting to the feeble effort by Democrats to tamp down Bush’s “surge” in Iraq in Lincolnesque fashion. Lincoln, according to Big Oil, “had the same problem this president had with a very unpopular war, the same problem with people trying to redirect the commander-in-chief.”

In fact, Lincoln never said such. Big Oil’s quote was penned by “J. Michael Waller, a professor at the Institute of World Politics. They metamorphosed into the illegitimate Lincoln quote on Dec. 23, 2003, in a column that Waller wrote for Insight, a conservative weekly magazine published by the owners of The Washington Times,” otherwise known as the Moonie Times, founded by Sun Myung Moon, who likes to call himself “humanity’s Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent.”

“Waller said he actually wrote the words as a provocative summary of the Lincoln administration’s decision to prosecute two men who urged desertion from the Union Army during the Civil War,” reports the Daily News-Miner. So enamored was neocon Frank Gaffney, former Richard “Prince of Darkness” Perle flunky, he used the bogus Lincoln quote as well, as PNAC types are fond of the idea of stringing up their opponents, not surprising as the philosophical foundation of neoconism runs back to the Trotskyites and the Leninist thinking of Max Shachtman and James Burnham, the latter serving as an inspiration for Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984.

“Young said the United States has always fought for freedom and is doing so again in Iraq. In the two world wars in which his father and cousins fought, and in the Korean War, ‘never once did the Congress in that role undermine the military or the commander-in-chief,’ he said,” the Alaskan newspaper continues. “And then we came to Vietnam and we began to fight a war by the media, a war without allowing the troops to do the job as they should have done. And in fact, we lost that war.”

No doubt, employing Big Oil’s reasoning, the United States may have won in Vietnam, that is if we had strung up the media and, of course, a few million antiwar demonstrators and activists, including moi, never mind the Vietnamese might have had something to say about surrendering to Ngo Dinh Diem, Nguyen Van Thieu, or some other brutal stooge.

“After the United States withdrew from Southeast Asia in 1975, the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia slaughtered 2 million citizens, Young said. ‘People forget that,’ he said.”

People also seem to forget that Nixon and Kissinger were indirectly responsible for Pol Pot and the slaughtered Cambodians. “The ’secret bombing’ of Cambodia by the Nixon-Kissinger gang may have killed as many Cambodians as were executed by the Khmer Rouge and surely contributed to the ferocity of Khmer Rouge behavior toward the urban elite and citizenry,” writes Edward S. Herman. “Henry Kissinger’s role in the Cambodian genocide, Chile, and East Timor, makes him a first class war criminal, arguably at least in the class of Hitler’s Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop, hanged in 1946. But Kissinger has the impunity flowing naturally to the leaders and agents of the victorious and dominant power. He gets a Nobel Peace prize, is an honored member of national commissions, and is a favored media guru and guest at public gatherings.”

But then, as usual, the neocons are not big on history, same as they are not big on the Geneva Conventions.

“It’s a slippery slope down this slide of not being the leaders of this nation for freedom,” Big Oil blathered. “And that’s what I thought this country was about—freedom for each individual in this world and in our country.”

Say what? Did those last two sentences make a lick of sense?

But never mind. Freedom, in Bushzarro world, is reserved for neocons and their ilk, a freedom that translates into not only telling lies and kicking off wars designed to last generations, but also apparently free to misquote former presidents in the procession of issuing death threats against those who, however feebly and insincerely, attempt a return to political sanity.