Acculturation can also lead to the desire to numb one’s brain.

Think. Think logically. Is a numbed brain a better way to seek pleasure and enjoyment than having one’s faculties intact?

Observe your fellow humans.

The drinkers tend to congregate while the non-drinkers do the same.

Yes, there is intermingling but this is a brief message board post using generalities.

I found the non-drinkers to generally be more intelligent, glib, peaceful and more fun to be around.

Oh how I feel sorry for those that “just have to have a drink.”

What a high price to pay in so many ways, especially if addicted to the drug alcohol.

Alcohol cause so much misery within society and between people.

And how many innocents have been murdered by drunken drivers? How many maimed, crippled for life?

Logic and introspection honestly done can make some imbibers realize just how foolish gulping down the grog is if one seeks fun, companionship and pleasure.

Cast off the alcohol. Reveal the real you and fin the “real” in others.

Perhaps you will become a non-drinker and find life to me more pleasurable with a non-numbed brain and revel in the cost savings of alcohol avoidance.

Someone who is moderate, not abstinant, in these and all other things in life will be a better adjusted person to whatever life throws at them. Figure out the meaning of the article and stop arguing over things that have nothing to do with what is being said.

Could someone else have been chosen to personify temperance. Yes, but General Lee was chosen. Think about what he said and what he did and use temperance in your own life.

tippler Forms: 4­5 tipeler, 5 -ar, tippelar, -ilar, typuler, 5­8 tipler, 6 typpler, typlar, 6­7 -er, 6­ tippler.

1. A retailer of ale and other intoxicating liquor; a tapster; a tavern-keeper. Obs.

2. One who tipples; a habitual drinker of intoxicating liquor (implying more or less excess, but usually short of positive drunkenness).

Notice that excess is not equated with drunkeness, necessarily. There are other presidents who were drinkers that your list, and I daresay that habitual drinking is intemperance because it implies a need on the part of the individual to engage in a given behavior (it would not be habitual otherwise,) and it seems to me that your list is woefully inadequate if it means to fully capture the depths of presidents and other eminent men who were habitual drinkers. You also know very well that temperance is a code word for abstinence, and one is served well to be suspicious of any advocate of temperance.

The point of the post was not absolute abstinence, but temperance. Yes, the majority of the great men of history were tipplers, but most weren’t guzzlers.

Stonewall may have said something similar, but there are several sites that attribute the version of it we used in this post to General Lee. Simply google his name and the quote. And whether he said it or not, Lee was assuredly a famous teetolar, a fact that can be found in any biography of the general.

It is true that Lee can’t be compared to Grant in terms of being president. Although we could compare Grant and Lincoln, the latter being another teetolar. But in interest of full disclosure there were other US presidents known to be heavy drinkers. Real all-stars, all of them:

1. Martin Van Buren
2. Franklin Pierce
3. James Buchanan
4. Andrew Johnson
5. Ulysses S. Grant
6. Chester A. Arthur

Grant was a military genius and is widely considered such. He was, however, a very lax president who didn’t keep corruption from his administration. This is granted, but, since Lee was no politician, we can only compare apples to apples, and Grant proved Lees superior in war. Generals, unfortunately, don’t make great politicians, but, fortunately, perhaps, Lee did not have to suffer the fate of politics that oft befalls leading military men in their august years.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not defending slavery, and it’s abolition was eminent, but Lincoln and his party shied away from strong abolitionist sentiments until they became convenient. They were no heroes in this matter, and to compare a slovenly, corrupt drunkard to the likes of General Lee is anathema.

Alas, there is no entry for Lee with the quote you attribute to him. Alas, also, that Stonewall Jackson died on the battlefield, the south lost, and the general that triumphed was a notorious drinker and military genius: president and fifty dollar bill pin-up, Ulysses S. Grant.

Churchill depressed? Sure, but he lived to age 90, and kicked ass prior to that, um, like leading the UK through WW2.

Bogart got cancer? Yeah, he smoked, a lot. We’re not talking about tobacco in this article.

Give me a counter list of exciting, great men who didn’t enjoy a tipple. You won’t find the founding fathers on that list, in fact, a number of them smuggled rum from the west indies and operated malting houses on their property to make ale and whiskey.

Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, and Winston Churchill.

Score one for intemperance!