Fact-checking and research is definitely not the new GOP’s forte, which was aptly showed when the RNC tweeted (and later deleted) a fake quote attributed to Lincoln in celebration of his birthday. From The New York Times:
“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count,” it said. “It’s the life in your years.”
There is no documentation of Lincoln uttering these words, according to James Cornelius, curator of the Lincoln Collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
The committee’s tweet was taken down on Monday morning. But in a political atmosphere buzzing with acrimonious debates over fake news and alternative facts, the error caused a ruckus.
While the original tweet is gone, but the flub continues to live on — in an Instagram post by President Trump. I think he must have some sort of subconscious attraction to incorrect information.
If you’re curious about the real origins of that quote, here’s what NYT uncovered:
Garson O’Toole, the author of “Hemingway Didn’t Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations,” wrote on his website Quote Investigator that the quote can probably (though not definitively) be traced to a man named Edward J. Stieglitz. An advertisement for Mr. Stieglitz’s book, “The Second Forty Years,” contained the phrase:
The important thing to you is not how many years in your life, but how much life in your years!
That was back in 1947.