Peter MacKay shows signs of puberty

Like a twelve year old school boy with crush on his grade 7 teacher, Peter MacKay unabashedly embarrassed the citizens of Canada by gushing over US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. What Canadians got was a demonstration of how unbelievably naive and childish the Canadian government's External Affairs minister actually is.

"I'm delighted to be here. I've always been a fan of yours," he told Rice at a joint news conference in an ornate department ballroom. "And much of our discussion today confirmed what I already knew about you from having followed your career."

A fan?!

You mean, like a fanatic?

The incompetence boggles the mind. On the part of both parties.

Let's review a little of Condi's stellar performance.

This review by Joseph Kalvoda, of Rice's book, The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983: Uncertain Allegiance, is a scathing indictment of her sloppy research and meaningless conclusions in which she relies on previously exposed propaganda to develop a thesis which was patently false. Her renown among neo-con circles as a "Soviet expert" was strongly based on this faulty piece of work. It should be noted that Kalvoda did not know Rice since, in his review, he refers to Rice as "he" and "his".

Rice, by the late 1980s, a supposed Soviet expert, totally miscalled the fall of the Soviet Union and that country's overtures for an end to the standoff which had kept the world on the brink of war for more than three decades. When, as Director of Soviet and Eastern European Affairs for the National Security Council, she was directly advising Bush 41 on the state of Soviet relations and the internal desire for independence of countries like the Ukraine. In short, she got the whole thing wrong and suggested that the USSR would not break up. If that wasn't bad enough, she was a ranking member of the NSC which allowed the sale of arms and biological weapons to a country whose leader was anything but stable - Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein.

Then there is the more modern Condoleeza Rice and her push for war with Iraq. As National Security advisor to the current disasterous US president she declared, on September 8th 2002, when The New York Times had reported, without substance, that Iraq had tried to purchase thousands of stengthened aluminum tubes,

The tubes, Rice said, "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs."

Something which turned out not only to be wrong, but false.

That's not all. Rice failed to act on a National Intelligence Estimate in August 2001 which reported that al Qaeda was intending to attack the United States using commercial airliners. Much later, she claimed to have been caught totally off-guard when Hamas won the Palestinian elections.

Rice isn't just clueless, she's incompetent. Rice exists to act as cheerleader for whatever Bush administration happens to be in power at the time and she does it at the expense of the country she is sworn to serve.

This is what Peter MacKay was slobbering over on Thursday. An incredible piece of work who believes that extraordinary rendition is an everyday event and then threatens countries who might "tell all".

Is this the career that MacKay has been following? Or, did he just accept the piece of BS handed out by her office?

The minister appeared to be mostly in lockstep with Rice on global concerns, saying it may be necessary to impose sanctions against Iran.

Lockstep? Granted that is the CBC report on the issue, but I had the misfortune of having to listen to MacKay on, of all things, NPR from Washington.

"Lockstep" is understating MacKay's position. "Sell out" is more accurate. MacKay has just made it clear that Canada doesn't need a foreign affairs ministry. The Conservatives will be happy to take direction from Foggy Bottom, reducing External Affairs to little more than a messenger force.

It casts Belinda Stronach in even better light that after making the mistake of hooking up with this turkey, she corrected the problem by dumping him. And didn't he behave like a whinny-ass, titty-baby that day.