Commentary: Petty Trump spikes football over nearly 200-year-old Mexican-American War
This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.
It was a war fueled by colonialism, launched with the intent of humiliating a weaker country, fought in the name of revenge and waged by a racist president.So leave it to President Trump to spike the proverbial football over the U.S.victory 178 years ago in the Mexican-American War.
Abraham Lincoln first earned national attention by calling out President James K.Polk’s lies about the lead-up to the conflict, which lasted from April 1846 to February 1848, on the floor of Congress.
Ulysses S.Grant called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged.” Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay “Resistance to Civil Government” was written partly in response to the Mexican-American War, which he decried as “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.” Other American paragons of virtue who were publicly opposed at the time: William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass.
Yet on Feb.2, the anniversary of what Mexico calls the American Intervention, Trump declared that a war in which the United States conquered more than half of its southern neighbor for no reason other than it wanted to was a testament to “the unmatched power of the American spirit” and guided by “divine providence.”And in case anyone was still wondering why Trump would feel fit to commemorate events that happened almost 200 years ago, he argued the job wasn’t done.“I have spared no effort,” he blared, “in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction.” California The Mexican-American War of remade the U.S.
and Mexico — and the much-debated border that separates the two countries.But it remains a relatively overshadowed conflict in American history.
In Montebello, a group of men and women try to educate people by reenacting ...