Maybe they just missed it that we don’t get a vote.

Most Canadians don’t get to vote, that is, in the U.S. presidential election.

How else can we explain the Canadian mainstream media’s relentless campaign leading up to yesterday’s U.S. presidential vote to get Canadians to cast their nonexistent ballots for Willard “Mittens” Romney, the Republican candidate?

In case you missed it, President Barack Obama defeated Romney in that presidential election last night, saving it from going down in history the U.S. pestilential election. 

“Is U.S. polling guru Nate Silver going to have egg on his face?” the Globe and Mail asked plaintively as the minutes ticked down to decision time south of the Medicine Line, which thanks to Obama’s re-election still has some form of medicine for most of the 99%. Since the polling guru in question had bet on an Obama win, the answer to that poser in a Globe headline was, uh, sorry, no egg…

“Why Obama doesn’t deserve to win,” Globe columnist Margaret Wente, one of those double-overhead-camshaft Canadian Americans who get to vote down there, schooled us in a particularly dimwitted column three days ago in which she quoted “my friend Jim.” (That is, her friend Jim, not mine, who being a union rep I’m pretty sure would have voted for Obama. Also, my friend Jim actually exists and I can prove it!)

“Obama is, in fact, a lefty, and given a free hand we really would become a debt-laden, sinking, entitlement-heavy, socialist basket case,” said “Jim,” according to Wente, and let me remind readers that it’s not nice to refer to him as her “imaginary friend.”

Indeed, the Globe’s horserace analysis with barely a mention of that Electoral College thingy got so bad that I tried to make it go away by repeatedly opening stories so Canada’s National Website would tell me I’d used up my monthly quota and blissfully lock me out. It did. Tell me that it had, that is. But it kept letting me open the stories. What’s with that? I have no willpower. Can’t someone make it go away?

The CBC — which members of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Neo-Liberal Party of Canada love to hate — was nevertheless almost as bad, with Cross Country Right-Wing Trash Talk Radio with Rex Murphy spending Sunday afternoon getting his brother’s yahoo buddy to explain to us for painfully endless minutes why we’d be smart to vote for Romney … even though, like we mentioned, most of us don’t have a vote.

Well, at least with the radio if you get sick of the Canadian media explaining why you should support the Republicans’ sales closer — which the New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz nicely summarized as “zero tolerance toward disaster relief combined with a more easygoing attitude about rape” — you can push the button and listen to golden oldies or something!

Of course, the usual suspects over at Sun News Network wore their hearts on their sleeves all week, like the delightful Ezra “When Poll’s Unspun, it Looks Like Romney Won” Levant. Last night Levant was moaning less poetically about the End of America, but have faith, he’ll get over it when President Obama ethically OKs the Keystone XL Pipeline to Texas.

I hate to say it, but the National Pest, founded by Lord Tubby Black himself to turn us all into little Americans back in the day before he had his moment on the bumpy road to Damascus or Coleman or wherever it was and proclaimed himself “an unambiguous leftist in justice,” actually covered the run-up to the election more like a grownup media operation.

You get the picture, and if you’re anything like me, you haven’t been able to tune it out for days.

Now, presumably, the Canadian media will turn to close analysis of the popular vote down south, and explain to us that President Obama doesn’t really have a mandate, so we’d better get that Northern Gateway opened right quick and that 31-year sovereignty association deal with the People’s Capitalistic Republic of China signed off by the weekend. (If Romney had won with a similar popular vote, they would have told us to “get over it.”)

Indeed, the trendsetting Lord Black — taking a short break from asserting the doubtful proposition that “no reader could possibly be more bored with the subject of my late legal travails than I” — was beginning the exploration of this very theme last evening.

You can’t bring on those paywalls fast enough, if you ask me!

Meanwhile, about that American election? Thank God for small favours!

This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...