President Obama already made headlines today for skipping the 150th anniversary ceremony of the Gettysburg Address citing a scheduling conflict, and now it looks like there is controversy surrounding his taped reading of the address.
President Obama and several other famous faces from the worlds of politics, entertainment, and business recorded versions of President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address for a project filmmaker Ken Burns produced for PBS. But in the video that President Obama recorded, two important words appear to have been omitted from the text: Under God.
“It is amazing. The President has just released footage from Ken Burns of the President giving the Gettysburg Address… I am sorry. You can say that it was a prompter [or] he misspoke, but he does it over and over again,” Glenn said disgusted on radio this morning. “That is an affront to Abraham Lincoln, an affront to the Civil War, an affront to the people who died there, an affront to our own history, and an affront to God. I'm sorry, there are no two ways about it.”
Watch the video in question below:
It should be noted that there are up 10 written versions of the Gettyburg Address and each has slightly different text. Some of those versions do not include the words “under God,” however, as TheBlaze reported, the commonly accepted Associated Press version does include the words.
Ken Burns as since come out and attempted to deflect the attention away from the President, saying President Obama was specifically asked to recite one of the versions of the Gettysburg Address that does not include the phrase “under God.” Burns made that clarification on his website learntheaddress.org. As TheBlaze discovered, that caveat has been added recently, for a cached version of the page reveals no such explanation.
Even before Burns’ explanation for the inconsistency was known, Stu explained that the excuse would most likely be that President Obama used one of the other versions of the text. But Glenn was not buying it.
“The spin is going to be, of course: Well, we used one of the earlier versions that did not include ‘under God,’” Stu explained. “There were other draft versions and some did not include it. But this is the one who was accepted.”
“I'm sorry – the earlier version,” Glenn asked exasperatedly. “Stop buying into the lies. Something is wrong here. Stop buying into the lies. He is changing our history, changing our tradition. Stop believing the lies.
Front page image courtesy of the AP