The origins of Obama’s ‘horses and bayonets’ line

In his latest Rewrite segment, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell suggested Senator Al Franken could have planted the seed “for the best line of the night” in the 2004 book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. O’Donnell pointed to a key section in Franken’s piece, a graph comparing the Defense budgets of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan:
Horses.

In 1864 President Lincoln requested 188,718 new horses.
And 120 years later, President Reagan – to his eternal shame – requested only 3

“What Mitt Romney is doing now is straight out of the George W. Bush campaign and the Ronald Reagan campaign,” said O’Donnell. “The Franken book reminds us that Republicans running against a Democratic White House always attack the military.”
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