So I’m sitting on the couch watching the goopy rain spatter against the living room window, a steaming rum-based beverage close to hand, wondering if I ought not to pack up the kids and move to Cairo. No slush. No pesky Foreign Affairs Ministers sniping at their ex-girlfriends. And no pinched-faced blond-ambition bimbos whining about it.
This is front-page news in Canada? How boring are we?
Actually, it was a pretty funny joke. Woof. And poor sad Belinda Stronach ought to know better than to play the baby girly card. The woman behaved like a total snake to the party that got her into parliament then cries poo poo pants when her old boyfriend whispers a joke. Boo hoo, Belinda. Grow up. Or at least think of something funny to say about Peter MacKay. Look at the guy — how hard could it be?
About moving to Cairo. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak appears to be the only politician on the planet with both brains and gonads in good working order. He said, speaking to a group of senior government officials and Muslim clerics on Thursday, that the Muslim community has to take some responsibility for the shoddy state of Islam’s reputation. Normal Muslims have not done enough to prove that the terrorists are a lunatic fringe, he says.
That is a thoughtful, provocative message to relay to an excitable global media. (I will not be surprised if somewhere this week, extremists burn photographs of Mubarak and holler, “Death to Egypt.”) But I am not sure I agree with him. I suspect that the global snitfest over Islam is mostly racist. Normal Roman Catholics were not expected to conduct a public relations exercise to convince the world that not every Catholic was likely to blow up garbage can in London when the IRA were most active. It was understood that violent criminals are just that and only that, no matter what they say. So long as they’re not brown.
As the mother of both a red-haired half-Irish kid (whose dad, incidentally, was a bomb-toting terrorist before he blew himself up) and the mother of a black-haired half-Lebanese kid whose Dad couldn’t have roused himself out of the coffee shop long enough to purchase a slingshot, I am pretty sure this is all about skin colour. My red kid gets his cheeks pinched, my brown kid gets the snitfest sneer. As if he has a bomb in his shorts.
Sometimes, the way that kid smells, I think he does.
