Denali Mountain

President Obama renamed Mount McKinley Denali Mountain to hour the indigenous people of Alaska who consider the mountain a sacred place. Of course the racist Republican Party objected and have mounted a defense of McKinley our twenty-fifth president. I wonder how many people know the illustrious history attributed to Mc Kinley. He is rated as one of America's worst presidents. Consider this from Raw Story.com:

When most people think of William McKinley, our 25th President, they are most likely to think of America’s fattest president. Weighing in at over 300 pounds, McKinley was a mountain of a man. He also was a man with blood on his hands, the blood of hundreds of thousands of Filipino people. At the conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898, in which the United States defeated Spain, McKinley found himself with the question of what to do about the Philippines. The Filipino people had expected to be given their independence, which they had fought with Spain over prior to the war. Instead, McKinley decided, “that we could not leave them to themselves – they were unfit for self-government – and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was; and…that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.” Thus, under McKinley’ mandate, the U.S. brutally put down the Filipino insurrection in a war that lasted until 1902. “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn: the more you kill and burn, the better you will please me,” said one of McKinley’s generals, General Jacob H. Smith. Tens of thousands died in direct combat in the guerrilla war, and hundreds of thousands more from disease transmitted in the concentration camps where Filipino prisoners were herded.


Is this guy really someone to be proud of? In fact for citizens of Ohio whom I doubt even know the history of this man they should be ashamed that he was borne in Ohio. But in a country where willful ignorance seems to be the cultural norm, it is not surprising that McKinley is honored, after all when did the Confederate flag become infamous?