And now a word from Emily Litella.
Compare the speech Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave in New York Thursday to the one he gave in Davos in January, because January Carney seems to have been swapped out for a doppelgänger who has no idea what three-months-ago Carney thought.
In that January speech to the creepy World Economic Forum, Carney let America have it with both barrels. Rejecting the cruel power of a nation led by a mean orange monster, Carney promised to turn his back on an America-centered “old order” and build a coalition of “middle powers” that would boldly challenge the United States. Canada would “fundamentally shift our strategic posture” to challenge and reject America, not to cooperate with a degenerate and power-mad country. (What Carney didn’t say in Davos was that his big plan to turn away from America would mostly mean, in practice, an aggressive embrace of China.)
Weak, dimwitted pundits ate it up. In The New York Times, witless livestock-adjacent cuckold David French declared that Carney had given a “bracing” speech that “might be the most important address of Trump’s second term so far.” That’s it for America, French concluded, because the Canadian prime minister had just stood up in front of the world and “marked out a path of allied integration and cooperation that could create, in essence, a new great power rival to the United States.” Whatever you say, David.
The media kept banging away on this ludicrous theme, with Politico gushing about Canada’s “Muscular New Anti-Trump Strategy.” Cooler heads intervened, with the Canadian scholar Stephen Nagy writing that Carney’s speech presented an “elegant theory” that was “practically impossible.”
Three months after he boldly tossed that obsolete dinosaur called America into the trash, Carney traveled to New York City this week to pitch, wait for it, a new and strengthened partnership between the United States and Canada:
Carney said the U.S. is dependent on Canadian oil, natural gas, electricity, aluminum, potash, nickel, copper and industrial components, and the two sides should do more business together in these sectors, not less.
‘That is mutual strength. Canada Strong will help make America great again. The examples are legion where we should work together and compete with the world together,’ he said.
The prime minister of a country that shares an enormous border with the largest national GDP in the world suddenly discovers that actually, we’d really like to sustain a close partnership with you guys.
“Canada is far and away America’s biggest customer, and an integrated North American market for production is the best and most durable way to confront intense, truly intense, global competition on critical minerals,” Carney said. We reject your power and we seek closer integration with you.
Speeches, and news about speeches, generally have no meaning or substance. A thing like David French makes empty noise for a living, like a broken player piano that’s too heavy to carry out of the living room.
Politicians and pundits erect meaningless symbols, and dance around them like it means something. Reality just sits there, waiting quietly until everybody gets done performing the fake noises. A prime minister says in January that we utterly reject X, and a bunch of idiots celebrate, and then the same prime minister says in May that we embrace X and need a lot more of it. So what? The world just keeps turning.
Like the lady said, never mind.
