Merry's Big Books   
      
      
   A topic I recently raised in Clark County, Washington: "What can you just say   
   about Robert W. Merry, the mysterious doyen of American crypto-conservatism   
   hitherto unknown to Washington journalism?"   
      
      
   My answer was this:   
      
      
   There are two important books by "Merry", *A Country of Vast Designs* about   
   James K. Polk and *McKinley: Architect of the American Century*.   
      
      
   Polk was actually a Whig and McKinley a Republican, but the distance between   
   two ought not to be reckoned great: the Republicans were arguably a   
   "successor" party to the Whigs purified of the influence of people like Henry   
   Clay.   
      
      
   I have never been a Republican; I never even vote for Republican candidates.   
   Still, if you want America you must cope with its historical tradition and   
   people "distasteful" to you who are part of it. (Ardent Democrats ought to   
   remember there is not a "   
   standard of excellence" associated with joining the Democratic Party, if you   
   will.)   
      
      
   I can find fault with neither of these two men on account of the "models" they   
   offered to later Americans and what they chose to, or had to, do. Polk was   
   associated with the real "opening of the American West", a phrase which not   
   ought to hold terrors    
   for those familiar with what the Louisiana Purchase buys you.   
      
      
   It is very arguable that there would have been no Abraham Lincoln without   
   James K. Polk, as Lincoln's early years in Illinois and Illinois politics.   
   Similarly, if McKinley was not quite the "architect of American empire" that   
   Roosevelt was he was    
   something of a model for even how a man of wealth and distinction could have   
   (almost) "Just One Wife".   
      
      
   Could be said.   
   Jeff Rubard   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)