Our ungrateful American friends. (cont.)

It happens.

You're a journalist on deadline with a non-story. You struggle to come up with an engaging lead paragraph. This isn't your "beat" - a tech writer turned out this swine-flu piece for the Washington Post - and rather a lot of ignorance gets printed. You start with a cliche that applies to the wrong nationality, and it's downhill from there. Not your fault, really. Wrong writer for the story.

Par example:

   Poll: One in three Canadians are sane (hand shake story)

   Michael Arrington, TechCrunch.com, Washington Post 
   Monday, October 19, 2009; 2:37 PM

They say going to war without Canada is like going deer hunting without an accordion (ok, they actually say that about the French, but whatever). And we've had repeated run-ins with our frozen neighbor to the north in the past (see here, here, here). So you'd think the Canadians wouldn't be our first choice of allies in our war against the hand shake.

But they also say the enemy of your enemy is your friend. And so, by that crazy logic, I am now friends with Canada. Or at least, one in three Canadians. Because they've joined us, CNN, the Dalai Lama, the Obamas, the Boston Globe and some random town in Germany in our fight against the dreaded, disease spreading hand shake.

The Globe And Mail...writes that one in three Canadians won't shake hands due to flu concerns.

Dear Mike:

Actually, they universally say among armed forces worldwide that fighting alongside the notoriously trigger-happy Americans is a good way to get yourself killed by "friendly fire," as the families of four of our soldiers murdered and eight injured by the U.S. Air Force in Afghanistan on April 18, 2002 can attest. Be that as it may, your frozen friends have fought alongside you in two world wars, Korea, the Gulf War and in the most violent part of Afghanistan, where we've been fighting since 2002, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, while you guys were fighting the wrong war in the wrong place against the wrong enemy. And where we suffered our 132nd military fatality yesterday. As in World War I, we're enduring more fatalities per capita than our allies, because we're trained for shooting wars and prefer challenging combat missions where others before us have failed to patrol duty in pacified zones.

We did take a pass on Vietnam, although we provided you munitions for it, and on Iraq, although we tried at the U.N. in early 2003 to sway the non-voting members of the Security Council to support your resolution before you abruptly withdrew it. And then we sent three warships into the Persian Gulf to free up your troops on the mainland, who were so few in number that failure was preordained. You appear to be making the same mistake again now in Afghanistan - not enough boots on the ground - but all the same we're determined to keep helping your out in that god-forsaken place until 2011, at which point we'll have deployed our combat forces there for 9 years.

Just as Billy Falkner was so eager to fight in the First World War that he trekked to the frozen north to sign up with Canucks hell-bent on killing Huns (hence the name change to the Anglicized William Faulkner), thousands of Canadians headed south in the Sixties to fight with you in Southeast Asia. Second only to the Aussies, if there's a fight going on, we want to be there. The NHL is a vicarious thrill, as fighting goes. At times, the urge to feel that "pink mist" in our faces when our comrades are blown to bits is too great to resist.

Now that you've slurring us and the French, who wisely warned you off Vietnam, having failed there themselves, and who were the third-largest allied combatants in the Gulf War, after yourselves and the Brits, please understand we have no hard feelings. Though your values are God and carpeting, we feel a need to defend them. Let anyone lay a hand on your homeland and, regardless of your consistent ingratitude, we will fight to the death for your conception of life, liberty and happiness. Just do us this one favour and keep your notion of LLH from seeping through our porous border. The concealed small-bore weaponry you carry into places of worship, for instance - and you can guess the rest.

Update: We lost another young Canadian to an IED today. Make that 133 precious dead fighting a war in service to America's strategic interests, not ours.