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McQuaig takes Ignatieff and others to task

The Tyee has posted excerpts from an interview with author and journalist Linda McQuaig, whose new book, Holding the Bully’s Coat: Canada and the U.S. Empire, has recently hit the shelves.

Charles Demers introduces the piece by saying:

Luckily, McQuaig didn’t get the memo that the left had conceded the terrain of populism and accessibility to the right, so she’s able to establish with eloquence that yes, she’s angry, and, yes she can tell you why.

The ‘why’ includes a list that goes on and on: from the Harper government’s shameful defense of Israeli policy, to the cottage industry of penis-envying commentators like Jack Granatstein, who view peacekeeping as an insult to balls and country, all the way through Canada’s military side-kicking for the White House in Afghanistan and Haiti.

Michael Ignatieff doesn’t fair too well in McQuaig’s estimation either:

That quote [in Holding the Bully's Coat] from Ignatieff, where he talks about torture [being defensible] as long as it’s done by a patriotic American, now that’s an interesting quote. That one hasn’t gotten the play that some of the others [have]. That one was from an interview he did with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. That is an incredible statement of the notion of American exceptionalism, the idea that America should be excepted from being bound by international law. And for Ignatieff to come out and endorse that in the way he did is just phenomenal. I find it striking, because he doesn’t talk like that in Canada. You don’t hear him talk like that so much in Parliament…. And yet if you actually look at some of the things he’s said, he’s actually an extraordinary neoconservative. He’s up there with guys like Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and some of those people in terms of the extremism of his position. And yet this guy’s a prominent politician in Canada….

Watch for a review of McQuaig’s book in the June issue of Q&Q. In the interest of keeping things sparky, it’s paired with a review of Jack Granatstein’s latest book Whose War Is It?: How Canada Can Survive the Post-9/11 World.

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