On unfair stereotypes

Don't you just hate when a prominent political figure wrongly insults our neighbour to the south solely for the sake preserving his own political hide? Take, for example, the Cons' Saskatchewan campaign co-chairman, who's so desperate not to be seen as having American support that he bashed the American press in general in response to the Washington Times article that endorsed his party:

"That article was just plain inaccurate on a number of fronts," Rybchuk said. "They (American journalists) don't even know capital of Canada -- let alone the details of Harper policies."

For the record, the commentary in question doesn't state anything about the capital of Canada...so there's absolutely nothing to justify Rybchuk's comment on that point. And it's hard to figure out why Rybchuk would choose to tar all American writers (or at least multiple commentators) with the same brush when the article in question was written by only one person.

As for Harper's policies, the Times commentary casts Harper as "pro-free trade, pro-Iraq war, anti-Kyoto, and socially conservative", and says that he would "push to cut taxes and spending and the regulatory burden on Canada's business sector". For the next set of debates, I'd like to see Harper discuss which of these positions he actually disagrees with. At best he might try to argue that he's not really for the Iraq war, and hasn't explicitly stated that he'll cut spending...but that hardly makes the commentary inaccurate as to the general thrust of the campaign.

That said, I should note in fairness that the commentary was evidently wrong on one point: the "crude anti-American rhetoric" isn't coming only from the Liberal side of the aisle.