PoliticalAction.com Blog

Gettysburg, PA — In the middle of a field being dedicated as a cemetery for the mass burial site of Civil War casualties, President Lincoln said on November 19, 1863:

“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.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—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.”

The American dream would be for all politicians to be this concise.

Hakimullah Mehsud was the head of the Pakistani Taliban. As he was preparing to meet with Pakistan officials for peace talks, the United States murdered him in a drone strike.

“We confirm with great sorrow that our esteemed leader was martyred in a drone attack,” a senior Taliban commander said.

“We are not in a position to confirm those reports, but if true, this would be a serious loss” for the Pakistan Taliban, said Caitlin Hayden a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.

“So the drone strike is very awkward and difficult for Sharif. Conspiracy theories in Pakistan will assume he agrees to the strike even as he proposed peace talks with Mehsud,” former CIA official Riedel said. “Another setback for U.S.-Pakistan relations ironically.”