In a speech at a conference at McGill University recently, former U.S. President George Bush responded to charges that former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had been too cozy to the U.S. President, selling out Canada's needs and aspirations in order to cozy up to those big American mega-corporations. "However close our relationship was, the prime minister always had Canada's best interests at heart." Spoken like a true tart. He sounds like Dracula praising a woman for her lovely, long neck.
Brian Mulroney himself later proclaimed that where-ever he travels in Canada, "I am just about received in triumph". It's a very telling phrase: just about. I picture two old ladies with pom-poms asking if it's true that Joe Clark is making an appearance. Just about.
Somehow this doesn't jive with the reports of Conservative campaign workers who found, in the election following Mulroney's resignation, that doors were slammed in their faces as soon as they identified themselves as representatives of Mulroney's party. Doesn't jive, either, with the election results: the Progressive Conservatives under hapless successor Kim Campbell were pretty well wiped right off the map. No one seriously believed this was a vote on Kim Campbell. The Conservatives still haven't recovered. Mulroney claims that the media made him look bad. The media and about 10 million voters.
Well, when Bush wasn't busy singing Mulroney's praises, he lavished a few compliments on former Mexican President Carlos Salinas. Mexico certainly hasn't lost it's desire to see Mr. Salinas-- he is hiding out in Ireland right now avoiding extradition on charges of pilfering the state treasury. Mr. Mulroney must have blushed with delight at having risen to such lofty heights-- to be praised in the same breath with a corrupt former Mexican dictator!
What is so offensive about Mr. Mulroney's attempts to rehabilitate his "image" is his cold conviction that he really was a great as he thinks he was, and it is only a matter of sufficient determination and persistence on his part for the rest of us to be so enlightened. One gets the impression that he thinks that the people of Canada were tricked into believing he was a creep, and they can be tricked back into believing he was a genius.
The problem with that is that if Canadian public opinion was really so wishy-washy, who would want the blessings of its favour?
Bush has the same problem in the U.S. He is generally regarded as a light-weight president, a man who led his country into the most one-sided and hollow military victory of this century, and, for all that, couldn't manage to get himself re-elected while running against a shifty womanizing chameleon from Arkansas.
Copyright © 1999 Bill Van Dyk All rights reserved.
