Stephen Harper for President

Americans should want our PM as their Commander-in-Chief, "right-wing carnival barkers" are taking over mainstream media, and other thoughts on the U.S. midterm elections.

As American voters head to the polls for midterm elections today, the Ottawa Sun opines, “we suspect they'd trade their Barack Obama for our Stephen Harper in one of those New York minutes.” That is, of course, assuming your average American could distinguish between Harper and a sack of dirt. Which they can’t. The reason for their would-be Harper-envy however? “Compare Canada's recovery from the global recession with that of our neighbour to the south, and most Canadians would likely say ours has come and gone with minimal damage.” We think what the Sun really means is that Americans want Paul Martin to be president. He’s the one who left the Tories a $12-billion budget surplus after all.

It’s hard for most of us to remember when “(s)ober-minded voices such as Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings set the media standard,” in the U.S., thanks to what the Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin calls Fox News’s “(r)ight-wing carnival barkers.” Fox may have made those screeching voices mainstream, but Martin believes “Jon Stewart has the formula that can perhaps stall or reverse this trend: satire and ridicule.” This is a pleasant thought, but a curious one, considering it’s been three days since Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, and American politics appears as insane as ever.

The National Post’s Kelly McParland makes a not-so-astonishing admission about his publication’s political views when he writes, “As a blog that tends, occasionally, to lean a little bit to the right, we should be happy about (impending Democratic losses at the midterms), supposedly. But it’s hard to get enthused. It would be a lot easier if the Republicans actually had an agenda to look forward to … But they don’t. The party platform consists of waiting for Obama to propose something, then opposing it.”

Finally, in a column written by the always-eloquent, never-satisfied Christoper Hitchens and re-posted by the Post, he blasts everything from “Obama’s almost weird refusal to stick up for himself,” to political polls, to the very idea that Latino Americans exist. Somebody better tell George Lopez his career is over.