Maclean's Interview: Efraim Halevy

By Yoni Goldstein - Wednesday, December 23, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 59 Comments

Efraim Halevy is the former head of the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, where he worked closely with five Israeli prime ministers—Yitzhak Shamir, Yitzhak Rabin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. He is the author of Man in the Shadows: Inside the Middle East Crisis With a Man Who Led the Mossad.

Q: What are the real chances of peace between Israel and the Palestinians?
A: I think peace between Israel and the Palestinians hinges on the Palestinians proving the capability of nationhood. I don’t think that nationhood can be thrust upon the Palestinians from without. A nation has to be built from within—and it has to be purely Palestinians who create and build their own nation. The way things are at the moment, the Palestinians are not creating their own nation. The nation is being created from without. The United States is training their military forces; Tony Blair is chaperoning them and helping them build their economic and political institutions; the European Union is helping in other fields. In other words, what is being done is the Palestinian nation is being built with outside help. This, I think, cannot succeed. Whether the Palestinians have it within their capacity to transform what they have into a nation that has an in-built hierarchy, that has an in-built structure of discipline and orderly conduct—this is something that we don’t know yet.

Q: Do you have a sense whether they’ll be able to do it?
A: I don’t know. I think that if it is not the case, then they’re in for a lot of trouble. I think it is in Israel’s interest that there should be a Palestinian state—I think it is in Israel’s interest that there should be a Palestinian people that is capable of sustaining a Palestinian state. But what has been going on in recent years is not very encouraging.

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Steve must have been in the bathroom

By Andrew Potter - Monday, November 30, 2009 at 4:07 PM - 5 Comments

Obama has decided how to proceed in Afhganistan, issued the orders, and is letting (most of) the allies know:

As Mr. Gibbs spoke Monday morning, the president was on the telephone with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France…. Mr. Obama also had calls scheduled with President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, and was to meet at the White House on Monday with Kevin Rudd, the prime minister of Australia.

Of course, why would he tell us what’s up. We’ve already said we’re leaving no matter what.

Week in Pictures: November 14th – November 20th, 2009

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 2:56 PM - 0 Comments

Still not there on healthcare reform

By John Parisella - Monday, November 9, 2009 at 5:56 PM - 7 Comments

The House of Representatives passed a major healthcare reform bill on Saturday by a close margin of 220 votes to 215. It is the first of its kind since Medicare was passed in 1965 and the first-ever aimed at implementing universal coverage. Only one Republican voted for the bill, while 39 Democrats broke party ranks. Speaker Nancy Pelosi deserves much credit for achieving this important milestone, but the narrow victory sets the stage for a drawn-out fight in the Senate.

Blue Dog Democrats will most likely pursue their attempts to either eliminate or weaken the public option when they begin to deliberate, while independent Senator Joe Lieberman is hinting he might join a Republican filibuster. In other words, the 60 senators needed for cloture are no longer onboard. Saturday night’s vote may prove historic should Barack Obama end up with a comprehensive reform package. But unless he opts for reconciliation, a process that allows for a straight up and down vote requiring a simple majority, there may not be anything for him to sign before the holiday season.

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Design for Obama is super, man

By Andrew Potter - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 8:28 PM - 8 Comments

A year or so ago, a group of graphic designers asked themselves how they could best use their skills and talents to help Barack Obama. The solution was “Design for Obama”, which is just an elliptical way of saying, “propaganda”. I’d guess that no president in history has been given the full Warhol the way Obama has, from the infamous Shep Fairey HOPE poster to the racist Russian Obama ice cream.

Anyway, the Design for Obama project is going to be a book from Taschen. Meanwhile, you can check out the website for all the submissions, or just dig this image I snapped in an alley just off the Bowery a while ago:

Obama, Fox News, and You

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 3:56 PM - 16 Comments

Just some quick points about the Obama Administration’s strategy of bashing Fox News:

1. The easy rejoinder to the claim that Fox News is a “wing of the Republican party” (for which Anita Dunn, who made the statement, is Fox News’s target for tonight) is that, well, the rest of the media is liberal. Except it isn’t. Even MSNBC, which is often considered the liberal Fox News, is only considered liberal because it has the only openly partisan liberal hosts on cable news, along with conservatives like Joe Scarborough, and Chris Matthews, who is just a crazy person prone to man-crushes. (He has a man-crush on Obama, but he also had one on Bush.) The conservative argument about liberal media bias is that it’s unconscious, that because media personalities skew liberal/Democratic, they have certain unexamined liberal assumptions that they incorporate into their work as if they’re “objective.” Liberals actually agree with conservatives that TV media personalities incorporate unconscious biases into their work, but liberals see these as the biases of elites, which are not necessarily liberal at all (particularly on issues like the Iraq war). But whichever way you look at it, it’s different from what Fox News does. Fox News is a combination of partisan outlet and entertainment, and its genius is the way it has made partisanship into entertainment — for example, bringing on the most pathetic, beaten-down liberals imaginable so that the audience can enjoy watching them lose the argument. (That was the whole point of teaming freakish-looking Colmes with handsome, all-American Hannity.) Other networks, terrified of being called liberal and constantly bending over backward to prove they aren’t liberal (MSNBC famously canceled Phil Donahue’s show, despite decent ratings by their standards at the time, to prove they weren’t liberal), simply aren’t in the same league either as partisanship or as entertainment.

2. Jacob Weisberg’s article on why Fox News is “Un-American” is pretty hellaciously silly. Which is too bad, because he’s raising a point that probably should be discussed seriously: given that Fox News is slanting the news to favour a particular political party, should journalists treat it as if it’s the same exact thing as a non-partisan outlet? But the idea that news has “a century-old tradition of independence” that is being destroyed by that nasty foreigner Rupert Murdoch is, as many people have noted, kind of weird. Even if you assume that openly partisan news ended after the collapse of the Hearst empire, that would still would be less than a century ago, and of course the tradition of partisan news persisted for much longer than that, particularly at the level of local newspapers. Apart from that, his assumption that the American approach to news is better than anybody else’s is, really, pure jingoism, on the level of saying that the U.S. has the “best health care system in the world.” It’s telling that his biggest worry is the presence of “a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news,” i.e. shows with opinions in them. This is silly. Fox’s opinion shows are just talk radio on TV. The more problematic thing about the network is that its “objective” news reporting, which it defends to the death, tends to be increasingly indistinguishable from the opinion shows in terms of what issues it considers important. If Fox News dropped the U.S.-style pretense of objectivity, it would be a lot less problematic, and might help pave the way for a genuine liberal alternative. Bashing Fox for pretending it isn’t conservative makes sense; bashing Fox for being conservative doesn’t.

3. As to why the Obama administration is picking this fight, I think Fox News pundits are correct in comparing this to Nixon and Agnew’s media strategy. It’s partly about playing to the base (since liberals hate the media even more than conservatives nowadays). But mostly, it’s about pushing the media in a certain direction. Nixon picked up the “liberal media” strategy, at a time when these complaints were closer to the truth than they are now, as a way of guilt-tripping the media into examining their assumptions. There were many editorials and articles written asking whether the media was out of touch with what would now be called “Real America,” the silent majority that elected Nixon. Reporters and pundits began trying to make sure they didn’t descend into knee-jerk liberalism. Today, the Obama team is trying something similar. His aides are telling CNN and other networks that they shouldn’t be like Fox News. This won’t and shouldn’t hurt Fox’s popularity any, but it could help jolt CNN et al into wondering if they’re out of touch with the majority that elected Obama, and re-check for conservative assumptions (anti-tax protests are the most important things ever) in their work. Call it the Nixon strategy in reverse, which makes sense after 40 years of the U.S. media being spooked out by the original Nixon strategy.

Tell Them, Game Called On Account of Nobel!

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 9, 2009 at 2:42 PM - 16 Comments

I have been trying to think of something to say about the Nobel thing, and can’t. It’s too weird. The only observation I can make is that the award probably makes more sense if you think of it as a way of thanking the U.S. for electing somebody the committee likes (at least at the moment). The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein compared it, on his Twitter feed, to the year Time magazine named “You” as the Person of the Year, and I think that is the closest comparison. But even then, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Also, as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald points out (and contradicting my statement that liberals/Democrats now tend toward “soft” messaging), the Democratic National Committee’s press flack’s statement is pretty sleazy. He says that the Republicans have “thrown their lot in with the terrorists” in criticizing the prize. Now, the Republican/conservative freakout is fun to watch but criticizing the president or saying he didn’t deserve an award is obviously not “throwing their lot in with the terrorists”; it’s like saying that Vegetarians throw their lot in with Hitler.

On another media-related note, I will say that I object to the Marisa Tomei jokes that have been made by everyone from Time’s Mark Halperin to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. Tomei was a perfectly good choice for the Oscar the year she won for My Cousin Vinny. She used to be the butt of jokes because she didn’t do much in the years following her Oscar, and because she beat out four Brits and won for a light comedy (albeit a good one). But she was good in that movie, and she’s had a good career, and it’s time to find someone else to hold up as the gold standard for undeserved awards.

I was also trying to find SCTV’s sketch “The Nobel,” but it’s not online. So here are some highlights from the legendarily terrible movie that sketch was parodying, The Oscar. It’s actually a lot funnier than the SCTV sketch, and at least it can teach us all about the proper reaction when someone loses an award he really wanted: undisguised joy.

The other Nobel Prize comedy sketch I remember, oddly enough, is also Canadian: it was a Wayne and Shuster sketch I saw as a kid, where they imagine a glitzy Oscars-style Nobel ceremony, with musical numbers about Alfred Nobel (“With what he had done/He was the one/Who could blow the whole world to hell…/So he created a prize that was for/People who laboured for peace not for war/Let’s hear it for Alfred Nobel”). The only other thing I remember from that sketch was that the winner of the Peace Prize was the guy who invented the button that turns off the TV.

Red (Maple) Menace: Health Care Edition

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 12:16 PM - 44 Comments

As the fight over Obamacare heats up, the bill’s opponents are pulling no punches. A reader in New Jersey points me to an anti-Canadian health care attack ad that is running down there. It features a Canadian woman who got a brain tumour; her “government health care system” told her to wait six months for a specialist, and she survived only because she was able to get to the US for treatment.

The message of the spot is that patients should never let “government” get between them and their health care, because that leads to wait times, rationing, and arbitrary decisions about what treatments you are entitled to. As a Canadian, she ends by imploring Americans, “don’t give up your rights.”

Is this accurate? Hardly. Wait times we can argue over. But my sense is that an HMO gets “between a patient and their care” in a far more intrusive way than a provincial plan like OHIP does; though as a bit of northern red-baiting, it’s pretty effective.

Here’s the video – it’s called “Survivor”.  Dissect away.

"Brezhnev in toe shoes"

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, June 10, 2009 at 3:39 PM - 7 Comments

That’s how PJ O’Rourke described Obama’s governing style, today on Radio Q.  No podcast yet, but I hope they’ll have it up soon, because I missed the setup. Can anyone help me out?

What price our pseudo-empathy?

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 131 Comments

Empathy. You either got it or you ain’t. Sonia Sotomayor’s got it, which is why she’s just been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. President Obama said that what he’s looking for in a big-time judge is “the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” As he told his pro-abortion chums at Planned Parenthood, “We need somebody who’s got the heart—the empathy—to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old—and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges. Alright?”

Er, well, alright. But what does it boil down to in practice? Then-senator Obama voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts because the nominee said he saw the judge’s role as that of “umpire.” The President wants someone less hung up on the rule book. He likes to cite the case of Lilly Ledbetter, who sued Goodyear Tire for discrimination but ran up against the pesky old statute of limitations. An “empathetic” judge would presumably say, “Screw the statute of limitations.” Strange to hear the same folks who complain that Bush disregarded the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution at Gitmo (both charges untrue, by the way) simultaneously hailing the ability to disregard inconvenient laws as the indispensable attribute of a Supreme Court justice.

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Never Forget

By John Parisella - Friday, April 17, 2009 at 8:47 PM - 7 Comments

We have heard this before. I was struck when I heard it said by a former Israeli Prime Minister many years ago prior to the actual process that led to the Camp David Accord. It sounded right.Yesterday, President Obama released memos from the Bush Administration justifying the use of interrogation methods which can only be described as torture. And even though I believe Obama was right to say there would be no prosecutions, his decision not to press ahead with criminal charges against CIA officers who used these memos to justify their behaviour has left many in his liberal base upset and bewildered. In other words, interrogators appear to have been told they can do wrong and everything will be forgotten.

The ACLU was first off the mark to sound the clarion of protest. Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy was clearly disappointed with Obama’s approach because any future prosecution will likely be more difficult as a result. Obama media backers were also highly critical of the move and speculated loudly that such a chilling and despicable episode in US history could be repeated unless offenders were prosecuted. Judicial initiatives in other countries against torture during the Bush years could very well be compromised as a result of Obama’s reluctance to prosecute.
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Good luck, Hopeychanger-in-Chief

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 132 Comments

If you know your P. G. Wodehouse, you’ll remember the passage in Right Ho, Jeeves in which Tom Travers is much preoccupied by the Exchequer’s claim upon him:

“Is he still upset about that income-tax money?” asks his nephew, Bertie Wooster.

“Upset is right,” replies Aunt Dahlia. “He says that Civilisation is in the melting-pot and that all thinking men can read the writing on the wall.”

“What wall?”

“Old Testament, ass,” snaps Aunt Dahlia. “Belshazzar’s feast.”

“Oh, that, yes,” says Bertie. “I’ve often wondered how that gag was worked. With mirrors, I expect.”

A lot of writing on the wall these days. A half-remembered quatrain from Jonathan Swift has been dancing around my brain in recent weeks:

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Falling off the moral high horse

By Andrew Potter - Sunday, April 5, 2009 at 3:53 PM - 0 Comments

As Obamamania sweeps the planet — my latest column for the mag, on what it means for the Canadian left.

Obama's Afghan Gamble

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, April 1, 2009 at 9:50 AM - 1 Comment

If you’re looking for some context for the current shift in NATO’s thinking on Afghanistan, you can do a lot worse than to plow through the first 200 pages of Thomas Ricks’ new book, The Gamble.  It picks up where Fiasco left off, with the US staring defeat in the face in 2006. It is the story of how a small group of civilian academics and think-tank types (Eliott Cohen, Fred Kagan and a few others from the AEI) joined up with a retired general (Fred Keane) and his protege, David Petraeus, and effectively instigated an insurgency within the US military.

They key was the recognition that the fiasco at Haditha was not an aberration, but actually a logical consequence of America’s strategy of minimizing casualties, killing scumbags, and getting out as soon as possible. And so the American insurgents re-wrote the counter-insurgency manual for the military, got Petraeus installed as commander of the US forces in Iraq, and dragged the mission out of the quagmire.

I’m a complete amateur when it comes to this stuff, but three things struck me about the story (as Ricks tells it):

First, that when it comes to dealing with an insurgency, the population is the prize. The goal is not to kill the enemy but to turn it into — at worse — a political opposition. That means getting out into the population and making it clear that you aren’t going anywhere. It is amazing to realise that until Petraeus took over, the US troops were essentially “commuting to war” from their super FOBs. 

Second, that “democratization” is not only a distant goal, but as a near-term objective can be utterly counterproductive. As Ricks quotes one analyst: “Our current strategy is based on the delusion that we can have stable or modulated democratization. Few things are more destabilizing and prone to chaos than democratization. 

Third: It is hard to imagine a Canadian journalist writing a similar book about Canada’s strategy in the war. It is even harder to imagine members of a  Canadian think tank having a similar impact on the Canadian military in the middle of a war. And it is ludicrous to think that senior members of the Canadian military would be as open and on the record as the men and women Ricks has as sources. 

The Gamble is the most remarkable book I’ve read in ages.

2:00 pm – Redraft entire tax code

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, March 25, 2009 at 12:14 PM - 8 Comments

Of course. ‘Cause after he’s through fixing the economy, overhauling health care, reforming the education system, and controlling the weather, he’s got the whole rest of the day staring at him…

Obama Asks Volcker to Lead Panel on Tax-Code Overhaul

March 25 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama is putting former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in charge of a tax-code review aimed at closing loopholes, streamlining the law and generating revenue, budget Director Peter Orszag said.

Volcker, 81, who heads the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, is being asked to take a top-to-bottom look at the laws in an effort to rebalance the tax system.

Everybody Loves a Good Manufactured Outrage

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 20, 2009 at 9:26 AM - 13 Comments

Last night President Obama was on Jay Leno, normal enough for a candidate but unusual (if not unprecedented) for a President, and when Jay Leno mock-complimented him on his higher (but still low) bowling score, Obama said: “It’s like the special Olympics or something.”

The line was immediately picked up by commentators, was walked back by a Presidential spokesman, prompted a Presidential apology, and became a top blog issue within the hour. The internet and the 24-hour news cycle have turned word-parsing into a science, but it’s also become, in a strange way, a “scoop.” Jake Tapper, who “broke” this story on his ABC News blog, is basically obsessed with turning up mis-statements or gaffes that others have ignored; he’s ABC’s Senior Trivia Correspondent. In this case, the story may get even more play because it fits into an emerging media narrative, that Obama can’t say anything right without a teleprompter. Gaffes get more play when they fit an overall narrative.

I have to admit I’m not terribly outraged by the manufactured outrage machine in this case. Powerful political figures do need to watch what they say and choose their words carefully. It’s a different matter when someone says something that is not stupid but is then wilfully misinterpreted to mean something else, like Al Gore with his internet comments (he never said he invented the internet, but a whole media narrative was created around the idea that he did). But this is just standard-issue stuff where somebody makes a poor choice of words, it becomes a 24-hour story and is then forgotten. Besides, I suspect that politicians don’t always mind this kind of outrage, since it creates a distraction from the genuinely controversial or embarrassing things they say. So Obama probably considers himself lucky that he’s getting more outrage over that than his statement that Tim Geithner is doing an outstanding job.

Bipartisanship, Good and Bad

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 10:37 PM - 1 Comment

My column for the mag coming out this week points out the inherent tension between Obama’s twin themes of Change and Unity, and praises the president for knowing which one to ditch. I’m not a fan of bipartisanship ( and its many kissing cousins — postpartisanship, consensus, pragmatism, centrism, Third Wayism, radical-middlism, etc.), and while I’m glad I didn’t see Matt Bai’s nice piece on Obama’s understanding of bipartisanship until after I filed,  I agree entirely with Bai that Obama has kept what is worthwhile about it.

As Bai argues, for Obama, bipartisanship is not about getting votes from members of the other party, it isn’t about consensus for the sake of appearances. Rather, it is about cultivating a certain political culture that respects reasonable disagreement:

During the closing weeks of the fall campaign, Obama told me that bridging the cultural chasm in America would require of him, as president, a governing style that acknowledged differences rather than exploited them. This is why he intends to keep Republican leaders on speed dial, even if they vote against him — in doing so, he demonstrates to the voters that he will not be dragged into the pettiness and derision that have caused so many of them to lose faith in their government. He may also, over time, accumulate enough goodwill to wrangle Republican votes when he really does need them.

Tactical bipartisanship, in other words, a means to necessary ends, but not an end in itself.  

Keeping an eye on Obama's National Security Adviser

By John Geddes - Monday, March 2, 2009 at 3:47 PM - 3 Comments

The place of the National Security Adviser in U.S. politics is not something most Canadians, including federal officials, have thought much about. But after Barack Obama’s recent visit to Ottawa, that should change. As we reported in the March 9 issue of the magazine, the key White House official in setting the agenda for Obama’s meetings with Stephen Harper was General James Jones Jr., the current NSA.

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High Praise from High Places

By Andrew Potter - Monday, March 2, 2009 at 2:37 PM - 19 Comments

While everyone is performing Kremlinology on Harper’s CNN interview, the much more interesting piece on Harper in the WSJ goes a-begging for solid analysis. Written by Mary O’Grady, the paper’s Americas columnist and based on an ed-board meeting Harper did there, it must have resulted in some serious high-fiving in the PMO. Start with the hed and subhed:

A Resolute Ally in the War on Terror
Canadians are with us in Afghanistan. We should be with them on free trade.

How do you like them apples? It gets better (for Harper) from there on in, as the conversation courses over Afghanistan, the future of NATO, US protectionism, and free trade with Columbia. After pushing for ongoing support for the regime in Columbia:

Then he adds what is the cornerstone of Harper foreign policy: “If you don’t support your friends,” he says, looking around the room and turning up the volume every so slightly, “you . . . are . . . not . . . going to have many friends.”

Not bad play at all for a Canadian PM. The article actually reminded me of another opinion piece written in the Journal about another prime minister. In the fall of 2002, Marie-Josee Kravis (wife of Henry, and sort-of Canadian) wrote a scathing piece about Chretien as a very unreliable partner in the war on terror. She also described him as an economic neo-Malthusian and an insecure anti-American.

It was, on the whole, a terribly-argued piece written by a very influential woman in a very influential publication. The headline on the column was ”Canada’s Schroeder” and it caused a fair amount of consternation in Canada, because the WSJ at the time was widely acknowledged as the morning read for Washington republicans.

Which leads me to ask: What is the most influential publication in Obama’s Washington? Does anyone have a sense of what papers or magazines (or, heck, blogs) have an influence over the new regime comparable to the one the Journal supposedly had during the Bush years?

The Curious Case of Barack Obama

By John Parisella - Friday, February 27, 2009 at 6:53 PM - 29 Comments

What is it with this guy? Barack Obama’s first 100 days have to rank among the most active in over 70 years.

He promised a stimulus package and signed one two weeks ago; he promised mortgage relief and delivered; and while Secretary Geithner may have been short on details as far as relief for the financial sector is concerned, he still delivered the beginnings of a more comprehensive package. In the meantime, Obama announced the closing of Gitmo and, just today, he elaborated on his Iraq strategy. Obama’s visit to Canada clearly illustrated a new era in American diplomacy and his address to Congress this Tuesday further outlined his commitment to four major policy areas—energy, health care, climate change, and education. And he’s got a plan for all of it to boot. Still, the fight over the budget remains.

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Coyne v Wells: it's Obamarrific!

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, February 20, 2009 at 9:25 PM - 30 Comments

Now with 50% more props! And 50% less picture quality! My fault, that: we had to use my MacBook Air to record it, which whatever its other virtues, handles video awfully.

Coyne and Wells post O-day wrap up

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Coyne v. Wells in a post-Obama Ottawa

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 20, 2009 at 8:10 PM - 0 Comments

Coyne and Wells post O-day wrap up

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HQ Version

Coyne v. Wells in a post-Obama Ottawa

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 20, 2009 at 8:05 PM - 3 Comments

Coyne and Wells post O-day wrap up

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Canada’s best Presidents

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 18, 2009 at 4:32 PM - 3 Comments

In August 1943, two years before the end of the Second World War, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood at the base of Ottawa’s Peace Tower and addressed his “good friends and neighbours of the Dominion.” The crowd, reportedly numbering 27,000, covered even the rooftops of the capital.

Roosevelt, who had summered as a boy and, later, as president at Campobello Island, New Brunswick, spoke stridently of the Nazi menace in Europe and confidently of what would come from the meetings in Quebec City between himself, prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and British prime minister Winston Churchill. “Mr. King, my old friend,” Roosevelt said, “may I, through you, thank the people of Canada for their hospitality to all of us. Your course and mine have run so closely and affectionately during these many long years that this meeting adds another link to that chain. I have always felt at home in Canada, and you, I think, have always felt at home in the United States.”

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