Americans want to know why Martin’s so eager to slap U.S.
I’ve been struggling to answer wave after wave of correspondence from American readers wanting to know just why embattled Prime Minister Paul Martin is using President George W. Bush and the U.S. in general as a whipping boy in his desperate bid to retain a tenuous grip on power.
They are perplexed as to why a nation depending on the U.S. to buy more than 80% of its exports—and on which 50% of all Canadian jobs depend either directly or indirectly—would slap its closest neighbour in the face.
I won’t say “closest ally,” because Britain is now Washington’s closest ally with, as incredible as it may seem, Italy running a close second.
I’ll backtrack a bit.
A month or so ago, through a friend, Herb Meyer, who was special assistant to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Ronald Reagan, and vice-chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, I was introduced to Thomas Lifson.
Lifson is quite an accomplished fellow, having been awarded a master’s degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, obtained a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard Business School, and a PhD. in sociology from Harvard.
To top it off, he has also taught all three subjects at Harvard as a faculty member.
Eloquent and elegant, Lifson is quite an intellectual giant.
He is also the publisher of the intellectual conservative digest, The American Thinker, which is just about the hottest political journal in the U.S. today, and is, I’m told, required reading for anyone at the top of the American political establishment.
It turned out that, through Meyer, Lifson had been a reader of my columns in the Sun for some time, and wanted me to start contributing to The American Thinker (www.americanthinker.com) on a regular basis.
That’s how I came to pen an exhaustive article, “Canada’s Liberals Blame America,” detailing how the regimes of both Jean Chretien and Paul Martin had abused the Bush administration at every touch and turn and how Martin was now seemingly trying to blame all of Canada’s ills on the U.S.
Covered was the gibberish from the likes of Chretien’s bad-mannered communications director Francine Ducros calling Bush a “moron”, to fanatical Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish’s comment of “Americans! I hate the bastards” and to Parrish’s stamping on a doll fashioned as Bush on a TV show.
Then into how the Chretien cabal broke all diplomatic rules by letting Americans know Ottawa would prefer to see Democrat Al Gore elected president in 2000 rather than Bush, and how in 2004, the Liberal hierarchy, cabinet ministers and senators, had openly supported Democrat John Kerry over Bush.
Hardly the way to win friends and influence people.
Martin’s suggestion he might well divert Canadian oil exports to Communist China rather than the U.S. was also covered.
As was Martin blaming gun smuggling from the U.S. for the gang violence and 52 gun-related murders in Toronto last year.
How come gun smuggling from the U.S. was not a problem for the past 100 years or so until just last year?
None of this anti-Americanism makes sense.
I also went longingly back to the Brian Mulroney era and the famed Shamrock Summit in Quebec City in which Mulroney, Reagan, and wives Mila and Nancy, joined arms and warbled When Irish Eyes Are Smiling together.
In those days, Canada got just about everything it wanted from the U.S., but Chretien and Martin could hardly get Bush to return a phone call, never mind getting a foot in the door of the Oval Office.
Hence the ban on our beef went on and on, and the softwood lumber dispute never gets settled—with Mulroney, or Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, these issues would have been settled with the snap of a finger from Bush.
Not only were there waves of response from the U.S. on my article, but ripples from Canada, too.
I would never have guessed The American Thinker was known in Canada, but I know Harper’s wife, Laureen, and the likes of Calgary South Centre MP Lee Richardson, have tuned in.
Friends, we have to take our country back from the anti-American rabble now in Ottawa.
There’s too much at stake to allow this silly—and irrational—behaviour to go on.
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