Wrong. The man represents the values that would have kept the colonies under British rule. One good check is what was called the American Way. Written by David Broder in 2010 this latter portion of an article The Essential American, regarding Senator Henry Clay. Look at the contrast and begin to understand. These right wing FOX nuts are killing the America we need and love while failing to even understand how it came to be with their pretensions and imaginary world of Ayn Rand style thinking. Broder finished his article like this: The following decades are etched in history. Clay found his nemesis in Andrew Jackson and began an unprecedented series of losing presidential campaigns by challenging him. He earned a permanent place in Senate history along with his great contemporaries, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster. He became famous as a conciliator and, despite increasing infirmities, helped negotiate the Compromise of 1850, a last, futile attempt to head off the Civil War. Along the way, he led the short-lived effort to make the Whigs (named for their British cousins) the opposition party. It lasted just long enough to inspire Abraham Lincoln. ((((((And besides all that, Clay invented the American System, policies favoring the support of domestic industry and the improvement of what we would now call infrastructure -- roads and rail and all other forms of transport and communication. Between Washingtons time and Lincolns, it is probable that no American was more influential than Clay -- and certainly no one who did not occupy the White House.))))))) On Independence Day now, he is rarely mentioned as part of the pantheon that shaped this nation. But shape it he did. And, as the Heidlers remind us, toward the end of Clays life, when the famous soprano Jenny Lind visited Washington and Clay came to hear her, he was pleased to reciprocate by honoring her request to come listen to him argue a case before the Supreme Court. Two star turns. davidbroder@washpost
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 23:36:40 +0000
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