Wrote this one in 2005, right after Bush announced the appointment of David Wilkins as ambassador to Canada. Imagine my disappointment when the Wilkins in question turned out to be some redneck legislator from South Carolina:

Dear President Bush:

I'm honored to accept the job of ambassador to Canada and eager to get to work. My official nomination letter from the White House hasn't arrived yet, so I am writing to get a jump on the task at hand -- indeed, it's already well past time we got down to business with those hoseheads north of the border, and I am just the man for the job. We are, after all, the last superpower, and we are dealing here with people who actually gave a big chunk of land back to the Indians.

Canadians' favorite snack food, I'm told, involves deep-fried balls of lard covered in gravy. Half of the country speaks French, for Pete's sake.

Cazart! Has the weather up there done something to their brains?

I'm prepared, Mr. President, to storm into Ottawa at high speed with a Marine combat team in massive urban assault vehicles loaded with searchlights and full radar, and surround the embassy with sandbags and high-powered weaponry.

My first press conference will be held in the newly-fortified Ambassador's Compound, and I will take the message -- your message, sir -- directly to the Canadian people, who like most denizens of the Third World are actually Americans at heart.

We will beam it into every home using the enormous Air Force microwave facilities in Alaska, and overpower their feeble CNBC network news feeds. We need to show these multi-lingual socialized medicine-junkies how a real democracy with a real Bill of Rights and a real Free Market works, and nothing will do that faster than blotting out their "Laverne & Shirley" reruns with an hour or two of angry political rhetoric, on every single channel.

In short, sir, we need to put the fear into them. Lumber tariffs? They need to know that getting all uppity on the subject of lumber -- or indeed any aspect of trade, international relations, war and peace, or the many species of powerful marijuana they grow north of the border -- has the potential to make us decide that the whole French & Indian War thing was a wash, and everything up there -- including the part they gave back to the Indians -- actually belongs to us.

I might add, sir, that your selection of a veteran journalist such as myself is shrewd indeed. If the pen is mightier than the sword, a pen backed up with huge Army tanks and massive air support is mightier still.

True, I am from a "blue" state, but it's really a red state with a blue stripe down one side, following Interstate 5. Where I live, people know the value of a good whuppin'. We don't mess around out here in fishin' and huntin' and farmin' country, and we know you understand people like us -- and vice versa.

We know you're not really on "vacation," as the pinko press is so fond of sneering every time you go down to the ranch in Texas to get some good honest work done. That brush doesn't clear itself, after all.

So I await the arrival of an Air Force executive jet out at Bowerman Field, and I am already getting my remarks together for my confirmation hearings. We will march on a road of bones, Mr. President, and show those pacifistic, lard ball-eating pinkos who's the boss.

Sincerely,

Amb. David Wilkins

Oh, wow....funny stuff! Just what I needed in the nightmare of reloading programs, finding device drivers, and all the other crap reloading Windows causes. Sacre bleu!

Was this submitted shortly before you changed from the press to radio corps? Funny stuff that.

Old but funny!

I am glad to have read it.

Funny! I don't remember reading this the first time 'round.

I missed it, or forgot it as well.

Loved it!

Lessee... September 2005? So about 6 months before I made the leap. It was published in TDW on the editorial page under the headline "Who wouldn't answer his country's call to Canada, eh?"

Too funny. You brighten the world.