Canadian PM Attacks Obama, Just Like Former Australian PM

Karl Rove may not get a White House paycheck any more, but it's a good bet he's still calling the shots there through his former subordinates, and ratfucking Democrats every chance he gets. The evidence?

A few days ago, Canada's foreign office promoted a story that Obama's economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, privately assured Canada that Obama's public calls to renegotiate NAFTA were just empty campaign rhetoric, and nothing Canada should worry about. When an opposition MP challenged Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Harper took another swipe at Obama:

The Canadian embassy in Washington has issued a statement indicating its regret at the fact that information has come out that would imply that Mr.--Senator Obama has been saying different things in public than in private.

As Chris Bowers writes,

So, the Canadian conservative prime minister is calling Barack Obama two-faced on NAFTA at the exact same moment that John McCain is indicating that Canada might pull out its troops on Afghanistan if we make too much a stink about NAFTA? That strikes me as more than a little suspicious. In fact, it strikes me as a directly coordinated attack by McCain and Harper to neutralize McCain on trade during the general election. It wouldn't be the first time Harper and Republican leaders have coordinated, given that Harper uses Republican pollsters and the conservative movements in both countries are deeply intertwined...

I generally agree with Josh Marshall on this one: the whole thing stinks of cross-border conservative coordination on the presidential campaign. 

Chris and Josh are right, and this isn't the first example of cross-border conservative coordination.

One year ago, Australia's conservative PM John Howard unleashed a similar attack on Obama for proposing legislation to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq by March 2008. Howard's outrageous attack was so brazen it caught the attention of Stephen Colbert.

It's almost unprecedented for foreign leaders to attack U.S. presidential candidates, so it's impossible to believe Howard's attack happened by chance. Since Karl Rove was still in the White House at the time, there's every reason to believe he orchestrated it.

Unfortunately for Howard (and Rove), that attack didn't improve Howard's popularity, and his party was crushed by Labor soon thereafter, and Howard even lost his own seat in Parliament.

Of course the most egregious example of cross-border conservative coordination was the international propaganda campaign that launched the Iraq War, which was orchestrated by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), chaired by... Karl Rove.

Rove's pre-war propaganda campaign ran into two major obstacles - massive anti-war protests in the U.S. and around the world, and Saddam Hussein's decision to cooperate fully with U.N. inspectors. To overcome these obstacles, Rove's counterparts in Britain "sexed up" an Iraq WMD dossier with the completely bogus claim that Iraq could deploy its non-existent chemical weapons on 45 minutes' notice. And Tony Blair used this bogus dossier to help sell Bush's war to the world.

So enlisting conservative leaders is a familiar maneuver by Karl Rove, which makes Stephen Harper's attack on Obama entirely predictable - and outrageous. And if Democrats don't blow the whistle on this foul, we'll certainly see more just like it.