The Obama White House: Mange We Can Believe In!

The FOX network has long been rightfully derided for its umbilically intimate relationship with the Republican Party and America's broader right wing. Of those two hateful hemispheres of planetary idiocy, though, FOX has traditionally been the more thoughtful--the analytical foil to the feckless party on whose behalf it speaks. Throughout the Bush II era, the blithering cretins at FOX usually managed to be just barely close enough to the right side of sanity to seem downright moderate beside the cackling hysteria and stumblebum ineptitude of the Bush/Cheney misadministration. FOX's mere carrying of The Simpsons gave it a credibility the Bush White House could never hope to approximate.

Apparently, Team Obama considers this asymmetry to be too deeply embedded in the American psyche to be changed without massive systemic damage. Accordingly, soon after FOX releases a candid clip featuring some of its vulgarly anti-Canadian talking-heads sensibly denouncing Homeland Security for treating the Canada/U.S. border as a serious threat to American security, Obama's security doyenne Janet Napolitano repeats the odious slur--iterated across American right-wing talk-radio since literally days after 9/11--that many of the WTC terrorists had entered the U.S. through Canada and that Canada therefore needs vigilant surveillance.

In a heartwarming gesture of bi-partisan asininity, John McCain later gave his sclerotic endorsement to this preposterous urban myth. McCain, at least, has an excuse: he's clearly in the early stages of senile dementia. I suppose Napolitano's excuse is that she's an American (an excuse which, in its basic purport, is not unlike McCain's), but I do believe that her bottomless ignorance and its possible executive ramifications (she's in Obama's cabinet, remember) serve to prove that Americans' utter lack of understanding of and respect for Canada is not (as so many of us believe) a harmless eccentricity--a patronising nervous tick that we should simply ignore, laugh off, and learn to live with. It's a deeply worrying neurosis that chronically impedes the very continental security about which American official blowhards claim to be so preoccupied.

Former Mulroneyite Michael Wilson, Harper's ambassadorial appointee, appears to think that being "frustrated" by Napolitano's stark stupidity is somehow good enough. This extravagantly-paid stuffed cardigan was supposed to use his wide network of U.S. connections to change the reflexively anti-Canadian tone in Washington, made all the more urgent when the traditionally protectionist Democrats regained the White House late last year. If Ignatieff manages to kick Harper's well-marbled ass to the curb this year or next, I will enjoy watching him yank Wilson off of D.C.'s "exclusive" (i.e. all-white) golf courses and back into his rocking chair where he’s harmless. We need somebody who can bring the kind of balls Frank McKenna brought to the job before Harper's shabby partisan hackery brought his successful term to a premature end.

Until then, fellow Canucks, please enjoy your utterly unearned and quintessentially "American" reputation as the folks who helped bring down the Twin Towers--brought to you today by "Change We Can Believe In"!