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Bruce DowbigginGod bless Joy Behar. If it weren’t for the febrile panelist on The View, one might think we’d made significant strides in the treatment of clinical paranoia. Guess not. She’s a one-woman PSA for a fascist under every bed.

Trump “needs to resign” before inauguration day, she fumed on a recent show. “Do we have to wait until the hammer and sickle is on the American flag before we stand up to this guy?” (It’s escaped Joy that the Russian flag has had no hammer and sickle since 1991.)

Behar is an American comedian, writer and actress and the pinup girl for progressives who think that Donald Trump is Hitler or Mussolini or Francisco Franco (funnily, they never compare him to leftist dictators). That this insults the millions who actually died of starvation, gas chambers or bullets seems to escape our Joy in her proxy role for the snowflakes who vowed they were moving to Canada but then lost their boarding pass.

While there is not a shred of evidence that any Democratic votes were suppressed (recounts do show Trump was shortchanged in Wisconsin), Behar and her pals are convinced the election must have been fixed. Funny how the deniers now are not climate-change skeptics but progressives needing a do-over on the election.

Behar is undeterred. She’s still tossing around wild-eyed conspiracy theories to explain how the Republicans crushed the Democrats at just about every level in the November election. After all, “it couldn’t be moi and my fancy friends, no?” Having successively run through James Comey, voter suppression laws in North Carolina and misogyny, she’s now tilling the furrows of Russian intervention into the election.

As in, we need a re-vote because Russian dingoes ate my baby. Or something. To believe this, you must believe that 65 million Americans were brainwashed into rejecting Saint Hillary and the Deplorable Church of America. Credible? Hey, millions watch The View, so anything’s possible.

The real tragedy is that Behar and her precious pals think a tyrant is someone who won’t squeeze them into posh New York restaurant Le Bernardin on a busy Friday night. Or fails their progeny in school for grabbing a 26 on the final exam. Or soundly routs their Anointed One in an election. Any more out-of-touch, and she could be premier of Ontario.

If they don’t like Trump the Tyrant, wait till they meet the people who come to collect on the $20 trillion national-debt marker she and her fellow Americans have run up by spending like drunks on Black Friday. “Nothing is too good for my socially dependent friends!” If she believes the unpredictable president-elect is an offence to her sensibilities, how are she and Whoopie going to feel when the precious social net is shredded by the people holding the debt of the U.S. or Canada or the social democracies of Europe?

Because, unlike Behar’s audience, these people will not be accepting excuses about Russian hackers and a corrupt FBI for the failure to control the public purse. Their collection agency doesn’t tear up when you ask for more time. Behar’s learned friends in finance will pooh-pooh this idea, saying that most of the debt is money America owes to itself. Except the debt is what underpins the dollar, and if those foreign interests who do own American debt foreclose, the greenback will perform the swan dive done by the pound in the years after the Second World War.

(There’s a telling story that, when Britain wanted to invade Egypt during the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower told them not to do it. When PM Anthony Eden persisted, Ike reminded the Brits that the U.S. held the U.K. war debt, and if they went ahead with the invasion, the pound would drop by half in value overnight. Egypt was not invaded.)

Perhaps the only consolation for Behar will be that the guilt for putting the U.S.’s financial future into unsympathetic hands will be a shared one. Obama and George W. Bush, a Democrat and a Republican, were both profligate spenders. The Congress and the executive branch both bought fantasies with other people’s money.

Were Behar to glance north to Canada, she’d also find comfort seeing the same fiasco playing out with Liberal governments in Ottawa and Toronto. The Trudeau and Wynne governments are playing financial karaoke, whistling the old favourite, It Ain’t Too Hard To Get Along With Somebody Else’s Money. In the belief that taking water from the deep end raises the water level in the shallow end, they still pour money they haven’t got into projects they can’t afford.

While this should cause the populace to demand answers, the Canadian media seems more troubled by Behar-ian issues of sexual politics, racial grievance and outrage that a Canadian TV star might emulate Trump and run for PM.

One final consolation: If the government road to hell is paved with good intentions, it’ll at least be paved by people paid three times the working wage for the job using materials five times the cost of the product. That, finally, should make Joy Behar happy.

Troy Media columnist Bruce Dowbiggin career includes successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he is also the publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster.

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