{"id":38708,"date":"2017-06-07T01:00:34","date_gmt":"2017-06-07T05:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38708"},"modified":"2021-05-27T09:11:14","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T13:11:14","slug":"qotd-blame-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/06\/07\/qotd-blame-america\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Blame America"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Canadians love to compare themselves to Americans, for all kinds of reasons \u2014 to congratulate themselves, to flagellate themselves, to comfort themselves when they\u2019re somewhat embarrassed. The \u201cmeanwhile in Canada\u201d genre of tweets is a bit of all three: in the midst of chaos in Washington, someone will oh-so-cleverly take note of a comparatively minor Canadian scandal. There is no charitable interpretation to be made of it: it\u2019s either bragging, or it\u2019s suggesting that we worry too much about Canada\u2019s ostensibly piddling scandals \u2014 like, say, the prime minister\u2019s chief of staff cutting a $90,000 cheque to a sitting Senator. That\u2019s not Watergate, but it\u2019s bonkers nonetheless.<\/p>\n<p>The effect is both to confuse the conversation about any given issue and to absolve Canadians of any responsibility for it. The ultimate example was CBC Marketplace\u2019s moronic attempt to sell racist t-shirts on Canadian streets and chalk up any interest to \u201cthe Trump effect.\u201d But again, that was just an extreme manifestation of this unhealthy blame-America instinct \u2014 one we would do well to eradicate.<\/p>\n<p>Chris Selley, <a href=\"http:\/\/news.nationalpost.com\/full-comment\/chris-selley-canadas-donald-trump-was-never-on-offer-in-the-conservative-leadership-race\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;&#8216;Canada&#8217;s Donald Trump&#8217; was never on offer in the Conservative leadership race&#8221;, <em>National Post<\/em><\/a>, 2017-05-26.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Canadians love to compare themselves to Americans, for all kinds of reasons \u2014 to congratulate themselves, to flagellate themselves, to comfort themselves when they\u2019re somewhat embarrassed. The \u201cmeanwhile in Canada\u201d genre of tweets is a bit of all three: in the midst of chaos in Washington, someone will oh-so-cleverly take note of a comparatively minor [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,41,13],"tags":[1420,262,1037,907],"class_list":["post-38708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-classism","tag-culture","tag-donaldtrump","tag-snobbery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a4k","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38708"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65987,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38708\/revisions\/65987"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}