Senator Mitchell: "Mr. Fatah, my experience with Muslim community is so fundamentally different than yours.

I just know so many wonderful, remarkable, amazing, beautiful people." 

Up goes the scolding, pedantic, obnoxious waving extended index finger.

Don't say anything until I'm finished please.Don't say what I think you're going to say. Don't interrupt me.

"Eye, eye, I find that the implication that every single imam in this country is, is, eh, is, is inciting people to do violence, which in a sense is what you said, because the first prayer... "

"No! Don't put words in my mouth, Senator."

"So my first question is have you been to every mosque in the country? That you say is preaching on Friday a prayer that starts, a prayer that, that, talks about a battle with non-Muslim people?"

Boom! Tarek Fatah lets Grant Mitchell have it. He too is afflicted with the scolding, pedantic, obnoxious waving extended index finger syndrome.

Index fingers dueling as swords.

In a brief two minutes Fatah exposes Mitchell as sniveling quisling, or perhaps just another person well out of his depth.

This is in Canada. Where Canadians fancy themselves lovelier than we, more knowledgeable than we, more agreeable, more free of our internal strife, and in many ways they are. I suppose. 

Canadian senators are appointed by their prime minister. As you know, in the U.S. senators were elected by state representatives until mid eighteenth century rumbling led eventually to progressive William Jennings Bryan to agitate for change during the decades at the turn of the century resulting in the seventeenth amendment to U.S. constitution that finally passed by Congress in 1913 (the same year the Federal Reserve Bank was established). 

Odd, I think, in that day progressive meant drawing more power from the states directly to the people, an action addressing personal liberty and acknowledging personal responsibility, while modern progressives reverse that impulse and agitate to redirect power from responsible individuals and with concomitant degradation to personal liberty onto federal government that is already well bloated beyond its capacity to govern properly, and say so repeatedly. In my mind this confirms so-called progressives today simply do not know what they are talking about, they do not know their own history. 

I have only one friend who self-identifies as progressive. Over and over he states outright he is progressive. Progressive. Progressive. Progressive. He likes the sound of it. He imagines himself on top of all things scientific. See? Progressive. He flies around all over the place to view solar and lunar eclipses as they occur and imagines himself astrophysicist. Because he listens to the lectures of guides he encounters there. He buys all the latest devices going through cell phones like water as they develop each year because he thinks they're neat-o, like personal fictional tricorders. He thinks Star Trek depicts our actual future, but without reading a single science fiction book nor operating his tricorder to its full capability as access to world knowledge, nor understanding the first thing about science fiction writers. 

Progressive is just a word that he likes to apply to himself. He supports uncritically whatever progressives suggest to maintain his association without understanding how progressives flipped things to straight up retrogression, and tags along without clear comprehension of their objectives. And he is unbearably fierce about it. He follows the most ridiculously vicious vacuous websites without realizing their pernicious foundation, nor the affect on his personality by adopting their insane reverse nonsensical language by parroting their exact vocabulary, as new words lodge they are so easily recognized by their sudden appearance and overuse, words that don't fit. And there is no shutting him up. Singularly he defines a whole type who cannot be reasoned with but argumentative nonetheless with interest only in posturing and so instead must be crushed.

He admitted to graduating high school in Montana without having read a single book. He bragged about his powers of book-reading avoidance. And that is one reason why I reject statistics citing Louisiana lowest among state education. It runs counter to my own experience. Colorado was also easy as eating pie. I suggested The Vampire Lestat. He liked it a lot. Being compulsive obsessive type he then devoured the entire Anne Rice series, and now he is vampire expert. I told him she also wrote fictionalized histories. He devoured those too. I told him she wrote porn under another name, Anne Roquelaure, and he read those too. Finally reading! 

Another of his type, but not so progressive also graduated from Massachusetts schools without every reading through a whole book. I recommend Harry Potter. It is a fat book but don't worry, the typeface is large. What a tremendous accomplishment to actually read such a fat book. He couldn't wait for the next and the next and the next, as children do. Finally reading! At this point the man is some forty years old and mastering children's books. He is the man with an art-shrine fetish on a wall in his basement office, not attractive nor decorative, homage to his own thick-headed loyalty to Democrat party, all campaign material. He is quite proud of his inflexibility. It matters not where his party leads him, the alternative is evil. His mind was made up at eighteen years of age.

Out: Ask not what your country can do for you, rather, ask what you can do for your country.

In: What has government done for me lately? 

I too always thought Canada more lovely than the U.S., more free of our internal strife. I held that idea due to my dad's reminiscing. He spoke often of his two aunts and uncle who lived together their whole lives in a small house in Hamilton Ontario. He described the two women growing obese sitting on the porch all day drinking a fifth of whisky. The man busied himself with a massive collection of tools. That is all that I know about them. None of three siblings ever married. Dad told me he held dual citizenship and spent every summer with them as a boy and then as adult visited often mostly passing through. He'd show up in his military uniform and the three were always so well chuffed to see him they would parade him around the whole town as Dad described it. They'd buy his drinks at their VFW and cheer their mutual world security interests. 

But I never met that portion of his family. I have only Dad's accounts to go by. They all died of old age within a few years. When the last aunt passed they left all that they owned to my father. They spent nothing, their life's savings together amounted to nearly one million Canadian. I asked Mum why that was not divided among Dad's sisters. Her answer was, they liked your dad. He was the only one of  them who visited. 

When I toured Canada my impression changed. I found them generally somewhat defensive immediately at the first exchange. The slightest comment was batted back like a tennis hard serve return. At breakfast at the hotel restaurant, men at a nearby table instigated political argument and goaded for dispute due solely to overhearing a teenager's American accent. WTF? I'm having breakfast! Cant I just eat my waffles? Graffiti addressing American government activities marred their own buildings and walls. Why should they care? This was not the lovely peaceful garden I was imagining. 

Canada is lovely. It is genuinely loaded with natural and architectural beauty. I was duly impressed with all that I saw but they are hardly so pleasingly pleasantly friendly, politically disinterested and strife-free as projected.