Maybe I can see it if I squint a bit.

Crooks and Liars has a good piece on the popular meme among Republicans.

The party of Lincoln.
The party who truly stands for civil rights.

Oh, please.

In light of John McCain’s appearance before the NAACP’s national convention, Bruce Bartlett makes the case in a WSJ op-ed that McCain should argue that the Republican Party, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, is the party of civil rights. (If this sounds familiar, Bartlett wrote a book on this subject, called “Wrong on Race.”)

Everyone knows this, but it’s worth repeating: the Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln and was established in 1854 to block the expansion of slavery. The Democratic Party was the party of slavery. […]

After the war, it was the Republican Party that rammed through the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution over Democratic opposition…. Historically speaking, the Republican Party has a far better record on race than the Democrats. Sen. McCain should not be shy about saying so.

This comes less than two weeks after the National Black Republican Association put up billboards in Florida and South Carolina saying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican (a claim which is demonstrably ridiculous).

Now, we’ve been down this road before, but if the right sincerely intends to push this argument again this election year, we might as well go to the trouble of pointing out how foolish — and frankly, intellectually lazy — this entire tack really is.

The inescapable fact is, the Republican Party of the 19th century bears no resemblance to, and has no bearing on, the modern-day Republican Party. The problem isn’t that Bartlett’s history is wrong; it’s that his history is irrelevant and badly misses the point.

...

It is just as the rejoinder to these memes notes, "Lincoln wouldn't recognize or be a part of the Republican Party of today. "

I like the ending to the piece.

Ultimately, this isn’t much of a campaign pitch: “Vote Republican: The Party Was Right Before It Was Wrong.”