JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Amazing, our robot-ideologue gets something for once.

We have no interests in Mali and no interest in Mali.

But those facts didn’t stop Harper’s most brainless minister from floating the idea that we should get involved in America’s next foreign adventure in mass murder.

I guess Harper received enough feedback to convince him that the public could not stomach his Minister of Rescue Helicopters for Fishing Trips’ brainless proposal.

Concern over Mali, apart from normal humanitarian concerns, is solely the territory of America’s giant blundering military-intelligence establishment.

But that is the case in so many other matters too, and was the case in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya.

We did waste a good many lives and a great deal of treasure in some of those places just in order to gain “creds” with America’s military Frankenstein.

And this is, after call, a government whose ministers’ surest route to a big appointment is to suddenly blurt something out, almost like a devotee at a Pentecostal Church’s speaking in tongues while writhing on the carpet, about fighting for another place in which Canadians in general have no interest, Israel.

That certainly was the case for Peter Kent and is an ongoing obsession for John Baird, aka the junk yard dog of vicious attacks and gushes of seemingly pointless enthusiasms.

I suppose we should be grateful for small things: we will not be winging our way over to Mali, dribbling away billions of dollars we don’t have, just to interfere in matters about which we have zero understanding.

 

[Note: Shortly later, Canada offered limited use of a C-17 transport plane to France, whose military had agreed to do America’s dirty work in Mali. Fittingly, given the clownish nature of  our Minister of Defense, after some fanfare in sending it off, the plane had a problem and was stuck on the runway for some time.] 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“But you can say one thing with confidence: a 14-month campaign that divides the country even more deeply, adds to uncertainty about long-term economic policy, fails to resolve anything but paralyses government in the meantime, all with the economy sliding back into recession, is not a good plan.”
Well put, Mr Crook.

You have precisely put your finger on the national political pulse and diagnosed why American politics are so inimical to good government.

It is actually bizarre in a nation with such a strongly defined sense of itself, that set patriotic feelings which have been very accurately described as the American Civic Religion, the people are so divided by what, in a longer term view, are trivia that they cannot pitch in to a national need and purpose so clear before them.

But it is nothing new. American killed people for ten years in Vietnam, squandered countless billions, and ended by dropping the convertibility of the dollar for what? A vicious domestic politics in which each side feared being “out-commied” by the other.
All that death and destruction dispensed to no point whatsoever since communism was always fated to wither through its internal inconsistencies.

Nations really do rise and fall in many instances owing to things which in hindsight seem immense stupidities, and America is certainly no exception.

The trouble is that the entire world must fear and be hurt by America’s crazy, meaningless politics because America has so thoroughly stuck its fingers into everyone else’s business.

There are many stories on the Internet, which if demonstrated true, may well end Perry’s campaign.

He is said to be a heavy user of prostitutes.

His wife was clearly not a happy camper in his last campaign for governor, going around with a rather frozen face and few words.

His religion is extreme and bizarre, a branch off the Pentecostals which the Pentecostals have called heresy.

And remember the American Pentecostals themselves are folks whose idea of religious inspiration is rolling around on the floor and yelling meaningless gibberish, a performance known as “speaking in tongues.”

Yes, America has a lot of Christian fundamentalists, but they are a minority, and the really bizarre ones are a still smaller minority.