THOSE WHO DON'T LEARN FROM HISTORY...

Have a quick gander at this:

The Whig party was presumably against the war in Mexico, but it was not against expansion. The Whigs wanted California but preferred to do it without war. As [historian John] Schroeder puts it, "there's was a commercially oriented expansionism designed to secure frontage on the Pacific without recourse to war." Also, they were not so powerfully against the military action that they would stop it by denying men and money for the operation. They did not want to risk the accusation that they were putting American soldiers in peril by depriving them of the materials necessary to fight. The result was that Whigs joined Democrats in voting overwhelmingly for the war resolution, 174 to 14. ... Throughout the war, as Schroeder says, "the politically sensitive Whig minority could only harry the administration with a barrage of verbiage while voting for every appropriation which the military campaigns required".

The above was transcribed from page 153 of A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

[asin: 0060838655]

It seems we've been through all of this before. Of course, going to war with Mexico to get California under our thumb was just as amoral then as invading Iraq to get it's oil under our thumb is today. Lesson? Based on past experience, the USG will do what it wants even if parts of the USG should be stopping them. Checks and balances only work if the people in power bother to use them. Expecting impeachment? Don't bother. The system already let us down a hundred years ago.

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Orignal From: THOSE WHO DON'T LEARN FROM HISTORY...