Yeah, we are on the same page.

And just for another swipe at the guy (I was never a big fan either), even with the (alleged) drugs, if I had to chose one pitcher from the generation, my vote goes to Greg Maddux.

Simply unhittable from 92-98. Koufax dominant.

Well, for once, the rich white man is in control. --Montgomery Burns

It's "Unsane's" opinion, after all, so even questioning it is an insult to all historians!! One, crybaby, I have never claimed to speak for all historians. Two, I find this comment very curious coming from you, as you are the FIRST to take a historian’s opinion and proclaim it fact. (And God Help US All if any of us mere mortals dare question YOU, THE SUPREME EXPERT on EVERYTHING!!!)  Remember your screaming that thedrugwarisracistandthatisaFACT!!!!??? I do. Never mind that is a historian’s opinion. However, I will maintain that those who bother to look at the history and culture of each of the three nations that are supposed to just magically amalgamate with the United States into some “union” as easy as apple pie will find their notions disabused very quickly.

Take a look at some quotes below for some evidence.

From The Economist, 14 July 2007: “Some Canadians see Mr Harper’s trip as part of his general desire to be in step with George Bush. The prime minister has made smooth relations with the United States a priority. Afghanistan has become the top recipient of Canadian aid. Mr Harper’s government has given outspoken support to Israel; its relations with China have been strained. Nevertheless, this week Mr Harper announced plans to purchase up to eight patrol ships for light icebreaking duties to assert Canadian sovereignty over Arctic seaways, which is contested by the United States.”

From James Dunnigan and Austin Bay, A Quick and Dirty Guide to War: “Is Soviet-style political devolution possible? Mexico may be seen as three separate nations: the “Panista” north, the traditional Mexico of Mexico City and the central states, and the Indian south. Let’s say the PRD takes control of several southern states and the northern states become dominated by the PAN. What keeps Mexico together if the southern states discover they have more in common with the rest of Central America?” (p.599)

And!:

 “Ontario is still the home of the Royal American Regiment. Tories fleeing the American Revolution (and choosing to remain loyal to King George) put a mild but still-present anti-U.S. disposition on Ontarian politics.” (p.602)

From Desmond Morton’s A Short History of Canada:

“Within ten years (of the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement being ratified), all tariffs would disappear. Americans would have equal access to Canada’s natural resources and to financial and other service industries. Breweries and so-called ‘cultural industries’ were protected, but Ottawa buried plans to protect Canada’s film industry.” (p.342)

“For a moment in the televised leaders’ debate, (John) Turner seized the lead, charging Mulroney with destroying Canada’s national identity.” (p.343)

These quotations informed me long ago that Canada and Mexico have issues of their own that they have to settle long before they look to forming any sort of union with the United States.

But I'm still curious as to whether CNN's own Dobbs (who's been sounding the NAU alarm for years) Of course he has, because he is a populist scaremonger/fearmonger in the finest traditions of such people as Pat Buchanan. He will do everything in his power to try and convince people that some “NAU” is just going to happen, because it delivers ratings, and because he HATES free trade. So what if he is lying/exaggerating? He doesn’t care if it is true or not, only so long as he can convince enough people to support his dream of a United States that is hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world.

Frankly, I am speechless that you, who is allegedly the biggest free-trader here (being a libertarian) would even listen to Lou Dobbs, considering his immense hatred of free trade. Although Mr. Dobbs performs a great public service when exposing the travesties of unfettered, unchecked illegal immigration - otherwise, he is an idiot. Oh, an “NAU” CAN indeed happen - but ONLY after several hundred millions of gallons of blood are spilled (you know, the same currency that allowed the EU to be formed). Mr. Dobbs is probably aware of that, but again, he wouldn’t care anyways. He is getting ratings being a gloom-and-doom populist scaremonger and fearmonger.

Mr. Dobbs would shriek with horror at this passage from Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies: “It simply no longer sounds plausible to describe the market as a static conspiracy of a few faceless, unchangeable corporate monoliths; the Galbraithean conventional wisdom of a generation ago sounds like nonsense in a world where upstarts can threaten even Sears and IBM. The same loss of certainty that disturbs Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan has energized a cohort of mostly younger businesspeople, many of whom see their work as a way of influencing the world – as feedback in a dynamic economic and cultural system.” (p.34)

(Say! Virginia Postrel! Do you know who SHE is???)

Not to mention he would be throwing a tantrum like a typical small child acting up in a supermarket if he were to tour such places as the Toyota plant in San Antonio, or the Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Alabama, among other places. Look at the graphic behind him pictured above. “Exporting America”: shrieked just like a good populist who cannot tolerate that, oh yes, we are being outsourced TO. He desperately wants everyone in America to believe that not only are we destined for Fourth World penury because the government is failing in its promise (in his mind) to guarantee us all jobs for life, but that there are evil boogeymen that will make this happen that we are all totally powerless to stop. Like this fictional “NAU”.

In fact, allow me to elaborate on the “NAU Conspiros” for a moment. All seem to be devoid of a sense of history, and apparently - I stress apparently - don’t seem to have spent much time outside of the United States. Many of them like to whine that just because the EU happened, that means that an “NAU” can, and indeed WILL happen here overnight. What they fail - miserably - to understand, is that though the idea was first proposed in the mid-19th Century (read MacDonogh’s After The Reich) and was further broached by Briand in 1929, it was widely ridiculed, until WWII and roughly 40-45 million dead and the complete, utter destruction of several economies did much to change attitudes, coupled with the threat of the Soviet Union. Without those events, I seriously doubt there would have been anything like the Nice Treaty of 1957.

But naturally, that’s all lost on the Conspiro community, who are motivated by the following:

1) Protectionism. People like Mr. Dobbs CANNOT STAND the fact that anyone anywhere in the world is manufacturing or growing ANYTHING outside of the United States. To people like him, EVERYTHING on earth MUST be manufactured and grown in the United States, and if not, oh no! We are DOOMED!!! It’s The Great Depression!!! (I exaggerate of course, but I fear only slightly.) In the view of a protectionist, every American must be guaranteed a job for life, and not permit any foreign competition. Sure, the American corporation/worker can churn out overpriced, low quality pieces of crap, but we should ALL buy them and be THANKFUL that it is Made in the U.S.A.!!! Never mind that if we have foreign competition, it just might serve to strengthen American products by forcing them to compete for business...

2) Xenophobia. There are some who hate the notion that we even border two nations, much less exist with 200 or so others. And of course, the United States is SO FRAGILE, SO DELICATE, that it MUST be shielded from all parts of the evil foreign world, lest it be corrupted somehow. Hence, it MUST be hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world, for the Outside World is just a big bacillus that will destroy the verdure of the United States.

3) Both.

One would think a big news outlet like CNN could manage to get their story straight -- especially with the commentary of a well-known history "expert" like "Unsane"! You so LOVE to act like the Leftists you so despise! Maybe you can learn to stop putting words in my mouth (but considering your posts reveal your libertartian thought processes stopped evolving in high school, I can see why you like that tactic) long enough to accept the fact that I claim no expertise on anything (unlike you, who claims to be the SUPREME EXPERT on everything imaginable - who can forget your comment that you understood military matters thoroughly because you study history and play chess!!!) -anything at all. The information I have either in my head or in my library is readily available to all. The ONLY thing that separates me from others is my motivation to learn what’s out there. And that’s not a mark of intelligence.

 I say fire Lou Dobbs because he obviously refuses to study history -- ie agree with "Unsane"!! :) Again, curious you make this lame comment. I say fire Lou Dobbs for an entirely different reason: “he sucks”. And last I checked, YOU are the guy who will routinely begin rebuttals with “You are full of crap as usual” or “More BS as usual”, among other whines - all because YOU are not universally agreed with. What is the deal with your projecting onto others, anyways? Study the history not to agree with me, but to be imbued with the critical thinking skills you obviously lack, that just might give others pause when presented with flaky notions such as an “NAU”.

And finally, I re-present this. Well you DID ask...be careful what you wish for. You just might get it. I respond with this to other NAU Conspiros. I’m not going to edit this to suit you, because I am quite busy and have other things to do.

Where to begin?

It is quite amusing to see that there are those who believe that they have so little control over their own lives, that they lack any freewill whatsoever. Nothing but secret cabals and conspiracies behind every tree and under every bed, and all of us mere pawns.

This claim (of an "NAU") betrays your failure to understand the cultures and histories of our neighbors. Not to mention a lack of perspective.

Out of the three major North American countries, only one of them - the United States - is confident of its identity and status as a nation. It is bordered on its north and south by nations that are deeply insecure of their national identities. And because of these tensions, a shotgun wedding between the three - or any two - is going to be impossible for the foreseeable future.

First you have Canada. That nation is the only one on earth whose existence is underpinned by the notion that “we are not our neighbor”. The national symbols it has are recent - the Maple Leaf Flag, for instance, came along in 1965 - and not everyone in the country points to it as a source of identity, especially the Quebecers. It didn’t even have the power to amend its own constitution until 1982. And since it is a nation which is chiefly “exploited” in nature - that is, having natural resources and exploiting them and subsequently exporting them as a major source of income to power the economy - it has always been beholden to a more powerful nation. Until World War II that was the United Kingdom (who still provides it a head of state via the governor general) and now it is the United States. The only thing you can really say about Canada is that, ironically, it owes its existence to 4 July 1776 as much as the United States does, for Canada was for the most part a loyalist response to the Revolution that followed.

This is a nation that, as much as it needs its southern neighbor to power its economy and provide it defense (for it is too sparsely populated for its 60,000-odd Canadian Forces to defend), lives in fear of its southern neighbor. On 15 May 2001 a broadcast of CBC’s The National revealed that Nova Scotia was considering becoming the fourth - and only the fourth! - province in the country to require its grade school students to take a course in Canadian history, which was actually a bit controversial. One history teacher made a comment on that segment about how he didn’t want Canadian history taught so that “our kids don’t turn out like the Americans”. The fear of the United States routinely enters its political campaigns. One memorable episode took place in 1988 when John Turner of the Liberals ran against the incumbent Brian Mulroney of the Tories. A hotly contested piece of legislation that became the centerpiece of the campaign was the then-proposed U.S. - Canada Free Trade Agreement. The race got ugly, and one point featured a Liberal sponsored commercial that depicted trade negotiators discussing the agreement over a map of North America. The American negotiator was seen to be erasing the border between the United States and Canada, calling it unnecessary, saying it was no longer needed. The imagery was designed to play on deep-seated Canadian fears that the United States intended to annex Canada under the guise of this agreement. The commercial ended with the Canadian counterpart pulling out a red permanent marker and angrily, forcefully redrawing the border on the map, implying that the Liberals were the only sure-fire guarantors of Canadian sovereignty.

There is still plenty of Canadian fretting over its southern neighbor. When in 2001 it was suggested that the United States and Canada work to harmonize its customs procedures and requirements, the Liberals threw a fit, and would more than likely been opposed by the Conservative opposition in any case due to their own “We are NOT America!” attitudes and those of the vast majority of the Canadian electorate. Its health care system is deeply cherished by Canadians because, among other reasons, “the United States has nothing like it”. Anything that differentiated Americans from Canadians is celebrated in Canada as contributing to its national identity.

In various travels, I have been asked sometimes if I am Canadian. To which I respond with “I am an American”. I follow this with a warning: Americans are almost never offended by that question; amused, maybe, but never offended. But if you ask a Canadian if he or she is an American, prepare to deal with a response like “No, I am a Canadian, we really are not Americans, here’s why…!” For calling a Canadian an American or assuming one is American is a deep wound to them.

I recommend going to Ottawa and recommend a common currency with Canada to its Parliament, just to see the shrieking and howling you will receive. Notice all of this even factors out the whole issue of Quebec, a province I suspect many Canadians would love to see remain Canadian if only because having a Francophone minority enhances the Canadian dream of “not being American”.

Turning to Mexico, we see a nation that is split between identities. There is a center which sees Mexico as a European style state which has as its center Spanish culture, albeit with regional influences. You have a heavily industrialized, dynamic north and west that more or less buys into this notion. And then you have a mostly agrarian south that often feels like it has much more in common with Central America, and Dunnigan & Bay point out in A Quick And Dirty Guide to War (second edition). In each of these regions you have those who point to the Spanish influence as the center around which Mexican nationhood revolves, and those who view the glories of Mesoamerica as a cultural reference. And all three of these regions eye the United States wearily. As Porfirio Diaz said during his time in the Mexican presidency from 1876 to 1910” “Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States!” Many a time have relations with the southern neighbor turned quite antagonistic, even discounting the Mexican War of 1846-1848.

The United States and Mexico are so far apart culturally and in terms of the strength of its nationhood and national identity that you couldn’t begin to harmonize laws between the two, let alone craft an EU-like alliance with them.

So, to recap, you have the United States, a nation with a strong, confident national identity populated by 300 million people, bordered on the north by Canada, a nation whose sole source of agreed upon identity is “We are not Americans and this is why we are not Americans” at 32 million, and a nation to the south which to much extent has yet to sort itself out nationally AND looks wearily at the United States at 100 million people.

And I am somehow supposed to have blind faith, when factoring in the histories and cultural attitudes in each nation, that some secret cabal is just going to amalgamate them all overnight? Hardly. We were lucky to get NAFTA agreed upon, and there are delays in fully implementing that agreement due to various reasons posited by all three sides. If I see Schengen like agreements between the three countries in my lifetime - and by most estimates this will be some time yet - I will be supremely shocked.

Here’s wagering that in 2010, 2020, 2050, and 2100 that these three nations are still separate political entities with no desire to surrender a drop of sovereignty.

Need me to pull out the belt again?

Res tantum valet quantum vendi potest.

I remember way back when they gave Pete Rose $800,000. A few (very few) wise people objected at the time. They saw this coming. Basically nothing is going to be done about this "scandal". It's a farce, a show for the masses to feel better about themselves. Fear and greed run the world-- always have, always will.

NEVER,NEVER trust a "liberal"

Since when did I ever say they did???? I keep having to teach you this, but to look less-foolish, try to read what I say for a change. It works a lot better in debates than your hallucinating-technique...
JMR

Rally online with fans of Dr. Ron Paul. (All purpose anti-slander-link, sadly-needed these days...)

I think you would have no freaking clue how it would feel, either, Sparky. We all feel bad for the poor kid, but what is your point? Shall we kill him? You think only you have dibs on hugging the Empathy Tree? That only brave liberals such as yourself have compassion? I pointed out a positive in the story you posted, and you are trying to slap my hand because it was a ray of sunlight that broke through your dark, dreary rainstorm. That is the difference between you and me, I guess.