Harper lied, Canadians staying in Afghanistan

Let me try to be dispassionate about this. 152 Canadians have died needlessly in Afghanistan. (I said "dispassionate", not "unopinionated".) Now Prime Minister Harper proposes, off his own bat, to keep about 1000 Canadian soldiers in that wretched cesspit of a country for another three years past the promised withdrawal date of July 2011.

First the timeline. Following 9/11, the Americans -- more accurately, the Bushmen -- decided to take revenge on Al Qaeda by attacking them in their homeland, which they thought was Afghanistan. Once again the profound American ignorance of geography and geopolitics came into play, as it turned out there were no Al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan, only the Taliban.

No Afghani ever attacked the USA. The perps of the 9/11 horror came from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. But no matter. Afghanistan was in the neighbourhood so...send in the Marines! Unfortunately, even though the UN refused to support the American mission, NATO went along with it, so NATO member countries were asked to participate in the "coalition of the willing".

About this time, the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien felt maybe Canada kind of owed the US one, having bailed out on the invasion of Iraq, so M. Crouton said OK, we'll send some of our guys for a couple of years, maybe until 2003 or 2005.

Well, 2003 came and went. So did 2005. The sound of wheels spinning and a mission going nowhere was loud in the land. So the mission got extended to 2007, then to 2009. By 2008 the mission was not just going nowhere, it was going in reverse.

By this time "Call me Steve" Harper was in charge, but, having only a minority government, didn't want to have to carry the can for a dubious decision to prolong the ill-advised and ill-fated war any further. So he did what Canadian governments always do, and appointed a commission.

Setting up a commission or an enquiry is a lot like hiring a consultant: you usually get the answer you want. Sure enough, the advice of John "The Man from Glad" Manley -- who conveniently had been a member of the Chrétien government -- was to give it another two years, max.

Harper brought the unManley report before the House of Commons, saying that Parliament must decide. In reality this was a clever ploy to make the Liberals take the blame. Not only had they committed Canada to the mission in the first place, but were going through a vicious internecine fight of their own, so they were hardly in a position to vote "no" and throw the country into yet another election.

Besides, Harper assured everyone, this is the ABF, the Absolutely Bloody Final extension. All the troops would come home in 2011, for sure, except maybe for a handful required to guard the Canadian embassy in Kabul. Really. Scout's Honour.

And so it came to pass...another two years in hell.

Now, with no exit strategy or plans in sight, nor any end to the war, Mr. Harpoon has had a sudden epiphany. It was wrong to promise to withdraw in 2011! We might be needed -- one wonders by whom -- for a little while longer.

On Remembrance Day, the day when we honour our fallen soldiers, Harper announced that, yes, Canada would leave some troops in Afghanistan after all. Say 1000 or so and this time for not two, but three years. On Remembrance Day! The cynicism and hypocrisy boggles the mind! 152 have died so for their sake some more will have to die.

But noooooo... Harper says Canadians will be there only in a training role, not a combat role. They will help the Afghan National Army and the corrupt and discredited Afghan National Police to develop their capacity to bring peace and order to their ravaged country. It will be "strictly inside the wire", in the peaceful and safe confines of Kabul, where explosions are less frequent than in Kandahar. Yeah, right.

Walt is old enough to remember Vietnam. For those who don't, let it be recalled that the Americans first went to Vietnam as advisors, to help the ARVN develop its capacity to defeat the dreaded Vietminh and bring peace and order etc. etc.

Tens of thousands of lives later, the Americans discovered that you can't very well train people to wage war without going into battle with them. What would make a training role in Afghanistan any different?

The fact is that if you are wearing a uniform -- any uniform -- you're fair game for the Taliban. Trainers or combat troops, it makes no difference. They all have targets painted on their backs.

Hell, the Taliban don't even see our soldiers. They just plant IEDs on the roads in the dead of night, then hide behind the nearest hill and wait for the big bang. Any "foren" venturing outside the camp is fair game, trainer or not.

This would be a great point to raise in a debate in Parliament, if there were going to be a debate in Parliament. But there won't be any such debate. Harper calmly announced, with a straight face, that since our troops will be teachers, not fighters, the decision to leave them there is an executive decision, which he, acting alone -- for it appears all this took his Defence Minister by surprise -- is entitled to make. Just like the president of the USA.

So much for the Canadian constitutional monarchy. So much for the supremacy of parliament. And so much for the lives of scores or possibly hundreds of Canadian men and women who will die in the dust on the other side of the world...for nothing.

Started your Christmas shopping yet?

It's terrible to have to write so soon about getting ready for Christmas. Also terrible that it occurred to me to say "the winter holidays", just in case there might be some "readers of other faiths" who might be offended by my daring to speak of Christmas. But I digress...

Christmas catalogues are starting to arrive in Walt's mailbox. Many years ago, two big department stores, fiercely competitive one with the other, used to send out big, thick "dream books". I and my siblings used to pore over these by the light of the flickering candle, while big white flakes of snow fell past the hoarfrosted windows [Get on with it! Ed.]

Yes, well... Sadly, the days of the huge Christmas catalogues are over. Gone are the books with pictures of everything from soup to nuts...literally. Now I'm seeing slim pamphlets from specialty retailers of chocolates, electronic goods, and, of course, toys and games.

There's a marketer called Calendar Club which specializes in -- guess what -- calendars. Apparently they're not making a large or even small fortune selling calendars, so they've added to their catalogue a section called "+ toys & games".

I didn't see any toys but there are all kinds of board and table games. Included are two pages of "word games" -- all variants on Scrabble and Yahtzee. They also have "games that make you think", the descriptions of which make me think, "Who on earth would buy this?"

Under "adult games", where I was looking for "Twister", I found "You might be a redneck if..." which is based on "Jeff Foxworthy Redneck jokes", whatever they are.

But best of all, under "family and party games", you can now buy a great new game called "FART!" Yep, that's the name of the game, folks. [It's supposed to have a "TM" after it. Ed.] Here's the catalogue description:

Flatulent fun with a CD player... Fart! is the side-splitting, sound-sational game that helps players unwind and release a little pressure! Players race to be the first to play out their cards while accompanied by a fast'n'frantic fart chorus that keeps them in stitches! Wild hilarity at the press of a button!

I guess it was only a matter of time until someone thought of a way to make a buck on such favourites as "Burglar Burglar", and the old artificial-fart-under-the-arm trick. Fun for the whole family! Who said good taste is dead?

Straight talk about blacks from Mr. C

"What's wrong with these people?" That was the theme of a keynote speech given by Bill Cosby in May, 2004, at an NAACP-sponsored gala in Washington. On the stage of Constitution Hall, speaking from his heart to a multiracial audience, he told some home truths about the home folks. Watch the video.



How did the audience react? No prizes for guessing that they were none too pleased. Not everyone was laughing. What you don't see in the video clip is the rebuttal by Theodore Shaw, then head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who grabbed a microphone to tell the crowd that the problems "in the black community were not self-inflicted".

Poor Mr. Cosby. Ever since what is now called "the Pound Cake Speech", he has been denigrated [Now cut that out! Ed.] as an "Uncle Tom", a racist, a traitor to his people, etc. etc. All because he dared to say out loud what political correctness says may no longer be said.

Time magazine columnist Christopher John Farley summed it up this way: "Bill Cosby broke the unwritten rule of keeping black dirty laundry in black washing machines."

"The suspect spoke with a Caribbean accent"

I didn't post anything yesterday because I was in shock. I read a newspaper account of a "home invasion" in a Toronto suburb, in which an Oriental lady was killed and her husband injured. There, at the end of the story, was a description of the three suspects. The colour of the perps wasn't mentioned but the report did say that one of them "spoke with a Caribbean [sic] accent".

"A Caribbean accent!" Cazart! That phrase -- actually "a Jamaican accent" -- used to be set in cold type in the Toronto papers, and routinely appended to stories about convenience store robberies and the like.

Then it became politically incorrect to suggest that crimes were being committed by people of colour...especially the Jamaicans who have been welcomed into Canada since former PM Trudeau opened the floodgates.

At the Globe and Mail, at least, it is still taboo to refer to someone's race in a crime report. Or at least it was, until last night. Following comments by dozens of readers of the online edition, the Glob finally inserted the word "black" into the descriptions.

However, a commentator named "Meatball" had the finally word: "Gee, they were black? What a surprise! I'm shocked, SHOCKED!"

Who's screwing up America - final word

On November 6th I posted a couple of excerpts from the introduction to Bernard Goldberg's fine opus 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. Of the hundred listed (no, I won't tell you who they are!) a couple of died and a couple have slid into the memory hole. Most of them, however, are still out there, telling us -- the great unwashed -- how to behave and how to think. Here's part of "A Final Word" from Mr. Goldberg.

For too many years now, the cultural elites have been working overtime trying to portray all those hicks in flyover country as grotesquely distorted fun-house mirror images of who they really are, without the fun part.

If Middle Americans oppose gay marriage, they must be homophobes. If they don't like the sex jokes at eight o'clock at night on network TV, they're squares. If ordinary Americans think gangsta rap is foul and degrading, they're racists who don't understand black culture. If Red State America thinks our "best" universities are dominated by left-wing ideologues, they're anti-intellectual dolts. If they think feminists have gone to far, they're sexists.

What [this] tells us a lot about are the cultural elites themselves, those cloistered liberals who, as Tom Wolfe once put it, "do not have a clue about the rest of the United States" and "who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality. That is constantly done, and there is real resentment."

Yes. Indeed there is. And now, at last, that resentment is being made manifest. With the exception of the "blip" two years ago -- even Walt didn't see that one coming -- Americans (and Canadians) have been showing in the media and, more importantly, at the polls, that they don't see things the way the elites do. Returning to "A Final Word"...

What is it that so many ordinary Americans want? It's actually pretty simple. We want a little more appreciation for the values that most of us -- liberals as well as conservatives, Democrats as well as Republicans -- used to take for granted: civility, mutual respect, a semblance of decency and yes, a little old-fashioned love of country too.

The emphasis is mine. Amen.

The things they eat

Today Walt got shanghaied into a shopping expedition with Agent 78, who, it can now be revealed, is Mrs. Walt. Equipped with reuseable bags and styrofoam coolers, we forayed into one of the Big City's three Chinatowns, in search of "home food".

I have never browsed in a Chinese supermarket or grocery store without coming on at least one "food" which I don't recognize, have never heard of, and will probably never eat...at least, not knowingly.

We passed by the fresh beef tripe and pork spleens en route to the corner in which the live fish are sold. There I saw a sign which made me wish I'd remembered my camera. It advertised a tankful of "big head crap". Not kidding. We bought a tilapia instead.

"Facilitism": a better answer?

The posts on "How to fix the economy" -- my adaptation of an essay by Stephen Leacock -- elicited a lengthy response from Ron McPherson, an accountant and present-day resident of Leacock's hometown, Orillia, Ontario.

Ron agrees that the world's economy is broken, but doesn't think laissez-faire capitalism is the answer. He puts the blame on governments, banks, and the whole concept of debt and the charging of interest. The fix, according to his book Freedom's Dawning, is a new economic system which he calls Facilitism.

Here's what Ron has to say about Leacock's idea...

I’ve never appreciated Stephen Leacock's writings anywhere near the extent to which they're promoted. We do, however, have a few things in common: living in Orillia, awareness of excessive government and taxes, idle industry and workers, and recognition that people seem to believe their government should look after them.

The latter belief, in my opinion, is impossible to achieve. However, no-one should be without the basics for living. Our planet has far more than enough for all of us to have great lives without the stress imposed by our present enslaving structures.

Capitalism has proven over and over again throughout the last 300 years or so that it doesn’t work, except for the benefit of a few. Even Leacock admits this when he suggests that although we need these few profiteers to get things turned around that when the profiteer has finished his work; “We can always put him back into the penitentiary if we like”.

Communism, of course, also functions with an elite class ruling over their oppressed masses.

The farce of democracy, with its supposed representatives of the people voting in Parliament as demanded by party leaders, who in turn impose the dictums they themselves receive from the controllers of the money supply, progressively advance the enslavement of the people while expanding the confiscation of the peoples’ earnings through taxes and fees to pay for wars and interest charges on government borrowings. Absolutely disgusting! And the people have accepted these shenanigans. Ugh! But they are waking up.

The world needs a better system, one that can eliminate taxes and poverty, one that allows those who desire more than the basics to earn more, one that provides incentives for all people to contribute. One that also provides free heath care and education. Such a system exists. It is called Facilitism. Its time has come.

Our politicians here in Canada, or any other country that has sufficient resources to function independently until other countries come on stream, if they had the gumption and daring, could quickly implement Facilitism’s funding methodology and eliminate taxes by modifying the country’s computerized tax and benefit data base of their residents.

Click on the link to Ron's book to have a look at the Facilitism website. You can contact Ron at ron@facilitism.com.