Blood-thirsty United Stations

Now personally I think that our friends to the south (the United States) depend a little too much on their own fantasy-history than is really good for them. They are not all descended from cowboys and they are not all rugged individualists who 'won the west' and 'tamed the red-indians' and all the rest of that stuff. Sorry, it's just the facts. Something else is, they also don't tend to "shoot first and ask questions later". This week some dude stole a small plane (a four-seater Cessna of some description) from the Confederation Flight School in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and flew it into the United States, apparently hoping that he would be shot down by the US military. The Wisconsin National Guard scrambled a couple of F-16 fighters who followed the Cessna until it landed in Missouri. Oddly enough, they didn't try to shoot the Cessna down (which probably would have taken them less than a second), they just followed it, trying to contact the pilot who was ignoring them. Not real blood-thirsty when you get right down to it.

It is true that some living south of the 49th tend to play on the rootin'-tootin' shoot 'em up thing, but the real professionals are a little too, uh, professional, to play that game. Unfortunately the last Presidential administration bought into that image a little too fiercely, and now a lot of people are paying (and have paid) the price for that. The US image around the world is not real good just now and it is going to take the current administration a while to work it's way through so that the US has the international support they should have (and which they did have just after the 9/11 attacks but which was blown entirely by the Bush administration). Of course all the right-wing dimbulbs are offended by how President Obama is presenting himself to the world, but that is not a real surprise. The 'be a bully' crowd is not real well known for being thoughtful at all. And still there are the professionals, like those in the Wisconsin National Guard, who show what the true US spirit is like. These are the people who's actions should be paid attention to, not the loud-mouths of the right.

Anyway... Humouroceros