NPR Morning Edition anchorman Steve Inskeep displayed his politically correct “anti-war” attitude in a recent posting on the “Buzz Board” at the leftish website The Daily Beast:

You never want to get stuck on a plane with nothing to read, which is why I walked into an airport bookstore and bought a copy of Eagles and Empire, by David A. Clary. Of course I never opened it until I got home again, but it was worth lugging around. It traces the tortured relationship between Mexico and the United States. It centers on the Mexican War, that great American land grab and war of choice. Clary traces the decades leading up to that war, as two nations sparred across the continent, forever blundering, forever improvising. President James K. Polk never had a clue what the Mexicans were thinking. The Mexicans changed their president every few months. Finally, the issue was decided by American generals whose strategic thinking rarely went deeper than this sentence: “Taylor decided he might as well take Matamoros.” This, plus a lot of bloodletting, was how we got our hands on California.

Random House explicitly promoted the book with President Polk as the 19th century version of George W. Bush:

A war that started under questionable pretexts. A president who is convinced of his country’s might and right. A military and political stalemate with United States troops occupying a foreign land against a stubborn and deadly insurgency. The time is the 1840s. The enemy is Mexico. (Italics theirs.)

A review in the Random House “Academic Resources” page for the book underlines Clary’s bias:

He argues that the war’s causes are found in Polk’s misunderstanding of the situation in Mexico and his naive belief that he could pressure Mexico to accept his territorial demands, as well as in Mexico’s stubborn refusal to accept the loss of Texas. The bulk of the manuscript is a detailed narrative of the war, in which Clary argues that Polk’s desire to win the “minds and feelings” of Mexicans was inhibited by Zachary Taylor’s inability to control volunteers, who committed numerous atrocities against Mexicans, and Scott’s decision to bomb Vera Cruz, which provoked a violent guerilla resistance.