
Aside from the unprecedented occurrence of flapping his mouth and threatening the Supreme Court about a matter pending before the justices,
President Obama was also busy at a recent summit alienating our two closest neighbors.As usual, the president's lackeys in the media ignored this, but the Mexican and Canadian press reported the real story. And as you'll see, Canada's PM Stephen Harper, a staunch U.S. ally (or at least he used to be) was unusually blunt.
Normally, such summits are relatively friendly affairs dealing with trade issues that are settled more or less amicably and end with the usual platitudes and photo-ops. Not this time.
Mexico's President Calderon is already not a fan of the president because of Fast and Furious, which illegally supplied arms to the drug cartels strangling Mexico and resulted in over 200 murders of Mexican nationals. My sources tell me that President Calderon asked some pointed questions about what the U.S. was doing to investigate this, punish the officials responsible and clean up the mess President Obama's justice department created, and that the answers were less than satisfactory.
This puts Calderon in a terrible position politically as the Mexican public is asking him the same questions.
El Universal, and
Reforma, two of Mexico's top papers have led the charge on this one.
Our situation with Canada is even worse. Canada's
National Post quoted former Canadian diplomat Colin Robertson as saying the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and our alliance with Canada is "on life support."
It's not a well known fact to most Americans, but our biggest supplier of foreign oil is not the Middle East, but Canada.
Up until recently, the Canadians supplying us with oil at lower than market prices because of the NAFTA agreement. American companies actually refined some of the Canadian oil and exported it overseas at below market price, which the Canadians put up with because we had the refineries and they didn't, and besides..it was between friends and there were compensations on things like lumber and items American companies manufactured.
That changed when President Obama took office. He and PM Stephen Harper never quite hit it off that well anyway, partly because President Obama's policies on Afghanistan where Canadian troops are in combat and partly because of disagreements on Israel, a country PM Harper is a great supporter of.
But the rift widened greatly when President Obama repeatedly blocked Canada and Mexico's attempts to joint a lucrative eight-way free trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an alliance of the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Peru, Chile, and Singapore.
And it exploded when President Obama rejected the Keystone Pipeline.
The Canadians had patiently waited for President Obama to make a decision to allow what would have been an economic plus for both countries, creating jobs and allowing the Canadians to benefit by shipping more oil that way.
President Obama's farcical no on the pipe line
was a wake up call for the Canadians:
In a public one-on-one interview here with Jane Harman, head of the Wilson Centre think-tank, Harper said Obama's rejection of the controversial pipeline -- even temporarily -- stressed Canada's need to find other buyers for oilsands crude.
And that wouldn't change even if the president's mind did.
"Look, the very fact that a 'no' could even be said underscores to our country that we must diversify our energy export markets," Harper told Harman in front of a live audience of businesspeople, scholars, diplomats, and journalists.
As I previously reported on these pages,
the Canadians finslly got sick and tired of Obama's dithering, sold the oil contracts to the Chinese and rerouted the oil to Vancouver.
And not only isn't that that decision going to change, but as the
Winnipeg Free Press is reporting, PM Harper is now saying that as a consequence of our president's actions, American consumers will be paying for Canadian oil in the future at market rates:
Here's some quotes
from an interview on the matter PM Harper did at the Wilson Center.
Harper: Now, in fairness though I've got to say that Canada's interests here are a little bit different. And particularly, I might as well be frank, particularly in light of the...of the interim decision at least on Keystone. What it really has highlighted for Canada is that our issue when it comes to energy and energy security is not North American self-sufficiency. Our energy [issue] is the necessity of diversifying our energy export markets. We can not be, as a country, in a situation where really our one, and in many cases almost only, energy partner could say no to our energy products. We just cannot be in that kind of position.
And the truth of the matter is that, when it comes to oil in particular, we do face a significant discount on the marketplace because of the fact that we're a captive supplier. We have made it clear to the people of Canada, one of our national priorities is to make sure that we have the infrastructure and the capacity to export our energy products outside of North America.
What Harper is saying if you read between the lines is that not only are the Canadians going to diversify whom they sell to but that their no longer going to rely on U.S. refiners. Look for Canada to begin work on its own refineries and oil infrastructure in the near future....probably financed by China.
This president could have okayed the Keystone pipeline with the of a pen. It would have created thousands of jobs, been a boost to U.S. exports and given us a safe and secure source of oil from a friendly neighbor. Instead, thanks to President Obama, we not only lost out on all of this permanently, but angered a loyal, long time ally in the bargain. And this president then had the nerve
to blame this fiasco on Republicans, just like he does every other failure he engineers.
This, by the way, is the energy policy Slo-Joe Biden just referred to as '
the very best it's ever been.'
Remember when Barack Obama was running for election? Remember how the line was that he was going to fix things and improve relations with our allies after 'Cowboy' Bush?
President Obama's tactics are pretty clear. None of this is an accident
What he and his far Left vampires want is to choke the American economy. They want an America where gas prices
are as high or higher than they are in Europe, where most people are forced into public transportation run by the government and the private cars that exist are abominations like the Volt, where a light bulb costs ten times as much as before and where breaking one calls for an expensive hazmat cleansing rather than just a broom and a dustpan.
And above all, he wants an America where the tax payers are raped by government giveaways to green energy scams run by well connected insiders and Democrat campaign donors.
Because America, in his mind, deserves to be made to pay for our sins.
Absolutely disgraceful.