This Bodes Ill. Very ill. . .

. . . I don’t mean a sneak attack the Americans are about to launch against us from the waters around Nunavut. I’m not even talking about the sticky national-security implications of dropping depth charges on Yankee submarines in peacetime.

I mean that not even a week has passed since the polls closed, and Stephen Harper has already manufactured the illusion (with help from his friends) that he’s “standing up for Canada” in a dispute with the United States - when he’s more likely just doing what the Americans have wanted all along, as our friend Michael Byers explains to the Globe and Mail.

To make things worse, even some of Harper's detractors on the “left” are buying into the charade. I’m not linking to the suckers, but here’s a link to our friends over at the Galloping Beaver, who aren’t so easily taken in.

Or read Thomas Walkom, in the Star. Or Larry Cornies’ take on how journalists have mangled the story.

The Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson got it right: “There can be no conceivable reason for Mr. Harper's attack other than to defuse Liberal accusations during the election campaign that the Conservatives were secretly controlled by American interests, to which they would sell the country out unless stopped."

The really sad thing is that this entire escapade is likely to mothball Canada’s long-held plans to invade the United States and subdue the Yankee menace once and for all. Strategic ordnance maps of the reconfigured continent are here and here, but it's now probably just another grand historical-might-have-been.