Payback for the Lady in Red - Trump set to stick it to Canada

As the picture above shows, the Honourable Chrystia Freeland, Canada's Minister of Global/Foreign/External/Whatever Affairs, is a natural-born diplomat. So much so that, last June, Foreign Policy magazine, the voice of the one-world crowd, gave her its Diplomat of the Year award, which she travelled to Washington to accept.

Today, even as I write, the talented and fragrant "Lady in Red" is jetting down to the nation's capital [It's not in Richmond any more? Ed.] for an emergency meeting with... well... whoever in the American administration is willing (or obliged) to talk to her about free trade. Yesterday, President Trump (hahaha, liberals!) announced the demise of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the beginning of a new US-Mexico trade agreement. Canada is to be shut out of what was supposed to be a three-way deal, and now it's up to Ms Freeland to get America's second-biggest trading partner back in there.

Ms Freeland's skills as a negotiator are well known, and have been discussed in WWW before. As reported here in October of 2016, her ass in the hole [Please use your spell-checker. Ed.], played at a meeting to discuss a Canada-EU trade agreement, is throwing a hissy fit and storming out of the meeting room to tell the meeja "These people are impossible! I'm going home to my children!" Amazingly, the obstreporous Belgians (the objects of her feminist wrath) went for it and got the meeting going again, although the agreement in principle has yet to be ratified.

That's just one example of Ms Freeland's fine feminist SJW form. Like Hellery Clinton, she does not hesitate to diss anyone who disagrees with the enlightened and progressive principles which she shares with her boss, Canuck Prime Minister Just In Trudeau. It was the lovely Chrystia who insisted that gender equity, indigenous rights and climate change be included in any new North American free trade pact. Why the Americans and Mexicans didn't put anything in their new agreement about those important issues is undoubtedly a mystery to her.

Like Mrs Bill Clinton, Ms Freeland is one of those who lay the blame for all the world's troubles at the feet of President Trump. Without actually calling him "deplorable", she managed to infuriate him by the foreign policy speech she delivered while accepting the award mentioned above. In the speech, she directly addressed Americans in the room, raising "concerns" about the direction the United States has been taking under the Trump administration. She criticized America's approach to international relations, including NATO, tariffs and trade.

According to people who should know, both President Trump and Robert Lighthizer, the lead American trade negotiataor, viewed the speech as an insult, not only targeting administration publicly but doing so on their turf in Washington. Worse, the speech came hard on the heels of the acrimonious and unproductive G7 meetings in Charlevoix QC. It will be remembered that in the closing presser, M Trudeau said he'd had good meetings with President Trump et al. Then, only minutes after Mr Trump's plane had lifted off, Mr Socks said Canada would not be bullied, yada yada yada!

The White House was not fond of Chrystia Freeland even before her speech. The President's staff and allies dislike her, her policy positions (gender equity???), and her negotiating style ("These people are impossible!"). So they made Canada pay for Ms Freeland's feminist rants, by disinviting the Canucks from recent meetings. See "While Canuck minister plays SJW, USA and Mexico near NAFTA deal", WWW 11/8/18.

Senior government officials in Ottawa insist they're not worried about Ms Freeland's having got her tits in the wringer, saying the deal is far bigger than personalities. In their liberal smugness, they actually think the "Lady in Red" is only disliked because she has been so relentless in bluntly pushing forward Canadian interests, such as, errr, indigenous rights and, errr, gender equity, and [That's enough Canadian interests. Ed.]

The Liberal government and its apologists in the state-owned CBC are telling worried Canadians that this could be the most critical week yet in NAFTA negotiations and that a deal could be done by the end of the week. Walt will take that bet. Lifetime pct .989.

Further reading: "Questioning the CBC's love affair with Chrystia Freeland", WWW 8/10/17. Spoiler alert! The link to Ms Freeland's disastrous appearance with Bill Maher, in which her biases and ignorance were revealed to an incredulous public, doesn't work. YouTube has deleted that video. Any suggestion that pressure from the Trudeau government had anything to do with its disappearance is, of course, completely unfounded.

The infamous G7 photo

We haven't received any entries yet in our contest to find the best caption for the infamous G7 photo of POTUS staring down (or being stared down by) Angela Merkel, but here's one posted today on Blazing Cat Fur.

Think you can do better? Send your submissions to Walt at the usual address.

Parsing the G7 summit: triumph for Trump or Trudeau or just chaos?

Six of the G7 leaders who met at Charlevoix, Québec, this weekend thought it was a good meeting. As everyone who reads Dilbert knows, if the point of the meeting is to get together around a table (preferably at a luxury resort) and have a good yak, a meeting which doesn't end in mayhem is "good", even though nothing is actually accomplished.

POTUS seems to be obsessed with accomplishing something, so he doesn't agree that the meeting was a success. He came late and withdrew early [Huh? Ed.] thus avoiding most of Canuck Prime Minister "Junior" Trudeau's agenda for the gabfest. Saving the whales, keeping the earth from burning up and improving the miserable lives of girl children don't interest Mr Trump very much. He wanted to talk business -- trade and tariffs -- but the Euroweenies and Canuck Liberals aren't interested in those things. See "MAGA to MAAA - Walt explains President Trump's 'trade war' strategy", WWW 1/6/18.

Reuters got an excellent picture which sums up the tenor of the talks. Six friends and a stranger, but when the stranger is the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, what difference does it make? What this picture really needs, though, is a caption. There are already hundreds of memes floating around in cyberspace, but I thought I'd add a couple more.

Note from Ed.: OK, it's Monday morning so we have to make allowances, but honestly, I think Walt's captions are kind of lame. Surely some of our readers can do better? E-mail your suggestions to me at the usual address and we'll post a couple of good ones... if there are any.

Footnote: After his abrupt departure from the meeting, POTUS lobbed a grenade at the assembled globalists and progressives (especially "Mr Socks") by walking back his agreement to a group statement on trade, complaining that he had been blindsided by M Trudeau's criticism of his tariff threats at the summit-ending news conference. As he flew from Canada to Singapore Saturday night, POTUS vented his wrath on Twitter. Among other things, he called Junior "weak" and "dishonest", something Canucks have known since shortly after he took office, but nevertheless found a tad insulting, eh.

Egyptian President shows up Western pussies, calls air strike on ISIS

Were you surprised when the "soldier of ISIS" who blew himself up along with 22 innocent people in Manchester turned out to be Libyan? See "Manchester bomber: 'lone wolf' or 'known wolf'?" for a pic and more about Salman Abedi. He was born and raised in the United Kingdom, but ethnically Arab. His parents and at least one brother, since arrested, live in Libya.

Walt admits to being surprised. In my mind I connect the phrase "Islamic terrorists" with Muslim fanatics from places like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan -- some of the millions now living in western Europe thanks to the insane immigration policies of the likes of Angela Merkel, all the while plotting the extermination of their nominally Christian hosts.

It's easy to forget that those millions comprise Arabs from the Maghreb -- the countries shown in black on the map at left -- who are no less anti-Christian than their cousins from further east, perhaps more so because they have a huge anti-colonial chip on their shoulders, particularly those from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, which were French colonies, and Libya, which was ruled occasionally (and badly) by the Italians.

Libya was in the latest terrorism news this week not just because of the late Mr Abedi, but because on Wednesday Islamic militants attacked a bus carrying worshippers in central Egypt, killing at least 28 people and wounding 25 others. This didn't get a lot of play in the Western lamestream media because the worshippers weren't white Europeans. They were Coptic Christians, members of a fast-dwindling minority in the predominantly Muslim land of the pharaohs.

Full credit, then, to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi -- himself a Muslim -- for calling in an air strike on terrorist camps in Libya! State television reported that Egypt carried out six air strikes in Derna in eastern Libya, which is where the militants who carried out the deadly attack on the Coptic Christians were trained.



For those who don't speak Arabic, the voiceover in the army video said the Egyptian air force carried out strikes on targets in Libya "after confirming their involvement in planning and committing the terrorist attack in Minya governorate on Friday." In a televised speech late today, President Sisi said he would "not hesitate to strike terrorist camps anywhere", and promised to "protect our people from the evil."

Countries supporting terrorism should be punished, said the President, as he appealed to President Donald Trump for help. Contrast that with the wimpishness of the G7 leaders (other than Mr Trump) who spent all day today condemning the Manchester massacre (without once uttering the word "Islamic") and yakking about security without, errr, actually doing anything.

Where, Walt asks, is Santiago Matamoros (Saint James the Moorslayer) now that we really need him? Can it really be that we must look to a Muslim -- President Sisi -- to show us the way?

FURTHER VIEWING: Gavin McInnes explains how the British class system informs reactions to the Manchester massacre. The upper class and the lower class have remarkably different ideas about what should be done with the Muslims who want to kill us. Ties in nicely with Mr McInnes's video on modern education and Marxist teachers, which I'm reposting here today. Warning: contains the C-word.