My original complaint against Canada and Canadians was that they are too concerned with what America thinks about them and obsessively preoccupied with being different than us. I criticized them in a G-File for making a huge deal out of a throwaway line by Pat Buchanan on MSNBC about “Soviet Canuckistan.”
Determined to hammer home my point for me, the Canadians have gone into a tizzy about, of all things, the program Crossfire. Last night, Jean Chretien, the Prime Minister, discussed the program by name. In the last 24 hours there have been dozens of news stories in Canada about the program I appeared on. Some of the stories make it seem the “moron” government spokeswoman finally got the heave-ho because of that segment. Now, look, CNN sends me a paycheck and all that, but I don’t think I’m diminishing Crossfire — or myself — much when I say that particular discussion was abysmal and even if had been great, serious governments of serious countries with serious press corps do not go batty about such things.