we’ve been subsidizing French Canadian stupidity since 1945, and now we wonder why there’s so much more of it? We’ve made anti-Americanism a winning proposition, a gamble without a downside. If you tell me that my pair of nothin’ will trump your full house, you’re damn right I’ll raise the bet. What’s the house max?
Thanks to our subsidy, France is now as pretty and Canada is useless as Marianne the CBC, "canadian values", their national symbol.
FranceCanada is playing a game we rigged for them. They’ve come to expect that our benevolence is endless, and that our gullibility is, too. It’s no wonder that they also expect to compete in a world economy when competition is all but outlawed at home. It should come as no surprise they think they can get national defense and power projection with a tiny army and a laughable aircraft carrier. Nod knowingly when France hamstrings Canada whimpers and bitches and postures about our efforts to fight Islamofascism abroad, when they won’t even tackle it in their own capital Montreal and Toronto.
So now France Canada says they’ll veto waver on any UN use-of-force resolution concerning Iraq – a resolution we don’t need, according to the very resolution (1441) that France not only voted for, but co-authored.
...may achieve something I have long wanted to see... the end of the fiction in American minds that either France or Germany are in fact US allies in any meaningful sense.
This is the first step needed to de-couple the Anglosphere Atlantic Alliance from the legacy of World War Two and the Cold War. The first clear step that this process is under way will be the permanent withdrawal of most US forces currently stationed in Germany, a situation which is a costly anachronism in the post Cold War world. Maybe the opportunity will be immediatly post-Gulf War II, with the US troops currently based in Germany which are going to be involved in Iraq going back to bases in the USA instead.
I just hope the pompous Chirac and the buffoonish Schroeder keep plucking on the eagle's feathers... sooner of later Blair, or his successor, is going to have to decide if they want to be on the side of history's winners or history's losers.
Hell, changing the name of N.A.F.T.A. to North Atlantic Free Trade Area would not even require reprinting all that stationary with the acronym on it!
It's not just the UK that faces that choice. Canada faces it as well, and the signs do not look good. As noted in the Mark Steyn column a few days ago, whenever the Liberals get a chance to follow their EUish ideals, they do so, no matter what the cost to Canada. What we are seeing in Canada at this time is the triumph of the EU ideology. (Let's just call it what it is, eh? Wide-eyed blissed out socialism)
The current growing distance between Canada and the US does not represent a failure on the part of the Canadian government, but the ultimate success of it's ideology. A recently as a decade ago, the fact that there was a unified right wing party meant there was a counterbalance to the Liberal anti-americanism and repairs to the damage done by liberals (albeit every 8-10 years or so) Now the Liberals do not have any practical (read- electoral) motive to tack to the right, posess a decade of accumulated arrogance and insularity feeding off each others' anti-americanism to the point where the logical identity for Canadians who wish to be "distinct" from the states isn't a Canadian identity, but an anti-american one. Especially when we have the UN and the EU to suck up to and preen for.
If the Liberals view our looming schism with the US as a problem, they only see it from a perspective that their actions should not cost Canada anything. Breaking from the US will be done in much the same fashions as the euros, with protestations of eternal friendship and the solid belief that ingratitude and spite should never have any consequences. As for the cost to regular Canadians through the economy, well the Liberals have a large store of experience in impovrishing large stretches of the country with only the nobelest motives. Why not go the whole hog?
I'm interested if anyone remembers the days of Trudeau- did our relations with the US decline to this point?
BCM // 10:53 AM
Remember: some on the left in the 80s were seized with the Spirit of Nixon, and wanted nothing more than détente and rapprochement; they wanted endless negotiations that would codify the precise number, size, and destructive potential of the missiles aimed at our cities. If we all agreed to have 27,293 missiles apiece, and we swapped ballet companies once a year, everything would be fine. For us, anyway. For those living on the other side of the wall, well, they had our warmest personal regards and best wishes. We had our system; they had theirs.
Which is like saying we fed our dogs, and they beat them and put them in kennels, but since we both have dogs we must celebrate our common bond. The Anti-Communists didn’t buy it; they wanted to confront Communism and defeat it. They kept pointing out the nature of the Communist regimes, and insisting that everything the nutball left said was metaphorically true of the West was factually true of the Communists, and more so.
A North American "confederation" is never going to happen. Not now, not in 50 years. Europeans, living on a continent of mostly failed nation states that rewrite their constitutions every generation as they lurch from Third Empire to Fifth Republic, have concluded understandably enough that supranational institutions are the way to go. Equally understandably, Americans have no interest in diluting either sovereignty or democratic accountability in transnational bodies.
[...]
Within 48 hours of 9/11, it was clear that Canada had a choice. It could be inside a North American perimeter or outside a U.S. perimeter. Given that the trucks were mostly backed up on the northern side of the border, the answer seemed obvious. But the siren song of "Canadian values" -- i.e., Liberal Party values -- was too powerful, and, as we know from Kyoto to the gun registry, whenever the national interest conflicts with Liberal platitudes the Grits go with the latter. Last fall, when the U.S. announced that Canadians born in selected Middle Eastern countries would be required to submit to "special registration" procedures, Ottawa's privacy commissioner responded by demanding that "place of birth" be removed from all Canadian passports and The Toronto Star huffed and puffed about "Muslim-focused racial profiling" full of "contempt for due process."
[...]
Professor Bliss talked about whether a "Republican government" would "want us as we are now." But that formulation's too parliamentary: The reality is that to get any additional stars on that flag there has to be something in it for both teams. In the Fifties, when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted, each party figured they'd got a state apiece. They were right, though not about which state was whose. On those terms, eight out of our 10 provinces have no chance of admission to the Union, since the GOP would be signing its death warrant. The only possible scenario is a deal by which Alberta and B.C. wiggle through -- Alberta for obvious reasons and because to Republicans it hosts the only assimilable population of Canadians -- or, at any rate, the least unassimilable; B.C. to even things up on the grounds that, given its propensity for electing charlatans, sleazeballs and all too human failures, the Dems might regard it as at least potentially rich soil. It would also fill in the map, leaving the "continental U.S." as a pleasing semi-serifed L-shape from Alaska to Florida.
[...]
America didn't change. We did, and in a dizzyingly short time. What would it take for the Americans to revise their view? Well, we could change back. It won't happen, can't happen. Indeed, on present demographic trends, it's more likely that Alberta will gradually lose the will to resist joining its neighbours in the Trudeaupian stupor.
[...]
Bali was a soft target for the terrorists because it exists in both worlds -- a Western enclave in bandit country. Canada also exists in both worlds: We're the country that supports both the Princess Pats and Hezbollah.
Washington knows that now. The big story since September 11th is that they finally see us for what we are: foreigners.
