The Canadian MSM (mainstream media) is in a tizzy over President Bush’s visit to Canada, trying desperately to maintain the fiction that Canada is important and America (especially the “Jesusland” Bush-electorate) is idiotic and arrogant, while being sycophantic enough to stay attached to the American teat that lets us sip our tea (or Molson Canadian) in luxury without any sort of principles or comittment to anything at all.
Peaktalk has a roundup on the to-do, and an essay by Aidan Maconachy on that rara avis, the Canadian Bush supporter (check out Diplomadic for more on Canada and another US neighbor, Cuba).
The Iraq attack in particular, in the eyes of many liberals was the act of an idiot. To others, it demonstrated tremendous courage and a willingness to defend the United States at any price. The jury is still out, debating the final verdict. As Jacques Chirac recently remarked …”history will judge”. Of course, its easy to play the proctor when you are comfortably ensconced on the sidelines sipping a pernod.
It continues to boggle me that the received wisdom maintains the “idiot cowboy” meme, when Bush, from my observation and study, is a ferociously intelligent yet down-to-earth and principled guy with a knack for seeing the underlying problem, sweeping decades of failed conventional wisdom aside, and resolute perseverance in implementing his radical and often painful solutions.
It is ironic that those who condemn the US for its past foreign policy (while ignoring the Cold War, which necessitated much of it) now condemn Bush for his, which is a radical change, from expediency and realpolitik to principle and real support for democracy.
Encouragingly, however, Friends of America has a survey that shows a large number of Canadians have positive attitudes towards America.
Update: Came across a characteristically illuminating essay by Victor Davis Hanson wondering why self-proclaimed humanists and liberals don’t support the liberation of Iraq (or Afghanistan, for that matter):
Just as the breakdown of a few Communist Eastern European states led to a general collapse of Marxism in the east, or the military humiliation in colonial Africa and the Falklands led to democratic renaissance in Iberia and Argentina, or American military efforts in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama City brought consensual government to Central America, a reformed Afghanistan and Iraq may prompt what decades of billions of dollars in wasted aid to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians, the 1991 Gulf War, and 60 years of appeasement of Gulf petrol-sheiks could not: the end of the old sick calculus of Middle East tyrannies blackmailing the United States through past intrigue with the Soviet Union, then threats of oil embargos and rigged prices, and, most recently, both overt and stealthy support for fundamentalist killers.
. . .
Oddly, our enemies understand the long-term strategic efforts of the United States far better than do our own dissidents. They know that oil is not under U.S. control but priced at all-time highs, and that America is not propping up despotism anymore, but is now the general foe of both theocracies and dictatorships — and the thorn in the side of “moderate” autocracies. An America that is a force for democratic change is a very dangerous foe indeed. Most despots long for the old days of Jimmy Carter’s pious homilies, appeasement of awful dictatorships gussied up as “concern” for “human rights,” and the lure of a Nobel Prize to ensure nights in the Lincoln bedroom or hours waiting on a dictator’s tarmac.