How to Win at Real Estate

I remember the indignation in Secretary of Slime Colin Powell’s voice when he declared “WE TAKE NOTHING BY CONQUEST” Actually that was what the newspaper declared when The US paid 15 million for the half of Mexico (including California and New Mexico) it won in the war. A new slave state (Texas ,all the way to the Rio Grande) was added to what would soon be the confederacy. It is a remarkable myth still propagated with fierce determination and swallowed hook line and sinker ( sorry about the fishing metaphor) by the “shining city on the hill” crowd.

Does this sound at all familiar? President Polk explaining the new policy of pre-emptive war to his cabinet in 1845: “up to this time we had heard of no open act of aggression, but the danger was imminent that such acts would be committed.” Having incited war by sending troops into what was recognized Mexican territory, Polk addressed Congress: “As war exists, notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, we are called upon to…vindicate with decision the honor, the rights and the interests of our country.”

It was our “Manifest Destiny” to grab the riches, and although they didn’t know at the time California, like Iraq, had oil they knew they wanted it . As an added bonus they could democratize the uncivilized Mexicans. Congress rushed to approve the war. “the bundles of official documents accompanying the war message,supposed to be evidence for Polk’s statement ,were not examined..” The more things change the more they stay the same.

The John Kerry Support The Troops speech of the time came from none other than Abraham Lincoln who had been accused of opposing the war: “The declaration that we have always opposed the war is true or false, according as one may understand the term ‘oppose the war’. If to say ‘the war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President’ be opposing the war, then the Whigs have generally opposed it…But if ,when the war had begun,and had become the cause of the country,the giving of our money and our blood,was support of the war, then it is not true we have opposed it.” In other words, now that we are there, we can’t just cut and run.Good thing they didn’t have Swift Boat Veterans at that time because Honest Abe sounds a little French. Old Walt Whitman was no quisling: “ Let our arms now be carried which shall teach the world that,while we are not forward for a quarrel, America knows how to crush ,as well as how to expand.” A more straightforward Bush /Cheney. Thanks go to Howard Zinn’s Peoples History of the United States for trying to remind us.