Doc's Diagnosis is Bad for My Health

Doc's Diagnosis is Bad for My Health

By: Rachel Marsden

Following in the footsteps of intellectual giants like Barbra Streisand and Sean Penn -- who have apparently convinced themselves that standing in front of a camera and reading lines that someone else wrote for you qualifies you to give advice on foreign policy -- world-renowned holistic health guru, Dr. Deepak Chopra, has somehow managed to parlay his ability to cure sore throats into making my blood pressure spike to gasket-blowing levels.

In his Huffington Post column (www.huffingtonpost.com) this week, Chopra advises us to bend over and take our medicine, saying that "becoming used to terror helps (us) defeat it." I wonder if the doctor gives the same advice to cancer patients: Ignore it and it'll go away?

He says President Bush is "wrong ... to keep promoting the initial fear and rage after 9/11," as though anger towards terrorists is attributable to brilliant PR flacking by the man liberals call a "moron," rather than the fact that terrorists are still making threats and blowing people up.

Chopra goes on to say "the need is for patience, professional diplomacy, negotiations, international police work, exchange of intelligence, and so on." That's what France was doing until recently with Muslim rioters -- raising the spectre of France possibly having to surrender to itself. Only since Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced that they were going to start deporting troublemakers have things started winding down.

By extension of Chopra's logic, we all should have just "become used to" what Nazi Germany had in store for us. Former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tried appeasement with Hitler, and we know what a spectacular failure that was.

Similarly, George H.W. Bush should have taken out Saddam Hussein during Operation Desert Storm, while America and Great Britain could have saved us the trouble of the Cold War by sticking it to Stalin early on.

Chopra speaks of the terror war like it's a ho-hum M*A*S*H rerun, saying that "just as the hundredth plane hijacking made little impression, another suicide bombing creates smaller headlines." He references the "diluted anger" in the U.S. after the recent Islamic terrorist bombings in Jordan, as though he can't grasp why a bombing thousands of miles away on a different continent doesn't incite the same fear and anger as passenger planes being used to blow up towers in New York City.

Look, when you're dealing with war, less exciting TV coverage and smaller headlines are good things. It means we're winning! Boredom doesn't stem from Chopra's prescribed appeasement -- quite the opposite. The reason we haven't been getting exciting, 9/11-style programming on every channel is because Bush is succeeding in bringing the war to the terrorists. If you want more intense TV, then head over to France -- a country in sync with Chopra's liberal way of thinking. I hear "Survivor: Paristine" is a big hit there right now.

Applying Chopra's loony liberal logic to our political problems here at home is like seeing a perfectly proportionate reflection in a funhouse mirror: Maybe defeating crime in Toronto means giving the criminals a break. Time to elect a sensitive, lefty city council that will negotiate with pistol-packing hooligans and feel their pain.

And if Canadians want to clean up government, we should put up with the federal Liberals, despite AdScam, until we just get numb to being screwed over. Only when they succeed in being re-elected again and again, after repeatedly attempting to bribe us with our own money in yet another pre-election budget, will we have finally rid ourselves of the stench.

The fact Canada's political reality happens to perfectly reflect Chopra's flaky logic should be a troubling wake-up call.

PUBLISHED: TORONTO SUN (November 16/05)