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Date Posted: - 5:50--pm, ------ 12/30/08 Tue
Author: Heretic
Subject:

Actually no, we don't want you back!

As Bush Exits, Expats Staying Put

By WILLIAM WEIR | The Hartford Courant

Each time George W. Bush won the presidency, some people swore they would move to Canada.

Most of it was just talk. But there are those who actually made good on their threats. So now that Bush is leaving the White House, will the expats be coming home?

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood, now a computer programming consultant in Vancouver, was among those who moved north. When she was living in Palo Alto, Calif., Sherwood was vexed by Bush policies that she saw as eroding individual rights. When he beat John Kerry for a second term, she started applying to grad schools in Canada.

It wasn't just Bush, Sherwood says. She felt disillusioned by her fellow Americans.

"In the second [election], my fellow citizens knew who George Bush was and knew what he was going to do, and they elected him," Sherwood says. "That was just heartbreaking to me."

(Believe me lady, a lot of us feel just as 'disillusioned' by these brain-dead Brawk voters.)

Last month's election, of course, was heartening for Sherwood.

"Obama's election, that shows me that they are, in fact, reasonable people," she says. "They have restored my faith in America." So she's moving back, right?

Not so fast.

Besides her frustration with the Bush administration, she had concerns about the U.S. economy when she left.

"It looked like things were messed up -- I was more right than I knew," she says. "So it seems like a reasonable thing to stay here, at least in the short term. "Long term, Obama has to do a good job -- it's nice that he got elected," she says, adding that she's particularly encouraged by his call for a ban on torture. (Wow! Another kook leftist obsessing over non-existent �torture�!

) "But it won't do me any good if he doesn't do a good job."

It was a combination of factors that caused Joyce Rabesca to move to Canada in the late 1960s: Her first husband wanted to avoid the draft, and she was discouraged by the Vietnam War, and especially the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr.

Last month's election was followed closely in Canada, and Obama's victory has caused Rabesca to think about returning.

"I suppose it's his depth of sincerity,"

Rabesca says. "I don't have any proof of that; I suppose it's more of an intuitive thing than anything."

She and her second husband run a lodge for big-game hunters in the Northwest Territories. "I am getting to a point where I would like to retire so, yes, I have thought about [returning to the U.S.]," she says.

Kastrina Brogden, who moved to Canada from Dallas about eight years ago when she married a Canadian, thinks there was a lot more talking about moving up north than actual moving. Although she's a member of Democrats Abroad, she does not know anyone who moved out of the U.S. specifically because of President Bush.

"I think that was kind of a mythology," she says. "That sprang up, and people wanted to believe that. I think there were people who were happy to be away from the Bush administration, but I think you'd have to be pretty extreme in your political views [to move away]."

Lee Rowan moved to Canada shortly after the first Bush election and is now settled in a town close to Toronto, where she writes gay romance novels.

Rowan's discontent with Bush had been simmering since the 2000 election and all of the controversy that surrounded it. Then came the Patriot Act and the invasion of Iraq. Then the second Bush victory. Finally, she and her partner of nine years decided to move to Canada in 2004 when their home state of Ohio passed an amendment banning gay marriage.

The emigration process was a lengthy one, and they finally settled in Canada in the summer of 2007.

Rowan is encouraged by the election of Obama, but the jury is out on whether she'll head back to the States. For one thing, she likes living in Canada. Also, gay marriage is another big issue for Rowan.

She and her wife got married at Niagara Falls a few years ago after the federal government legalized same-sex marriage. Obama seems to lean more toward her own world view, but has said he doesn't support gay marriage. Until he changes his mind on that, Rowan says, she'll probably stay where she is.

"Yes, I could see moving back to the U.S. someday, possibly," she says. "Many friends and family are there. But for the moment, I think we made the right decision and we're putting down roots here."

(If it's all the same to you, just stay right where you're at. We have more than enough leftist dingbats infecting our once great nation.)

As Bush Exits, Expats Staying Put

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