The amazing thing to me, or better - one of the many amazing things, is that the resident troll and others decided that Americans are so very different from all other peoples.

Yes, Americans are not the same as other people around the globe. Seems it has always been this way, and is not just a recent occurrence. You see, if almost every other country in the world stopped doing a thing in a peaceful manner we cannot expect that Americans could have also done it in a peaceful manner. That was bleated out by the tag-team over and over.

In spite of the experimental nature of modern science that, having seen the same results time and time again in other places, would reasonably predict a like outcome for the Americans. These Americans are truly a different animal.

Apparently they believe that Americans are so war-like and belligerent that we peace-nics might as well stfu since Americans can not be made to do the moral thing no matter the enticement to do it. In a way, after watching the uneducated foolishness of it all, I now see they had a subtle point and were proving it by acting out the American belligerence.

On the other hand, they are also saying that Bush the younger is just reliably following a long line of presidential saviors by invading, destroying, killing, raping, pillaging, and so-forth all in the name of bringing freedom to that land. I had always hated Bush I and Bush II, and had never seen that they were following in the footsteps or a democratic savior.

But then, I think killing people "for their own good" is wrong. Who knew?

They also indicate that they support in full measure any president who violates the constitution when he claims that it is necessary due to a threat to the union. Bush and Nixon both claimed that; shall we now see that they were correct?

Well, not I.

"... racist assholes from The League of the South, Lew Rockwell, Antiwar.com and all the other little confederacy fetishists, like Ron Paul, etc. I wouldn't piss on you ..."

And he may as well add Howard Zinn that great progressive who wrote in his great A People's History Of The United States in chapter 9:

Behind the secession of the South from the Union, after Lincoln was elected President in the fall of 1860 as candidate of the new Republican party, was a long series of policy clashes between South and North. The clash was not over slavery as a moral institution-most northerners did not care enough about slavery to make sacrifices for it, certainly not the sacrifice of war. It was not a clash of peoples (most northern whites were not economically favored, not politically powerful; most southern whites were poor farmers, not decisionmakers) but of elites. The northern elite wanted economic expansion-free land, free labor, a free market, a high protective tariff for manufacturers, a bank of the United States. The slave interests opposed all that; they saw Lincoln and the Republicans as making continuation of their pleasant and prosperous way of life impossible in the future.

So, when Lincoln was elected, seven southern states seceded from the Union. Lincoln initiated hostilities by trying to repossess the federal base at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and four more states seceded. The Confederacy was formed; the Civil War was on.

Lincoln's first Inaugural Address, in March 1861, was conciliatory toward the South and the seceded states: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." And with the war four months on, when General John C. Fremont in Missouri declared martial law and said slaves of owners resisting the United States were to he free, Lincoln countermanded this order. He was anxious to hold in the Union the slave states of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware.

It was only as the war grew more bitter, the casualties mounted, desperation to win heightened, and the criticism of the abolitionists threatened to unravel the tattered coalition behind Lincoln that he began to act against slavery. Hofstadter puts it this way: "Like a delicate barometer, he recorded the trend of pressures, and as the Radical pressure increased he moved toward the left." Wendell Phillips said that if Lincoln was able to grow "it is because we have watered him."

Racism in the North was as entrenched as slavery in the South, and it would take the war to shake both. New York blacks could not vote unless they owned $250 in property (a qualification not applied to whites). A proposal to abolish this, put on the ballot in 1860, was defeated two to one (although Lincoln carried New York by 50,000 votes). Frederick Douglass commented: "The black baby of Negro suffrage was thought too ugly to exhibit on so grand an occasion. The Negro was stowed away like some people put out of sight their deformed children when company comes."

Does Zinn know that twits at UT are calling him a racist, asshole, neo-whatever, and other such illuminating names? One wonders.