Did Georgie mean for it to be this tight?

Fashion faux pas aside, Steve-o Harper will hopefully have a better sense of the world when it comes to understanding the political shift south of the border.

While Americans have arguably been sleep-walking through a house of horrors brought on by the Bush-Cheney junta post-9/11, the alarm clocks finally went off in 2006 and perhaps, some level of sanity is about to return in, as Gore Vidal calls it, the "United States of Amnesia".

Canadians, on the other hand, despite handing Harper his quasi-chance at leading the country with a minority government, have been much quicker out of the gate in both understanding the al Qaeda threat (despite what the zealots will have you think) and a Conservative party that initially seemed bent on throwing down a carbon copy of Dubya-Land, particularly when it came to Kyoto and foreign policy.

Although Steve-o may favour ponchos and skin-tight cowboy gear to emmulate his Texas BBQ buddy, he would be wise to read the tea leaves and know that a) the Bush Clearing experiment of "freedom spreading" and fun time-war crimes is over, and b) Canadians never wanted to be near that laboratory in the first place.

Perhaps a good place for Harper to start, as a majority of our country now clearly wants out of Afghanistan, is to save five years of chest thumping, communications preoccupation, and government secrecy and actually step up, step out, and provide the Canadian Forces (and the Afghan people) with a real strategy, involving real goals, and set to real deadlines.

A number of sources have some decent analysis of both Canadians' attitude towards the Afghan mission, and the Liberals ranting against Harper from following the Bush train any further.