Richard Mourdock, Republican Indiana Senate Candidate, Compares Chrysler Bailout To Slavery

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Senate candidate for Indiana Richard Mourdock is again comparing slavery to modern politics, this time likening it to President Obama's Chrysler bailout.

The Republican state treasurer argued during his primary contest against Sen. Richard Lugar that the climate now is like that before the Civil War, with Obama and Democrats in the role of slave owners.

Late last week, Mourdock made the comparison even more direct, telling a crowd in Dallas that Obama's Chrysler bailout showed the same principle that Abraham Lincoln decried in his famous debates with Stephen Douglas.

Mourdock, speaking to a PAC convention organized by the Tea Party group FreedomWorks on July 26, said that Lincoln's argument was about the principles of right and wrong. What was wrong was the "divine right of kings ... that would give power to someone so that they might say to someone else, 'you work, you sweat, you toil, you earn bread -- and I shall eat it.'"

"Mr. Lincoln said if it was a prince demanding tribute from his subjects, or if it was offered as an apology by one race of men for enslaving another race of men, it was, he said, the same tyrannical principle," Mourdock added, before saying that was the principle that the Obama administration exhibited in 2009 when it bailed out Chrysler, leaving some pension funds -- including two in Indiana -- holding losses.

"It is once again that message coming from Washington, D.C., that even people like those pensioners I represent can work and sweat and toil and earn and save, so that someone else can be given their assets," Mourdock said. “It is the same tyrannical principle as in 1858 -- but now it’s 2012.”

A shorter version of the speech can be seen below. The full version is here.

Democrats complained to the Evansville Courier & Press that Mourdock was using slavery and the Civil War for political gain, but a day later Mourdock said he was making no such comparisons.

"No, that wasn't the issue at all," Mourdock said, according to the Courier & Press. "It was about government's actions and taking property."