One of the best speeches about the Canadian political campaing with America

[dream431ca]

It's by someone by the name of Rex Murphy..sort of a political analyst with whitty speeches..here's a good one (sort of long)

It's a little over a year or two now and as far as the news cycle is concerned, that's ancient history, one with the Punic Wars.

One of the main planks of Paul Martin's appeal to the nation was that he was going to unfreeze Canada-U.S. relations; that he, Mr. Martin, was going to put an end to the sharp elbows approach of Jean Chretien and work to normalize and improve relations with Washington and the Bush administration.

But then came missile defence, the mad cow business and softwood lumber. On missile defence, the Americans claim that our government was both cute and misleading with them. They didn't like it when we didn't come on board and they really didn't like what they regard as being led down the garden path on the issue.

On mad cow and softwood lumber, it was our turn to be angry. The long ban on Canadian beef products by the Americans was seen as more opportunistic than a health concern, and their flouting of various tribunals on softwood lumber just sheer wilfulness and arrogance.

So we've gotten tough with the Americans. Tough by Canadian standards is Paul Martin going down to New York and giving a spirited lecture to the Bush administration and threatening to institute a new energy policy, one that would seek new and far-off clients such as communist China as opposed to our neighbours, the energy-hungry Americans, for Canada's great oil and energy resources.

And this came on the heels of another lecture delivered here at home by our Ambassador to the Americans, Frank McKenna, and delivered with the American Ambassador at the same table.

"The government of the United States is in large measure dysfunctional," McKenna said. "There is so much independence of political party, loyalty if you like, that everybody in their own way is a freelancer going off in different directions. Be like having 535 Carolyn Parrishes in one place."

Five hundred thirty-five Carolyn Parrishes. Dysfunctional is not a term ambassadors routinely use. In the smooth atmospherics of diplomacy, it reaches to insult. Nor is it a particularly happy choice. Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle. Coming from a representative of a government, ours, that is glued together by short-term deals, rewrites its budget in a hotel room, owes its existence to Belinda Stronach's midnight conversion, labours under a commission of inquiry over one of the most explosive and durable scandals of the last four decades and could fall on whatever day Jack Layton decides that it should.

But curiously, it's the mad dysfunctionality of our minority parliament that makes taking a stern line with the Americans so useful, and, of course, it's pure political gold to take a knock at George Bush. Bush is the target of every comedian, elected or otherwise.

Also, we know that with Gomery hovering on the horizon, David Dingwall commanding the headlines, that a good dash of down with Washington, down with Bush is a kind of mana from heaven for a government that one way or the other is going to have to go to the polls very soon.

I'd measure all this tough talk with the Americans in the context of the inevitable election. It may not be new and it is certainly not clever, but summoning up the demon of the great bullying Americans is one more sure trip down the road of the most successful ploy in all of Canadian politics. Mr. Chretien knew it and now Mr. Martin knows it too. For "The National," I'm Rex Murphy.

 

[The Mullinator]

Just reading that I can hear Rex Murphy's unique voice and way of talking reading it to me in my head, I think anyone who has heard him give one of analysis more than once will hear it too. I have to say I have a great deal of respect for the man.