Walt wrote:
Yes, and under Democratic presidents.

With the exception of Lincoln, every war we've won has been under a
Democratic Party president.

Every war we've lost has been under a Rupublican Party president (in
its post-Lincoln "hooray for me and **** you" iteration).


Don't let Lincoln off the hook; if he'd been a really genius of a
president the Civil War would have been settled by negotiation, not blood.
The fact that he was kicked in the head by a horse at age ten and
knocked unconscious for several hours:
http://members.aol.com/RVSNorton/Lincoln19.html
....and that he may of had syphilis for decades before his presidency
that he transmitted to his wife, causing her madness:
http://www.poxhistory.com/work10.htm
Doesn't exactly argue for someone of impeccable mental clarity.
When the constitutional convention wrote the second amendment, the great
fear that inspired it was that a president would build a army and use it
to inflict his will upon the states, so that a state's armed militia
made sense as a guard against possible tyranny from a central government.
That was certainly one of the major arguments made in the Federalist Papers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_...s_Constitution
And probably why the words "well regulated militia" were included in the
amendment. The importance of the amendment to its writers can be noted
in its being the second addition to the bill of rights, preceded only by
the first amendment's rights of free speech, press, religion, and to
assemble for the redress of wrongs a government has committed; all of
which were particular wrongs that Britain was seen as having committed
against the people of America in their colonial days that should never
be repeated by a indigenous government.
In 1861, Abraham Lincoln raised a army and used it to inflict his, and
several other states, will upon some other of the states that made up
the federated states of America.
The end result was that eastern America has been "North" and "South"
ever since - divided by ideologies, memories, and history; with a wall
of 600,000 corpses separating the two sub-nations.
Before I am branded a ****ed-off Johnny Reb, you might note that my
family lived in the north at the time of the war on both sides*, and
that I'm writing this from around 200 miles south of the Canadian border
in Jamestown, North Dakota.

*...and in the case of my mother's side fought in the War Of
Independence up near Boston, as there are surviving documents showing
that the Continental Army was searching for two of them for desertion; a
fact my grandmother oddly never mentioned when she was showing me her
"Daughters Of The American Revolution" membership document. :-)

Pat