Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

�

Click here for the Secret Decoder Ring to this issue!

Become a
Paid Mullings Subscriber!

(To join the FREE mailing list or to unsubscribe Click Here)

O, Canada!

Rich Galen

Friday December 03, 2004

Click here for an Easy Print Version

From Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri
GOP State Senate Caucus

President Bush traveled to Canada this week. Canadians are not, we are told, happy with the President because of the whole Iraq thing.

Memo to Canada: Americans don't much care what you think because we know that Canada's biggest asset is sharing a billion mile border with us.

Think I'm making this up? According to the CIA's World Factbook, "Roughly 90% of the population lives within 160 kilometers of the US border."

If Canada were located in Africa instead of North America, it would be a country of 32 million white people in loin cloths barely surviving by eating wildebeest they had illegally cross-checked with hockey sticks.

Nearly 87% of everything Canada exports, it exports to the US of A which works out to about a billion dollars per working day. How about if we close the border to Canadian imports every, say, Tuesday. For a year.

Canada's principal export has been comedians who come to the US because one of the many things Canadians lack is a sense of humor. And Mad Cow Disease. They export that. And a dreadful baseball team which is moving to Washington, DC.

Canada's principal import from the US has been draft dodgers. If we're lucky, frustrated Kerry voters will produce the next great wave of immigrants into places like Saskatoon.

OK, that's not true, but this is: "[A] long-term concern is the flow south to the US of professionals lured by higher pay, lower taxes, and the immense high-tech infrastructure."

Here's a good idea: Canada sends us its physicists and mathematicians (and maybe a shortstop who can hit a Major League slider), we send Canada � Michael Moore.

A Canadian commentator on NPR earlier this week said Canadians were waiting to see what olive branch the President would be bringing. Canadians have so little contact with reality they believed President Bush was coming up there to apologize.

For what? Oh, maybe for allowing Canadians to quake and cower under the defense umbrella of the big, bad United States. The total expenditures for defense of the whole country of Canada in 2003 was about $9.8 Billion. The US number? About $400 Billion.

You're welcome.

In the run-up to the President's visit there were concerns that there might be violence among Canadians in protest. Yeah. Right. What's the first place you think of when you hear the word "protesters?" Kee-rekt: Canada.

Here's what the Toronto Globe & Mail said about the protests: "[They] were mostly peaceful, save for a small group that threw paint and burned a tire."

A TIRE! A, one, single, lone, solo, solitary. Oh, and they threw paint. Probably water-based. Canadians are nothing, if not tidy.

What's the national flower of Canada, the Pansy?

For his part, President Bush was typically gracious and funny. At one point he said, "I, frankly, felt like the reception we received on the way in from the airport was very warm and hospitable, and I want to thank the Canadian people who came out to wave - with all five fingers."

It was not immediately clear if the Canadians got it.

New topic: Modesty would normally prevent me from mentioning this, but this month's GQ Magazine - which used to be called "Gentleman's Quarterly" - is titled, "Men of the Year." There are articles about Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman, and a bunch of guys who need a shave posing in their underwear, and a small article about me.

Dear Mr. Mullings:
We're sorry. We could have sworn you used the word "modesty" in a context which included yourself. Did we imagine that, or has someone spiked our holiday eggnog? Eh?
Signed,
The Royal Canadian Society for Well-Deserved Self-Effacement
Yep. Yep. Yep. I'm afraid if I didn't mention this in Mullings I would lose my status as one of Washington's Five Most Exuberant Self-Promoters.

On the Secret Decoder Ring today: A typed version of the GQ piece, a perfectly ridiculous Mullfoto of the day, and a link to another of the Iraq Flashbacks.

Current Issue | Secret Decoder Ring | Past Issues | Email Rich | Rich Who?