America Bashing, Alive and Well

At Coming Anarchy, Younghusband dispels the idea that Canada is on the slide to becoming another bastion of anti-American sentiments. It’s hard to say whether US relations will be a key factor in voter choice on January 23, but the…

This is from a David Frum article dated 1-3-06 in the National Post.

After a spasm of heart-rending, frightening violence, Toronto’s Mayor, David Miller, and its news media want Torontonians to remember one thing: The city is very, very safe. Really…If there is any problem in Toronto, the Mayor insists, it is traceable to the United States: “The U.S. is exporting its problem of violence to the streets of Toronto,” David Miller complained on Dec. 27…Canada’s overall crime rate is now 50% higher than the crime rate in the United States. Read that again slowly—it seems incredible, but it’s true. It’s true too that you are now more likely to be mugged in Toronto than in New York City… Since the early 1990s, crime rates have dropped in 48 of the 50 states and 80% of American cities. Over that same period, crime rates have risen in six of the 10 Canadian provinces and in seven of Canada’s 10 biggest cities…

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=fb715fde-9cee-42e2-ae75-81061c3cee14

Frum, of course, has no credibility due to his contamination in the service of George Bush. Martin and the Liberal Party seem to be slipping in the polls a bit, so there should be an increased Great Satan-baiting until election day. America-bashing worked quite well for Gerhard Schroeder in 2002.

Yes, the good old anti-American ticket. A ready-made answer for politicians trying to make their own populations forget their own failures or lack of solutions (in the case of those not in power). I guess it just makes sense to use it, as anti-Americanism often seems to be little more than an all-purpose scapegoat for many average people.

Kushibo,

Yes.

Yes!

Yes!

Rant over

With pleasure. Yesterday I had a political forum at my highschool involving regional candidates for the federal election (I think). It was devastatingly stupid. The Canadian Healthcare Act, or whatever it was that consolidated our healthcare system into an inefficient public monopoly, was accorded the status of holy writ, with candidates attempting to outdo each other on the issue of maintaining the system against any alternative at all costs (better dead that not-red!). Many a bilge was spewed forth about meaningless concepts like “social justice” and the New Democrat pontificated at length about the need for a populist government with national control, of, among other things, the oil industry (lesson of OPEC: oil and government should never, EVER mix) and the liberal sidestepped the probing questions about her party with red herrings about how she “earned” her position. The “need” for foreign aid was never question, though the conservative at least had the sense to raise scepticism over the issue of debt relief, and many an annoying reference was made to Sweden and Finland (nonwithstanding that the median income in Sweden is lower than for blacks in the USA, Sweden doesn’t have large minorities that have been marginalised for a long time, and a continuous influx of immigrants from much poorer countries, and that Finland owes its prosperity to its oil reserves, not its government. As a counterexample to all these, there is always Chile). The Liberal, the New Democrat, and the Green paid tribute to the Almighty State by expounding upon the “need” for social programmes, and the remainder of it was a mud-fest, with parties accusing each other of “secret agendas” and “corruption”. As H.L. Mencken once said: “In a democracy, each party devotes its chief energies to proving that the others consist of scoundrels, and all commonly succeed, and are right…”. The only good thing that came of it was the fact that I got to miss a full hour and a half of classes.

If I were old enough to vote, I’d boycott the election.