Polls and Attitude

There is so much about which to blog and so little time to post. Here is one item.

Last Friday CTV News reported that the Pew Research Center released the results of a survey called the Pew Global Attitudes Project. According to this survey a significant number of Canadians have once again demonstrated that they have an attitude as big as the globe when it comes to our American friends and neighbours.

According to the Pew poll, 59% of Canucks currently possess a favourable view of Americans, down from 72% in 2002. While a healthy majority of Canadians retain a positive and friendly view of the Yanks it seems that this number is dropping. Those with a negative view of Americans see them as "rude, greedy and violent."

It must be all those American elected officials calling Canadian bastards and stomping on dolls of the Canadian Prime Minister on the US TV networks that has made us upset up here. You?d never see a public figure acting such a rude way in the Great White North. We are a polite people.

Mind you, it is true that Americans are a violent people. It was not always so. Americans did not go to war when:

• their diplomatic personnel were held hostage by Islamic extremists;
• their embassies around the world were repeatedly bombed by Islamic terrorists;
• their soldiers stationed abroad were bombed in their military barracks by Islamic radicals;
• their warships were attacked in foreign ports by peace loving Islamic al Qaida-ists; and
• their largest building was bombed by Islamic jihadists.

None of the above drove this "violent" people to war. True, President Clinton tossed a few cruise missiles at a Sudanese asprin factory to show displeasure, but there was no real retaliation of any significance. It was not until Islamic bin Ladinites flew the friendly skies of United into the sides of the World Trade Centre towers in the most unfriendly attack since Pearl Harbor that the US government and people went to war in a big way.

They remain at war today in a quest to get Muslims to stop attacking them. They are in for a long bitter battle I am afraid, and may God be at the side of their fighting troops. Unlike so many critics of the Americans, God is not a moral relativist, can distinguish between good and evil, and has been known to weigh in from time-to-time with a smite or two on the side of the good. Curiously, Americans have a more negative view of themselves than we do in the categories of greed and immorality.

Seventy per cent of Americans view themselves as greedy, which is higher than any other country surveyed. And while 34 per cent of Canadians see Americans as immoral, 39 per cent of Americans also see themselves the same way.

One may conclude from this that Americans just have higher standards than we do.