anyone think if there was a political group in Mexico, whose charter was the destruction of Texas and was sending Rockets over the border and Suicide Bombers into Texas Shopping Malls, etc.

That idiots like Ron Paul would refrain from bashing that group and instead bash America for anything it did to stop them?

jp on January 6, 2009 at 10:36 AM

I understand Polk was hoping get the whole thing.

Count to 10 on January 6, 2009 at 10:53 AM

ironically, or rather some history Paultards would like to ignore, but their Founder Idol(Thomas Jefferson) advocated taking Cuba and Canada at different points. Of course bought the Louisiana Purchase and as President had Indians forceably removed(and some killed) from parts of Tennessee and Georgia.

he also talked about establishing an “Empire of Freedom”, which in large part Britian and America have advanced greatly since then.

jp on January 6, 2009 at 11:09 AM

and of course Jefferson went to war with the Hamas of his day, the Barbary Pirates.

the reality is many paultards think they are the legacy of Jefferson and anti-federalist founders, but in reality they are the legacy of Anarcho-Capitalist crackpot: Murray Rothbard, who called Reagan a traitor and warmonger, claimed the US was the real “Evil Empire” and so on.

jp on January 6, 2009 at 11:11 AM

I thought Jackson was the one who marched the native nation out of Georgia?

Count to 10 on January 6, 2009 at 11:13 AM

he finished it, Jefferson started it initially. I read that somewhere last year, as some Jefferson history that gets glossed over. Jackson definitely accelerated it.

an excellent book to refute alot of the isolationist lies and half-truths on some of this is “Dangerous Nation” by Robert Kagan, fascinating. and it attempts to place some of the quotes that are thrown around into context and the political side of things at the time.

jp on January 6, 2009 at 11:17 AM

here is a review of Dangerous Nation, that mentions some Jefferson related things:

Dangerous Nation review

Indian removal didn’t start with Andrew Jackson, Kagan writes. The sainted Thomas Jefferson was as ruthless as Jackson in clearing out Indian settlements in places like Tennessee and even Georgia almost three decades before Jackson went about removing the indigenous peoples of the Southeast and newly acquired Florida.

anyway, here is the key part and thesis of that book that anyone with a political IQ should ‘get’ and shed a whole new light on that history

Historians have been too quick to take American politicians at their word – or used just part of a speech to come to conclusions, suggests Kagan. Adams, Jefferson and succeeding presidents ignored the words of George Washington to avoid permanent, entangling alliances with European and other nations and went about building an American Empire.

Washington himself, in his younger days, in the mid 1750s, was part of an expeditionary force that attacked French strongholds in today’s Pennsylvania, even though official British policy was to have a buffer of Indian territory between the British colonies and the French ones, Kagan says.

The part about entangling alliances in Washington’s Farewell Address (for the complete text from the Avalon Project, click here: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/washing.htm) was written with the help of Alexander Hamilton at Washington’s request, to attack the pro-French feelings of Jefferson, at a time the new nation was in a “quasi” war with France, Kagan says. Hamilton and Washington favored better relations with England. By the mid-to-late 1790s, the “factions” that Washington inveighed against – and which occupy most of the text of the Farewell Address of 1796 – had become the nascent political parties: The Federalists of Hamilton, Adams, Washington and others and the Anti-Federalists or Republicans of Jefferson, Madison, Patrick Henry, etc.

jp on January 6, 2009 at 11:26 AM