Through gritted teeth

Babble on.

Boy, you almost feel sorry for Haroon Siddiqui at Pravda Canada, having to give credit to American diplomacy in Africa. Schadenfreude is kind of like feeling sorry, isn't it? No? Well, close enough.

Still, rabid mouthpiece of the Canadian left that he is, he can't resist a gratuitious shot at Bush, nor a truly pathetic chest-beating over the the equally pathetic official Canadian role in Sudan.

The north-south peace accord is George W. Bush's second major triumph in Africa, having earlier spooked/cajoled Moammar Gadhafi into giving up his nuclear program.

Both policies were driven, in part, by oil, as was the invasion of Iraq, to lessen American dependence on Saudi crude.

Sudan pumps 350,000 barrels a day, more than Iraq at present. It has the potential to go up to 1 million barrels daily.

Bush was also responding to his core Christian constituency, long concerned about Sudan's Christians, as it once was about the Christians in East Timor.

Whatever his motivation, the president's is a remarkable achievement. (Babbler's bold)

Siddinkqui brings up two popular bugaboos - oil and bible-thumping - as qualifiers to his praise because it rots his socks to have to credit Bush with anything positive. Anything at all. It's like he's reassuring his readers: "Hey, even a blind squirrel stumbles across an acorn every once in a while. It doesn't mean I was wrong about everything else I've said about the lying rednecked idiot."

Then Maroon decides he's going to pour oil on the waters of *spit* praising Bush *spit* by blowing Canadian participation in the Sudanese peace process completely out of proportion.

Since Jean Chrétien named [Senator Mobina Jaffer] Canada's special envoy to Sudan in 2002, she has met that country's many estranged peoples, while also talking to Khartoum.

In July, she helped bring Darfur's religious and tribal leaders together in a traditional dispute-resolution conclave. She was in Nairobi Sunday for the signing of the north-south deal. Next week, she will meet the Beja rebels (she's the only foreigner given a permit to go into eastern Sudan). Then she will return to Darfur.

Canada is providing the political know-how and the resources to nudge Sudan toward a national policy of reconciliation, she said in a phone interview yesterday from Kampala, Uganda.

Did you get that? "Canada is providing the political know-how" by bringing "Darfur's religious and tribal leaders together in a traditional dispute-resolution conclave" and by simply being "in Nairobi Sunday for the signing of the north-south deal." Well, if she can also sing "War Is Over" while accompanying herself on the bongo drums, I say we nominate her for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Martin must work with Bush to add Canadian understanding and expertise to American clout.

This is just too rich, even for the king-bozo at a paper written almost entirely by lord-and-lady-bozos. Canada has 101 democratically elected politicians sitting in three different legislatures who support the separation of their province from this country. We have at least one current provincial premier who feels justified removing the national flag from provincial buildings to protest a dispute between his government and the federal government. If anyone wants to waste a few hours of their life buried in Google search results vainly trying to dig up equally well-supported separatist groups in the U.S., be my guest.

And yet we Canadians supposedly have more to teach the Sudanese about learning to live together than the Yanks do.

After all these years, it still completely flabbergasts me how The Toronto Star can take even an article with a reasonable premise - the Americans have done a good job, but much more remains to be done in Sudan - and bury that premise in enough nauseating offal to render it almost unreadable. Time to scrub my retinas clean.

Babble off.