Channeling Honest Abe

This just in, from the Dept. of Things We Missed Before Christmas:

Susan Hogan/Albach of the Chicago Sun-Times tells us that spiritualists -- you know, the ones who can speak to those in the great hereafter -- are making a pitch that Abraham Lincoln was one of their own.

Their evidence seems to hinge on the fact that Lincoln's semi-deranged wife, Mary, held seances to reach her dead son, Willie. Honest Abe apparently attended one or two, but most historians are pretty confident he remained a loyal Presbyterian.

"Lincoln is like one of those novelty mirrors with a beard painted on the glass -- Americans tend to see themselves in him," said Sarah Vowell, a humorist and social commentator who wrote about Lincoln's murder in Assassination Vacation.

"If you're a gay Republican, you think he's a gay Republican," Vowell said. "If you're mopey, you get relatively excited that he was depressed, too."