See Quebec by Helicopter

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

See Quebec by Helicopter

 

Clever folks, those Quebecois – twice this spring prisoners in the province have escaped by helicopter. 

 

In March, Benjamin Hudon-Barbeau (hyphenated names are like, y’know, so sophisticated, and, like, stuff) and Danny Provencal, left off serving time in St. Jerome Prison near Montreal and took a helicopter tour.  They were quickly recaptured.  They said they were ready to die, but apparently they really weren’t.

 

When the police officer cried “I arrest you in the name of the Queen!” the prisoners replied “Oui, Monsieur Le Fascist Pig; I’m cool with that.”

 

No, really, they didn’t; I just made that up.

 

In early June, Yves Denis, Denis Lefebvre, and Serge Pomerleau also skipped recess by whirlybird, this time at Orsainville Detention Center.  According to the Daily Mail a judge permitted them extra time together in the yard together in order to help plan their trial defense on drug and murder charges.

 

The police are curious as to who might have helped the lads go up, up, and away.

 

Hey, Dudley Do-Right, you might want to talk to that judge, okay?

 

But Yves, Denis, and Serge too are back in the nick planning the future. They shouldn’t think of booking Air Canada for their next adventure, though; the service is awful and the cabin crew feature all the charm and helpfulness of “Knuckles” McGurk, “Stan the Shiv” Deadenov, and Barbie “I-Know-Where-the-Bodies-are-Buried” Kowalsky in the exercise yard.

 

So how big are prison yards in Quebec?  Do they often land aircraft like that?  Imagine being a prison guard, and a big ol’ helicopter lands on the prison grounds in front of you.  Wouldn’t you, like, y’know, notice it?

 

Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and his dog King never permitted their prisoners (who always seemed to be named Lucky Pierre or some such) to escape at all, either by helicopter or by dogsled. 

 

One supposes that now King would be a bionic transgender superhero rabbit or something.  King would take down the renegade helicopter with subhyperubersonic beams from his glowing green eyes.

 

And speaking of criminals in helicopters, do you wonder if anyone in D.C. knows where the Internal Revenue Service email messages are?  Did Lucky Pierre spirit them away to the Yukon and bury them under a rock in an abandoned gold mine near Dawson in a plan to betray Canada by selling them for filthy lucre to Vladimir “Snidely Whiplash” Putin?

 

King the wonder dog could leap and grab Grubstake Charlie by his arm to keep him from shooting Sergeant Preston, who discovered the secret map to the gold mine on the dead body (the map, not the gold mine, was on the body) of Lucky Pierre who had been shot by Grubstake Charlie in a fight over cards at the Malamute Saloon (now a Tim Horton’s) while Robert W. Service took careful notes.

 

“Grubstake Charlie, I arrest you in the name of the Crown!  And I’ll see to it that these unlawfully purloined records are returned to their rightful owners, the freedom-loving people and the democratically-elected government of the United States, that glorious and ever-vigilant republic south of the 49^th parallel and Canada’s greatest friend in the tireless and ongoing fight against evil.  Right, King?”

 

“Ruff!”

 

“Well, King, this case is closed.”

 

“Ruff!”

 

“On, King!  On, you huskies!”

 

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Ted Cruz, Not a Canadian

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com
25 August 2013

Ted Cruz, Not a Canadian

George Washington, who knew he was not our first president, was born a British subject because his parents were British subjects and he was born to those British subjects – mostly to his mother, biology being like that - on British soil.  Okay, not literally on British soil, but in a bed that was on a floor that was in a house that stood on British soil.  You get the idea.

But was George Washington the 9^th president, or the 17th?  If we number the presidents from our first governing document, the Articles of Confederation, George is the 9^th.  If we consider presidents from 1776, George is the 17^th.  Some folks add the two convention presidents prior to the Declaration of Independence, which would make G.W. the 19^th.

Under Article II of the 1787 Constitution, George Washington was eligible to be president because he was an American (Canadians and Mexicans are Americans too, but since it’s hard to say “united States-ian,” we have arrogated “American” to ourselves) citizen when that Constitution was adopted, eleven years after the nation established itself.  Thus, American citizens born before the Revolution, who could not be Americans by birth because the USA did not exist, were given an exemption from the “natural born Citizen” rule, which did not extend past that generation.  This would violate the concept of equal protection under the law except that this idea was not part of the Constitution until 1868.

And what does “natural born” mean, anyway?  Can anyone be unnaturally born?

So can Ted Cruz, born in Canada, be elected to the Presidency of the United States?

Of course he can.  His mother was an American citizen who happened to be in Canada at the time but who never repudiated her American citizenship. 

If being born somewhere else disqualified someone from elected office, many thousands of Americans born to our military, our diplomatic corps (not sure why we call ‘em a corps), and the occasional tourist with a poor sense of timing would not be really-real Americans. 

The constitutional question was raised speciously several election cycles ago when Senator John McCain stood for the presidency.  He was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936, where his Navy father was posted.  The argument that he was born on U.S. colonial territory is unnecessary; he was born to American citizens. 

Senator Cruz is not required to wear a bell and cry “Unclean!  Unclean!” simply because he was born two feet north of the 49^th parallel instead of two feet south of it.

The argument against Senator McCain’s eligibility ceased when the details of the birth of the opposing party’s candidate were revealed to be somewhat more opaque than transparent.  But one thing is transparent – President Obama’s mother never foreswore her allegiance, and so, no matter where he was born, Barack Obama was born an American.

When Senator Cruz was recently advised that under Canadian law he could claim to be a Canadian citizen and a subject of the British Crown, he appears to have been upset.

Well, yeah, what right-thinking Christian man would want to be accused of being a Canadian, eh?  You know what Those People are like – they hang out at Tim Horton’s eating seal-flipper burgers and watching hockey on the telly and saying “eh” all the time. 

Before you could say “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon crowed three times” Senator Cruz responded with “Nothing against Canada, but…”

Oops.

“Nothing against…but…” is a parallel to “with all due respect.”  When someone says to you “With all due respect,” you know very well that respect ain’t happening. 

That Canada would accept her prodigal son back home with metaphorically open arms has no writ in our by-golly-republic, and as an American he needn’t repudiate something that doesn’t exist here.  In sum, Senator Cruz, who is testing the murky waters with regard to the presidency, was quite pointlessly rude to the USA’s best friend. 

Senator Cruz has forgotten an important American rule: you do not alienate your country’s friends until you are elected president.

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