We like you, we really like you!

[Scooter]

So the village idiot had to go back to 2003 (read the comments in your own link, moron) i.e. around the time of the launching of the Iraq War, to find an example of anti-Americanism. Which, of course, was not directed in any way shape or form at these young hockey players who would not even have been visible to those outside their bus.

Keep 'em coming, this is getting fun.

[Scooter]

The village idiot should be grateful that Canadians are intelligent enough to know that he is not representative of most Americans, otherwise we would believe that you were a nation of descendants of multigenerational incest lacking the brain cells God gave to a spaghetti squash.

[Lord Jim]

Lib if I've got the actions of a few jackasses 13 years ago on one side of the scale, and 16 years of scientific polling on the other, it's a pretty easy call for me to make in deciding which one is likely to be more representative of Canadian attitude towards Americans...

And here's an update on that story:

PeeWees back in Canada after Montreal booing

Thursday, March 25, 2004

John Reilly, a Massachusetts state trooper, is not a man accustomed to
crying.

Yet Reilly shed tears of joy when he and a dozen other hockey parents, plus a team of 12-year-old U.S. boys riding a bus north from Boston, arrived in New Brunswick on Tuesday to a welcome fit for royalty: Three hundred young Canadian hockey players lined the main street of St. Stephen, N.B., tapping their sticks on the pavement and chanting "U.S.A., U.S.A.," as the bus rolled into Canada.

"All these kids in hockey uniforms, from little tykes to teenagers,
cheering us into their town - it was unbelievable," Reilly said
yesterday. "Everybody on the bus was in shock, and many of us
were in tears."

So began the closing chapter to an extraordinary, cross-border
hockey saga that started a year ago in Montreal on the volatile
opening week of the Iraq War.

Reilly, his son John, and the rest of the Brockton Boxers - a
pee-wee team from Brockton, Mass., a working-class suburb ofBoston - arrived by bus in Montreal last March Break for a much-anticipated week of happy revelry in the hockey mecca of North America.

U.S. bombs had recently started falling on Iraq, and as the Brockton players and their chaperones were unloading their luggage outside a Montreal hotel, they were caught in the midst of a large anti-war protest. Their "Coach USA" bus, emblazoned with a Stars and Stripes logo, caught the attention of the protesters who swarmed past the terrified American kids, cursing and yelling at them, and hammering on the side of their bus.

The next day at an NHL game in the Bell Centre, the Brockton Boxers heard Montreal fans boo the U.S. anthem and heckle their presence at the game. The group left the arena in the second
period and drove back to the U.S., where some parents and players vowed never to return to Canada.

Word of the group's ugly experience reached the media in Brockton and soon made headlines across North America.

Brian Johnson, a hockey parent in Fredericton, was so upset at theevents he started mulling ways to make it up to the Brockton players.

In January, he went to Brockton to invite the Boxers to New Brunswick for a friendly tournament. Johnson was nervous about has since mushroomed into a $60,000 teenage hockey
extravaganza complete with celebrity guests, gala dinners and the Stanley Cup.

The fun started last week, when New Brunswick Premier Bernard Lord travelled to the Massachusetts State House in Boston to personally hand out glossy invitations for the trip, plus personalized
track suits, to each of the Boxers who had come under fire in Montreal.

On Tuesday, the Boxers and their families - 50 Americans plus a U.S. television crew along for the ride - left Brockton bound for New Brunswick, a place many of them had never even heard of
before.

At the border post in St. Stephen, they were met by two Mounties in scarlet tunics and a police cruiser that escorted them through the cheering throng on main street to a reception at the town's
information centre, where a giant welcome cake was devoured.

In Fredericton, where Canada's university hockey championships are underway, the Boxers are now lodged at the same hotel as the visiting varsity teams, but the pee-wee players are by far the
bigger attraction.

"Everybody we bump into here knows our story and wants to say hello to us," Reilly said.

http://www.usmessageboard.com/threads/p ... oing.4431/

[Scooter]

You're creating too much cognitive dissonance for the village idiot. In his mind, Canadians could not possibly like Americans because (a) we were allies of the Soviet Union and (b) we are close to Europeans, who do not eat corn.

[Sue U]

[liberty]

[rubato]

I'm sorry, did I miss the post where you admitted that the story was exactly opposite what you claimed? That in fact the Canadians were gracious and caring and went well out of their way to be kind to a group of junior hockey players after a tiny group of louts made the opposite impression.


You were going to do that weren't you.?


yrs,
rubato

[liberty]

I'm sorry, did I miss the post where you admitted that the story was exactly opposite what you claimed? That in fact the Canadians were gracious and caring and went well out of their way to be kind to a group of junior hockey players after a tiny group of louts made the opposite impression.


You were going to do that weren't you.?


yrs,
rubato

I don’t doubt that there is pro-American Sentiment in Canada as well as anti-American . Which side is the strongest depends on what is happening at the time. During Vietnam anti-Americanism was at its strongest, but even then there were Canadians who appreciated the USA. I remember Gordan Sinclair ; I wonder if he is consider as a traitor by some in Canada.

i
http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/sinclair.asp



Good reading, from a Toronto newspaper's editorial page!

Widespread, but only partial news coverage was given recently to a remarkable editorial broadcast from Toronto by Gordon Sinclair, a Canadian television commentator. What follows is the full text of his trenchant remarks as printed in the Congressional Record:



This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as most generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth.

Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of these countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.

When the franc was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it. When distant cities are hit by earthquakes, it is the United States that hurries in to help. This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes. Nobody helped.

The Marshall Plan and the Truman Policy pumped billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent, warmongering Americans. I'd like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States Dollar build its own airplane. Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tristar, or the Douglas DC-10? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all the International lines except Russia fly American planes?

Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or woman on the moon? You talk about Japanese technocracy, and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy, and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy, and you find men on the moon — not once, but several times — and safely home again.

You talk about scandals, and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everybody to look at. Even their draft-dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, and most of them, unless they are breaking Canadian laws, are getting American dollars from ma and pa at home to spend here.

When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the American who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke.

I can name you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.

Our neighbors have faced it alone, and I'm one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them get kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles. I hope Canada is not one of those.

[Scooter]

I remember Gordan Sinclair

No you don't, you hadn't heard of him before today when you found that piece.

I wonder if he is consider as a traitor by some in Canada.

Why would he be, except in your delusional universe where Canada was an ally of the Soviet Union?

Good reading, from a Toronto newspaper's editorial page!

More evidence that you had never heard of Sinclair until today. Sinclair's piece was not a newspaper editorial, he delivered it on the radio. Something you would have known if you had actually remembered him as you alleged.

Don't you have a ballot to go and cast for David Duke?

[Lord Jim]

I do remember hearing Sinclair's piece on the radio when I was a kid...

It was on the Billboard Top 40 here for weeks, and I would hear it on Casey Kasem's show...

[Big RR]

Yep, I think it was on the charts in 1973; if it was on Casey's show, it was in the Billboard top 40 for a week or more. It was a pretty maudlin piece backed by an orchestra playing America the Beautiful (except for the pounding tympanies at the start).

[Lord Jim]

"The Americans" is a famous commentary by the late Canadian broadcaster Gordon Sinclair. Originally written for a regular broadcast on CFRB radio in Toronto on June 5, 1973, it became a media and public phenomenon. It was replayed several times a day by some United States radio stations and released as a hit audio recording in several forms. Ronald Reagan credited it for giving comfort to the United States in difficult times, and it was widely rediscovered and re-disseminated as the United States faced new crises in the 2000s.

On June 5, Sinclair discussed some stories from the day's news. Widespread heavy tornado damage afflicted the U.S. Midwest. The Mississippi River was in flood stage. The American Red Cross faced an imminent threat of insolvency. And the United States dollar reached very low levels, something Sinclair, an inveterate market watcher, was keenly aware of.

"The Americans" was not, as widely reported later, an angry response to countries that were criticizing the American failure in the Vietnam War. Instead, Sinclair's commentary stated that when many countries faced economic crises or natural disasters, Americans were among the most generous people in the world at offering assistance, but when America faced a crisis, it often faced that crisis alone.

The editorial became a phenomenon on American radio after CKLW Radio news director and news anchor Byron MacGregor read Sinclair's commentary on the air. After CKLW (a 50,000 watt Windsor/Detroit powerhouse radio station) received many requests for it, a record was released by Westbound Records of MacGregor's recording, with "America the Beautiful" being played by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

By January 1974, The Americans record became one of the fastest-selling records in United States, reaching sales of 2 million within a month of its release.[1] The single eventually sold three and a half million copies in the United States, and hit #1 in Cash Box, as well as #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. All proceeds from the record were donated by MacGregor himself to the American Red Cross. (This version reached #42 in Canada.)

Gordon Sinclair's original recording was released as a record as well, with "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in the background, and went to #24 on the US record charts. This made the 73-year-old Sinclair the second-oldest living person ever to have a Billboard US Top 40 hit (75-year-old Moms Mabley had a Top 40 hit in 1969 with "Abraham, Martin & John"). The recording hit #30 in the Canadian RPM Magazine charts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ameri ... ommentary)

[Bicycle Bill]

Good reading, from a Toronto newspaper's editorial page!

More evidence that you had never heard of Sinclair until today.  Sinclair's piece was not a newspaper editorial, he delivered it on the radio.  Something you would have known if you had actually remembered him as you alleged.

I'd cut liberty a little slack on that one, Scooter.  While it was originally recorded as a radio editorial for CFRB radio in Toronto — without the background music — it struck a note with people and started being replayed.  It wasn't long before someone stuck some appropriate music to it, released it, and it hit the record charts.

A transcript of the original editorial — the lyrics, if you will — was reprinted and re-reprinted in editorial columns across both the USA and Canada after the recording was released, so it's entirely possible that liberty is referring to one of these columns.  And since the radio station was Toronto based and liberty's reference is to an unnamed Toronto newspaper, it might be that the paper picked up on the original broadcast and printed the transcript as an editorial even before the recording went viral.

So I'd let him have this one.  There's enough points on enough other things where he is totally wrong that this one time when he might be correct doesn't really matter.

-"BB"-

[Crackpot]

Bill you don't know half the history

[Scooter]

I'd cut liberty a little slack on that one, Scooter.

Why should I? He has provided as much evidence for this contention as he did for claiming that Canada was an ally of the Soviet Union, and that Europeans don't eat corn. To say nothing of having accused my parents of being communists and traitors.

[Econoline]

I'd have to agree with Bill here. IIRC, liberty is old enough that (like me) he may well recall hearing it on the radio (especially in his part of the country) , without remembering any details other than the fact that the author was Canadian. I'm sure that attempting to find it on the internet results in getting some garbled/erroneous information (which is, after all, lib's specialty here...) The Snopes page he linked to mentioned the information that Sinclair was a radio commntator, but didn't really make a point of the erroneous reference to it being a "newspaper editorial".

But just for the record, lib, even during the war in Vietnam, Canada and Canadians were overwhelmingly friendly to U.S. citizens, even when they opposed the policies of the U.S. government. My wife and I did a lot of traveling in Canada during that period, so I'm speaking from personal experience.

ETA: Moms Mabley had a Top 40 hit with the song "Abraham, Martin & John"??? I must have missed that...

[Big RR]

I agree about the friendliness econo--I used to travel into he Toronto area a lot and the only tome I ever had any problems was during the pre-NAFTA trade negotiations in the 80's; I was held up at the airport twice for over an hour each time while customs officials grilled me to make certain I was not working in Canada (providing counsel was OK, but working was not--I'm still not sure how they say the difference between the two). After the second time I started flying into Buffalo, renting a car, and crossing at Niagara Falls where I never had any problems with customs/immigration. The people were always pretty friendly; indeed, I think detention at a US airport by officials would be worse (even for an American citizen).

[oldr_n_wsr]

and crossing at Niagara Falls where I never had any problems with customs/immigration

When my cousin (a 2nd cousin) came visiting from Germany (fall of 1975), her and I were going to Niagra falls. Our ride from the airport to the bus terminal was late so we missed the tour bus to the American side of the falls. We found a bus going to the Canadian side so we took that. I was 17yo at the time and didn't know anything about customs/immigration. Going into Canada was no problem. Coming back into the USA became a problem. The only form of ID I had was my lerners permit and they (USA Customs) were asking me all kinds of questions, why was I there, who did I visit, blah blah blah. My German national cousin meanwhile breezed through back into the USA (she had her passport). After telling our story for what seemed like the 10th time they finally let me back into the USA.

[Big RR]

Interesting, I don't think they ever asked me for ID on reentry into the US--only asking how long I stayed in Canada and what I did. Maybe it was because you were yong, or travelling with a non American? Or maybe you just look shifty.

[Burning Petard]

Well, it is a problem, do Europeans eat corn, isn't it. What is corn? In many parts of Europe, the word 'corn' (similar pronunciations, different spellings) is used as a general word for various grains. In England English, 'corning' is a manufacturing process label, that seems to mean converting some kind of stuff into particulates resembling the physical shape of what Americans would call grains of wheat.

Specifically what I know as 'corn' is called maize in some parts of Europe that I have visited. But it certainly was eaten, just not perhaps as commonly as in America. As a money crop, it is not well suited to farming conditions generally in Europe.

I never have figured out what 'corned beef' has to do with that yellow stuff mixed with lima beans and called succotash.

snailgate