George Dennison Prentice Quotes
It is, perhaps, a debatable question, whether a person who has always been notoriously in the habit of lying, has a right to tell the truth; it is, of course, the only device by which he can deceive people.
Prentice, George Dennison. Prenticeana; or, Wit and Humor in Paragraphs. Derby & Jackson, 1860.
He was referring to his campaign in 2000 where South Carolina was a very important state in the Republican primary elections and he was campaigning there. At that time, the racist tradition of flying the Confederate Flag, a symbol of slavery and disloyalty to the Union, over the state capitol was a hot political issue with Blacks and some whites outraged and many conservatives who were insistent that the tradition be maintained. McCain, not wanting to offend the conservative who were the core of the voters in the Republican primary, said he did not see anything wrong with the practice when it really offended him as it did most Americans at the time.
George Dennison Prentice was a newspaper editor, writer and poet who built the Louisville Journal into a major newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky, and the Ohio River Valley, in part by the virulence and satire in its editorials, which some blamed for a bloody election day riot in 1855. A slaveholder, Prentice initially supported Unionist candidate John Bell in the 1860 U.S. Presidential election, and after the American Civil War began urged Kentucky to remain neutral. Both of his sons joined the Confederate States Army, one dying in 1862, and Prentice's editorials lampooned Kentucky's military governor, Union General Stephen G. Burbridge. Prentice later opposed Congressional Reconstruction. He wrote a biography of Henry Clay published in 1831, an 1836 poem published in the McGuffey Readers, and a collection of his humorous essays was published in 1859 and revised after his death.
