… offer excellent commentary on current events.” Someone said something like that, I don’t know who. I didn’t make it up; it just seems pertinent in light of the latest minor kerfuffle over Frank Gaffney’s attribution to Abe Lincoln this quotiation in a Washington Times piece this week:

Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged. — President Abraham Lincoln

The only problem, as Editor and Publisher explains, is that Lincoln never said it. It seems that one Brooks Jackson at FactCheck.org tracked it down thus:

… “The conservative author who touched off the misquotation frenzy, J. Michael Waller, concedes that the words are his, not Lincoln’s. Waller says he never meant to put quote marks around them, and blames an editor [at the magazine Insight] for the mistake and the failure to correct it. We also note other serious historical errors in the Waller article containing the bogus quote.”

Yeah, blame it on the editor. That’s right up there with ‘my dog ate it.’ Speaking of bogus quotes, remember this one?

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.

That was Barbra Streisand slamming GW Bush in September 2002. But, of course, there’s not a scintilla of evidence that Caesar ever said it, nor do the words appear in any of Shakespeare’s plays, to whom the bogus quote is sometimes attributed, presumably from his play, “Julius Caesar.”

Ralph Keyes wrote about misquotations in The Quote Verifier.

Misquotation is at least as common as accurate quotation, and for perfectly good reasons. The primary reason is that when using quotes, the reference we’re most likely to consult is our memory. This is a hazardous form of research. Our memory wants quotations to be better than they usually were, and said by the person we want to have said them.

As Lincoln said, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

The story of the the Tuskegee Airmen is one of the greatest American stories of World War II. One of these heroes died this week in Brentwood, Tenn., a community between my town of Franklin and the city of Nashville. Reports the Tennessean:

Joseph Clyde “J.C.” White Sr., a Tuskegee airman who escorted Allied bombers over Europe during World War II, a physicist and educator, died Friday at Alive Hospice in Nashville.

A Brentwood resident, he was 85.

Mr. White started as a cadet and college detachment student at the Tuskegee Institute. Later, he flew as part of the 332nd Fighter Group — known as “The Red Tails” — who gained fame for never losing a bomber they escorted. He became a commissioned officer in the United States Air Force in 1943 [sic].

After the war, he taught flying and radar in Alabama and Mississippi and served as director of environmental testing at Remington Rand in Minnesota.

A great web site about the fliers is here. HBO produced an outstanding dramatic movie about the Tuskegee Airmen in 1995, starring Laurence Fishburne.