Mt McKinley or Denali

President Obama's semirenaming of this magnificent mountain (actually one of the most massive in the world, though its height above sea level would be negligible in the Himalayas) (my comments also consider, doubtfully,that the President has the authority to do this - one must be careful with someone as disdainful of the rule of law as he is) is a good example of his disregard, both in reasoning and in personal preference, for the positive aspects of America's history. I've participated in and followed mountain climbing and I've very often heard McKinley called Denali with no need for clarification. The name Denali has not been suppressed or shown any measure of disrespect. The President's action is an obvious poke at America for taking possession of Alaska. Ok, lets consider whether America deserves that( that it does, the President takes for granted).

The President ignores several salient facts:  William McKinley was a Union combat veteran of the Civil War, which, aside from ending slavery, also traumatized McKinley. He sent American troops into the Spanish -American war with the greatest reluctance, only after intense public pressure, because he had been permanently scarred by what he saw on Civil War battlefields.  He had, nevertheless, done  his duty on those fields and the Civil War guaranteed a united and powerful country by the 20th century which was indispensable in resisting German, Japanese and Soviet imperialism. In the end the only force which  prevented the entire world  from going totalitarian in the 1900's was the power of the united United States .

Would Russia have denied or "reacquired" Alaska  to or from a fragmented  and conflict ridden North America, should McKinley and his Union compatriots have failed to reunite our country and would it have also taken Canada?  Of course it would have; who could have stopped it pray? And what, I ask you, would have been the fate of Athabascans, Alaskan natives from whose language the name "Denali" is derived, once they were engulfed by the "North American SSR". It would have been wholly at the whims of comrades Dzerzhinsky and  Stalin (ask the Crimean Tatars how that turned out for them).  The treatment of the inhabitants of North America whom the Europeans and then Americans and Canadians encountered was execrable but  both the U.S. and Canada have gone a long way toward owning up to their wrongs and trying to make up for them.  Would the Soviets have been capable of such introspective regret?  Probably not; when did they ever  enact retrospective justice for the monstrous wrongs they did (aside from "rehabilitating" a few of their dead comrades in mass oppression) ? Bottom line for Alaska?  The unshirted hell endured by McKinley and his fellows from 1861-1865 ensured that Alaska would not become subject to the tender mercies of the NKVD, the KGB and the inspired "Five Year Plans".

William McKinley eventually gave his life in service to his country, Mr. President, and his reputation  doesn't deserve to be slurred.


It is understandable that our communist President would have wished for the ascendancy of the Soviets, for though they were part of the northern hemisphere which he loathes, they did support the "liberation movements" in Cuba, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, North Korea and  Vietnam.  Well, we see how those turned out, though he chooses not to see.   Demosthenes