Mexico was here first?

[Dragoon68]

No, America was just like any other country - mixed with both good and bad impulses. Some time the bad ones drove and at other times the good ones drove. There is no reason to see America as significantly better or significantly worse than other countries. Both conclusions are fallacious. Denying the evil we did is just as fallacious as denying the good we have done. Using the evil we have done to obscure the good is just as fallacious as using the good to obscure the evil.

Nope! America is significantly "better" than every nation I can think of in modern times - not perfect but certainly better by a mile!

But in the case of the Mex-American war, its particularly absurd to hold our lack of annexing the whole of Mexico as somehow a good thing. It ignore
- the standard practice of the time
- the very unrighteous contributing factors to the war (Manifest Destiny)
- the scope of the perfectly legitimate causes of the war (conflict over the Texan border)

The only good in taking some instead of all is that we weren't as bad as we could have been.

I think it illustrates that America has done the right things overall in its dealings with other countries. What's absurd to me is when we start thinking and believing that every tin horn dictatorship in the world holds to standards equal to our own. We're no better man-for-man before God as any other but we have must certainly held to a much higher standard in world affairs than any other nation I know about. There are plenty of people around these days who would apologize ourselves into giving away all our land to everyone else under the false pretense that somehow they were right and were victimized by America. It's baloney through and through.