Your apparently inexhaustible capacity for vacuous reasoning is truly amazing. Your absurd commentary regarding the proposed statue of Abraham Lincoln at Tredegar in Richmond is a travesty. Exposing once again the hideously twisted Illinoisian roots of the editor, as well as an unremitting hostility to the Confederacy and Virginia's devotion thereto, you rhapsodize that Virginians "should be proud that their past includes Lincoln." (Note the revealing, patronizing use of "their" rather than "our.")

Proud? Commemorating the hubristic visit of Lincoln - an act of obvious self-gratification and gloating, masked by the latter-day gloss of lofty sentiments - by putting a statue of him at the political and industrial heart of the Confederacy would be as inappropriate as placing one of King William III in Dublin.

Seriously to suggest as "long overdue" such an affront to the heroic sacrifices of Virginians who bravely resisted his "gentle presence" in the brutal invasion and dismemberment of our Commonwealth is to urge acquiescence to cultural vassalage. You might profit from reading The Real Lincoln, a scholarly book by Thomas DiLorenzo that thoroughly demythologizes Lincoln and his legacy for the edification of those benighted individuals ignorant enough to venerate him. Then perhaps you would understand why such a statue would be properly viewed as a symbol of reconciliation only in the perverse sense of imposition of an intellectually phlogistic monument that is utterly unwarranted, undesirable, and unfitting.

Signed
Robert H. Lamb

Richmond