Can you imagine Steve speaking thus?
Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard: ‘There is a reason the world always looks to America’
…
She blew them away.
Speaking with a heartfelt tone and, near the end some voice-wavering emotion (full text below), Gillard’s 30-minute speech won 16 outbursts of applause, six of them standing. According to those in the House chamber, there were too some moist eyes at the end.
…few foreign leaders realize that deep down in their collective continental heart, Americans secretly yearn to be liked. Gillard gets that. Or her speechwriter does. But the Australian’s emotion recalling her childhood awe at being let off school to watch Americans walk on the moon could not be faked…
Gillard hit all the right bases, touched all the right notes, recalling joint sacrifices and expressing a level of official appreciation that Congress has not heard at home for a very long time, even though Gillard stressed she was speaking for Australians to Americans.
Probably back home her critics will say Australia’s national leader sounded a bit obsequious toward the Yanks. But for this audience on this day in this place of Washington, the lady from Down Under ruled supremely…
Now that’s serving your real national interests. And note:
Australia’s prime minister told a joint session of Congress on Wednesday [March 9] that Australian troops in Afghanistan would remain with the U.S.-led coalition for years to come, knocking down recent reports that the country was contemplating an early exit from the war-torn country…
Australia is far and away the largest non-NATO contributor to the coalition in Afghanistan, with some 1,550 troops on the ground — a 40 percent increase since 2009…
Keep in mind she is going to carbon tax Australia back into the middle ages with her war on the hoax called global warming.
She was speaking of another America, the one with cojones, not the sad, nagged wimp America of today.
she’s a leftie….and she likely wouldn’t have been so complimentary if a Republican was in office right now…
What a farce. Gillard is the prototypical femi-leftist radical who would like nothing more than to see the American nation dissolve. People can change but this would be a complete 180. If she told me rain was wet I’d want to check.
Maybe she fears something and is trying to buy some breathing room with this speech, or maybe she is trying to build a bigger tent at home. She’s PM by a hair and her base is the left. I think she’s just kicking-it Fabian style.
If by “Steve” you mean Prime Minister Harper, he cannot say something like that, unless you like the Conservatives in the electoral wilderness for about four to five years.
Erik is correct – before Harper could praise either American (or Canadian) exceptionalism and survive politically – he needs to at least de-fund the CBC ….
Well, China is just up the street so Australia needs to do all the brown nosing it can.
That said, it’s a said state of affairs that most Canadian are so anti-American. Hypocrital even.
How close is this to her promising “no carbon tax in any government I lead”, when campaigning for election, then ramping up to ram it through after the election.
Besides, Bono did a better job delivering those lines, but he’s a professional performer, as opposed to a politician.
Grandmaw always said never miss a golden oppotunity to shut the hellup.
Yo Mike, we will fix that attitude come 2012.
,
There must be a disconnect between the title of this post and contents of the quote. Are you upset with Canadian pullout?
Yeah, that’s going to be terrible! No more Canadians mistakenly killed by Americans, no more Canadians killed by Taliban. No more war spending in the budget. How are we going to live with that nightmare?
She must have been referring to the pre 1913 America. Before its republic was usurped by a criminal governing cabal centered in Wall Street and Washington.
That’s Mr. Harper to you Mark.
“What a farce. Gillard is the prototypical femi-leftist radical who would like nothing more than to see the American nation dissolve. People can change but this would be a complete 180. If she told me rain was wet I’d want to check.” Well said Sam.
I agree with you , too Soccermom.
The Australian Senate refuses to pass the carbon tax thingie because the AGW hoax has no credibility anywhere. She is on the same side as Obama on almost every issue. Australians are fortunate to have a Senate and I am quite certain that Gillard won’t last long. We are very fortunate to have PM Stephen Harper; we would be further down under than Australia if we would have allowed the Bloc and his fools in the second and third legs of the coalition to sink this country.
Atheist, liberal, and a woman – clearly we can’t listen to a word she says.
Actually Alex in Australia the word “liberal” hasn’t yet been lexically appropriated by the left, and the liberal party is in opposition against Gillard. The labour party won by the slimmest of margins and needed support of independents to form government.
I don’t believe a word she says because she’s a dyed-in-the-wool fabian socialist, which means her whole raison d’etre is to incrementally destroy western civilization.
And I don’t like her hair either. Anyone with hair that red can’t be trusted.
It’s an interesting statement about both the Canadian and Australian militaries when 1500 troops is considered an important contribution.
Strip away all the national command and support components and other “add-ons” and you’re left with a battle group based on a battalion.
And even sustaining that stresses the hell out of the armed forces of these two countries.
Two wealthy First World nations.
I looked it up. The Aussie forces have suffered 23 deaths in Afghanistan. Canada? 154.
Either we are terribly incompetent at training and preparing our young men and women for their mission, or the Aussies aren’t anywhere near the sharp end of the spear.
I wonder how gung-ho the Aussies would be if they were losing people at the rate we are?
Guess you haven’t been paying attention. Our government spent so much time screwing around trying to figure out what kind of commitment they wanted to make that, by the time the decision was made, the only area left unclaimed was Kandahar. We got the worst seat in the house because we were late for the party.
Doesn’t matter; we’re still quite “gung-ho”, thanks. There are many diverse political opinions within the forces, just like there are amongst the Canadian civilian populace, but there’s never a shortage of soldiers who are willing to deploy. I was pretty pissed when I got taken off the list for my last deployment so I could fill a position in Canada.
Thanks for your service Alex.
“I wonder how gung-ho the Aussies would be if they were losing people at the rate we are?”
Britain has lost around 500 military fatalities in the War on Terror, plus about 60 civilians slaughtered in the WTC on 9/11; Australia about 30 (So low because ALL their conbat forces in Iraq and Af-stan have been Aussie SAS troops, world class bad-ass special ops troops. They’ve killed by a couple of orders of magnitude higher then their own casualties, of the enemy in Iraq and Af-stan.)and America about 8,500 dead, which include the 9/11 dead civilian Americans.
154 soldiers lost in 9 years? Get a grip, KevinB!
That’s hardly Vimy Ridge, the Somme or the Battle of the Bulge level of casualties, or even 1 day at Dieppe. (BTW, add to the 154, the 26 Canadian civilians slaughtered on 9/11 in the WTC.)
If so many Canadians find keeping 1 lousy reinforced infantry battalion in the field to be an onerous burden, (Definitely not the opinion of most of the soldiers themselves, from what I’ve read, but who gives a f*** what they think, eh?!) their priorities, perspective and moral fiber are seriously defective.
If the war was/is not worth fighting, then pull your troops out. But if the Liberals were right to send them there and the Conservatives were right to keep them there, the logic and morality follows to keep them there until victory. Don’t cut and run on your NATO allies AND the Afghan people, especially when we’ve finally turned the corner in Af-stan from the effects of the Surge.
So my advice is for those squeamism Canadian armchair generals, self-admiring pundits, and kissing-Quebec’s-ass-for-votes politicians to grow some balls and act like their fathers and grandfathers did in WW1 and WW2.
DavePa,
It’s certainly not the ability of the soldiers in question here.
It’s the lack of a defined goal, there has never been one, therefore there is no end point to communicate about, but an ever changing set of “investments” into Afghanistan’s future.
It’s been defined by whatever is politically expedient, hence the late commitment to an extension in a “instruction” role.
If you don’t know where you are going, you probably will not end up where you want to be.
Is that too “common” to be considered knowledge?
“It’s the lack of a defined goal, there has never been one”
There’s a goal, it just happens to be one which some SDA readers don’t like: helping brown people. More specific goals come and go, but the thrust of our operations since first overthrowing the Taliban has aways been to suppress the fanatical elements while helping the Afghani people rebuild their nation into some semblance of a functional modern democracy. If you’re not aware of this, you obviously haven’t done even the most cursory examination of our involvement in Afghanistan.