Dr. Word asks: What do Al Melvin, Herman Cain and Ronald Reagan have in common? (Hint: it’s not Abe Lincoln)

by David Safier

Words matter, and so do attributions, especially when you're attributing words to Abraham Lincoln.

So I'll ask Herman Cain and Cap'n Al Melvin, who said the following words? (Too late to ask Ronald Reagan, obviously, though he used the words in his 1992 speech at the Republican National Convention.)

"You can't help the poor by destroying the rich."

Cain, Melvin and Reagan answer: Abraham Lincoln.

The real answer? William J.H. Boetcker, an ex-clergyman from Erie, Pennsylvania, who invented this phrase and a number of others in booklets he wrote in 1916 and 1917.

Let's not look at some lefty website for our fact check. The AZ Republic did its homework on the series of faux-Lincoln quotes Republicans love to use, even though they've been discredited again and again and again. But why let facts get in the way of a good sound bite?

At one point, even Republicans were becoming embarsassed and tried to stop the mis-attribution, unsuccessfully.

"In the 1960s, the Republican National Committee even warned its speakers, 'Do not use them as Lincoln's words!' but to no avail."

Here are Melvin's tweets citing a series of the Lincoln "quotes."

And here is Cain, using them as he rails against the Occupy Wall Street protests.

(h/t to AZ Blue Meanie for the Cain link.)