The Canadian Press is reporting that Michael Ignatieff stood up for Canada today. He wanted to express some displeasure on our behalf about newly minted homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano's comments concerning border security. So he delivered his message to Larry Summers, an old friend of his and one of President Obama's chief economic advisers. I'd be curious to know whether that conversation took place before or after this meeting. Iggy may have to work on his delivery.
Iggy spoke. But did Larry listen?
It just gets more and more obvious that the women who reacted so strongly against Summers when he was president of Harvard were right, doesn't it?
Summers is an outdated cliché on just about every ground he claims expertise, and yet there he is, adviser to the president, and asleep at the switch to boot.
Just the sort of person to be best friends with Iggy, though. Like Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power, who are probably better at staying awake through boring meetings (younger, sharper instincts).
To be fair and balanced, I also thought that Napolitano's comments about the U.S.-Canadian border were ignorant and inflammatory, and she as much as admitted that she still didn't know what she was talking about. Her exerience is entirely with AZ-NM border problems with Mexico, which are severe, although it might help to hear an American reflecting intelligently on the contribution the U.S. itself has made to those problems.
Och, what can we do? She is sec'y of the bleeding dep't of "Homeland Security." I have heard very good things about her from people in AZ, but what can she do, slotted into a department that seems founded on presumptions of paranoia about all furriners?
Has'nt the homeland chief looked at the secutity tapes of all the 9/11 hijackers walking right through secuity at the airport in New York. That's a long way from them entry across the border from Canada. Sounds like she needs a lot of on the ground training before she makes idiotic remarks to deflect their own fumbling and bumbling