…And they’ll lie and make up complete nonsense to convince you to hate America too, demonstrating another thing: that they think you’re a complete imbicile. And I suppose maybe they have reason to believe that, since they may be going by past experience—they’ve gotten away with it over and over in the past, so why stop now?—might be their thinking.
It’s an absolutely amazing bit of, well, literally garbage—that appeared in the liberal-left-friendly Globe and Mail over the weekend in a huge baloney-ridden 5,300 word tirade against America, badly written by a Paul William Roberts, which the Globe and Mail charmingly chose to publish as their version of a tribute and as a display of that famous liberal compassion on none other than the anniversary of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks that killed so many innocent Americans.
I really think they should stop getting away with it. Canadians should call them on it, loudly. Responsible Canadians should stop accepting this leftist garbage before we’re ruined.
Fortunately for Canadian liberals, they’re preaching to the converted, much as in the case of their new liberal king, Michael Moore, and none of them—including the Globe and Mail—will bother to even remotely check facts in their diatribes preferring, it would seem, to instead hope that more Canadians will be convinced to hate America too. Or they risked just letting the lies and misrepresentations go because they think they’re so awesome and untouchable, so arrogant are they. That’s worth the risk to them. That’s what they see as a good and reasonable trade-off. That, from a national, supposedly objective, unbiased newspaper of self-described good repute.
The fact that the Globe and Mail would publish such leftist anti-American nonsense speaks volumes about them; in fact it tells us all we ever need to know about them and how we should read their articles (if we ever bother again) in the future. And it now puts them solidly in the same camp as the hideously biased and radically left-wing, and roundly mocked, state-run CBC. Perhaps that’s their goal—to move in and become the biased, socialist media of record while the CBC is mercifully shut down in a labor union dispute.
But I could be wrong. This could simply be another day in the liberal media. It’s your call.
National Post columnist Jonathan Kay found the article and did a very laudable job of “Fisking” it. His critique of the article is today’s must read.
A moment of shame for The Globe and Mail
On Saturday, The Globe and Mail published “The flagging empire,” a mammoth, 5,300-word essay devoted to the theme that America is a racist, bankrupt, war-mongering hellhole, sliding inexorably toward “oligarchic totalitarianism.”
The piece is worth finding on the Web, for it reads as an unintentionally hilarious satire of the claptrap one might hear from a poli-sci freshman babbling about her seminar course on Noam Chomsky. The author, Paul William Roberts, careens breathlessly from U.S. Constitutional history to the Middle East to Asian geopolitics—the whole dizzying trajectory bound together by nothing more than a generalized contempt for the United States. To the extent he adds anything to the likes of Chomsky and other hard-left America-bashers, it is a sickening schadenfreude at the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
Why should such a hateful specimen be featured on the front page of the newspaper’s Saturday Focus section? For the same reason anti-Americanism flourishes everywhere in Canada: It permits Canadians to feel superior. And in this regard, no one puts the case better than Roberts. Canada, he writes, stands “among the few that have managed to achieve anything approaching democracy’s ideals for a peaceful egalitarian society.” America, by contrast, is a nation in “the death throes of republicanism.”
What is more amazing than the sheer hatefulness of Roberts’ tone, however, is how many obvious mistakes he got past the Globe’s editors. Some examples:
Roberts: “It is safe to say that relocating more than a million people, along with the loss of the nation’s largest port, and the other economic consequences from Hurricane Katrina will bankrupt the United States. Or would, if anyone dared to call in the country’s debts … No other [nation] has ever racked up such a tab.”
Actually, the best estimates suggest the cost of Hurricane Katrina will be minimal in comparison to the size of the U.S. economy—a few day’s worth of the country’s US$11-trillion-plus annual GDP—which explains why U.S. stock markets actually rose substantially between the time Katrina hit and the time Roberts’ article appeared.
As for that aside about America’s tab, the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is less than Europe’s, and less than America’s own post-Second World War average.
Roberts: “Shahid Javed Burki, former vice-president of the World Bank’s China Department and a former Pakistani finance minister, forecasts that China will probably have enough purchasing power to surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy this year.”
An amazing claim, given that even the most generous measure available shows China’s economy to be US$4-trillion dollars smaller than America’s. The explanation is that Burki never said what Roberts claimed he’d said. What he stated is that China’s economy might overtake that of the the United States in 20 years.
Roberts on the real reason America waged the Iraq war: “Before the invasion of Iraq, OPEC apparently was considering whether to start trading in dual currencies, and some economists believe that an announcement like this would send the value of a dollar falling by up to 40%. By gaining control of the Iraqi oil fields—the world’s second richest after Saudi Arabia—the United States has effectively prevented an assault on the dollar.”
Forty percent. Wow. That would mean the Canadian dollar would actually be worth more than the greenback overnight—an astonishing result. So you’d think the Globe’s editors would check the source.
I did. And I found out the identity of the “economists” Roberts consulted.
Turns out the 40% figure originates with a “personal research project” posted on the Internet by an American health-care worker named William Clark. Among Clark’s many astounding claims is that “the effect of an OPEC switch to the Euro would be [that] the dollar would crash anywhere from 20-40%.” Clark’s source? “An astute and anonymous friend.” This friend, apparently, has morphed into what Roberts calls “some economists.”
It goes on. Roberts: “The Bush administration used the September, 2001, attacks as an excuse to pursue its thwarted plan for a pipeline taking oil from the Caspian through Afghanistan to the Pakistani port of Karachi.”
This 9/11-era conspiracy theory would have been easy for Globe editors to debunk, since all you’d have to do is investigate whether any U.S. company had actually built the sort of pipeline Roberts describes. (Four years after the Taliban’s demise, there have been elections—but alas, no such pipeline.)
Roberts on U.S. State Department policy planner George Kennan: “Only five countries, [Kennan] stated confidently, could ever pose [a serious threat to the United States]: Britain, Germany, Japan, Israel and Russia … The five-enemies theory is said to be one reason for the Pentagon’s shape.”
Problem: The Pentagon was dedicated in 1943. The State of Israel didn’t come into being until 1948. Where Roberts came up with this bizarre whopper I have no idea. It reads like something out of a modern-day Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I could go on: The U.S. population is about 300 million, not 200 million, as Roberts writes. George Washington was not the U.S. president at the time he signed the U.S. Constitution. The term “al-Qaeda” does not refer to “a database kept by the CIA.” And I don’t even know where to begin with such ludicrous statements as, “the only successful wars [the American Empire] has ever waged are the ones against the environment and its own people.”
What does that even mean?
But is there really any sense in parsing Roberts’ feverish ramblings? To the extent this essay had any motive, it was not to make a logical point through facts and arguments, but to stir up atavistic hatred for America.
What a wasted mind is Roberts’. And what a disgrace to the Globe and Mail that its editors let this hateful, error-littered screed stain the newspaper’s otherwise respectable pages.
? National Post 2005
If I ever hear a “journalist” from an old mainstream media organization complain and warn the public about the journalistic integrity of bloggers—as they always do—I need only point to the Globe and Mail piece in this critique. They’ve forever blown that argument now.
I seriously wonder about the state of “journalism” in this country, and indeed the mindset of my countrymen. I’m embarrassed again.
The Globe and Mail is owned by Bell Globemedia, which also owns the CTV television network and Bell ExpressVu satellite television, in addition to other services like their Bell cell phone operation.
I strongly suggest canceling your Globe and Mail subscription and switching to the National Post if you want a “national” paper.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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