Whoop de do. One woman wrote a poem, and someone else with connections got it placed on the Statue of Liberty.

Not really, because it has not been around all that long. What America has is a history of being populated by human beings, whose behavior has been not much worse than anyone else's, and considerably better in a number of cases. The fact that Europeans, Africans and Asians wiped out enemies and rivals who looked like them does not make them any better than Americans finding them selves up against junior varsity cultures and overrunning the Indians almost before they could put the breaks on, or having stone-age primitives dumped in the country for the profit and convenience of British merchants. To the extent that "America" has been involved in racial issues, it was the US Army fighting its most costly and bloody war ever, in order to raise people of a different race to legal equality.

Their history is that they were formed from a coalition of anti-slavery and anti-immigration activists. I wish they WOULD remember that history, and stop going along with Democrats to import cheap labor for their business cronies.

We did not so consider ourselves that in practice, really, ever. Look up Operation Keelhaul sometime, when a Democratic administration deported Russian emigres and prisoners of war back to one of the most evil regimes in the history of the world, using firehoses to force them onto the ships that were carrying them to concentration camps. We have always controlled immigration, and put limits on immigration, until Democrats realized that the dregs of the third-world tended to vote their party line, and tore down the barriers, invented birthright citizenship as a Constitutional right in spite of decades of rulings otherwise, and then claimed "no backsies". The debate about whether or not the Parisian terrorists are refugees is just a smokescreen, and largely irrelevant. They are certainly Muslims, whose ancestors lived in the Middle East or Africa within the last 100 years. If they are NOT refugees, it just proves our point even harder - these people do NOT assimilate, their children do not become civilized Westerners who embrace freedom and tolerance.

The sufferings of other people, and their failures to straighten out their own countries, do not entitle them to compromise our security, any more than being unable to swim entitles you to swamp someone else's lifeboat.

And shove that bullshit about owing France anything. They only helped us out in our fight for independence because we happened to be fighting their archenemy, they refused to contribute until we proved we could win without their help, and then they themselves raised a vile and horrific revolution against the monarchy that DID help us out. If I'm going to show solidarity with the French people, it'll be with the fleur de lis, and never the tricolor. If we owed the French PEOPLE anything from our fight for independence (in spite of their attempts to sabotage us at the peace talks), the debt would have been canceled in the subsequent undeclared naval war we fought against them in our infancy, or declaring war on England when the mother country was holding the line against a Corsican dictator the French blindly followed in his rape of the continent. We let them off for giving moral support to our slaveowning enemies during our Civil War (the CSS Alabama, the most famous deepwater ship of the CS navy, was sunk at a French port, for crap's sake! ), or trying to impose an Emperor on our southern border, and we saved them twice in the World Wars. We did not insist the French win a major battle, as they did with us at Saratoga, and a good thing too, or else we'd be mourning all the bloodshed in Paris, Germany. A giant statue we can't even go all the way inside anymore, that costs our taxpayers millions to take care of, hardly balances the scales.