secession and isolation

As for ending isolation, there was the Spanish American war. I think that one started out because we didn’t like the way the Spaniards were treating the Cubans. Supposedly Hearst started the war to sell newspapers. Somehow we ended up in possession of the Philippines, but then some Filipinos didn’t like the way we treated them and we ended up in a Vietnamese style war with them that hardly anybody remembers. I’m going to have to wiki that war.

I think WW I was the war where we are firs considered to have shed isolationism. Even though the war was meaningless and a lot of our guys died, we did pretty well with that one in that we were on the winning side, and likely we were what made it the winning side. The end was a little strange though with Wilson as the naïve American divvying up Europe while the Europeans were just trying to get what they could, then there was that League of Nations thing.

You know what war had a good exit strategy, Herbert Walker’s Desert Storm. We took back Kuwait and bloodied Saddam’s nose and got out. We also encouraged the Shiites and Kurds to rise up which maybe made them think we were going to help them, but we didn’t, so that was bad, but at least the boys were home. Herbert Walker took a lot of shit for not taking out Saddam, but it turned out to be a good decision when his son proved that taking out Saddam was nothing but trouble.

That plan about the government buying the slaves was brought up at the time, but the northerners didn’t want to pay the money and the south wanted more than money, slavery was a part of their way of life and they had no intentions of ending it.

The southern states seceded because they were afraid Lincoln was going to take away their slaves. It was certainly about slavery. I don’t know why people are always trying to weasel word their way out of that. The roots of it were there at the constitutional convention and it was inevitable, and it’s a wonder why it took so long to happen.

I’ve always thought it odd that states couldn’t secede. If Montana decided they would rather be part of Canada I would be fine with it. But what if Texas decided they wanted to go back to being their own country? What about their oil? All the states have resources and they are supposed to be shared among us. It’s not right for one state to pull out and take their resources with them. What if Mississippi wanted to secede and then to reconstitute slavery? Could we allow that?

It might not be mentioned in the constitution but for as far as we can see there will be no seceding. Forget about it.