Enough, Already!

That face has sullied our small screens enough, that whinging aggrieved voice has scratched our sensibilities more than sufficiently. Why, one wonders, would some individual who has deliberately tracked out her mode of living in an alien culture in another country, come wailing for release from a situation she has engineered and expect that the prime minister of one country, and the president of another, take time from their busy agendas to discuss hers.

What exactly is it that makes some people feel so entitled to consideration they have no business securing and searching out? That their histrionics and manipulative psycho-social manoeuvring and pushing of official buttons will draw the attention of a compassionate public to persuade a prime minister and a president of two countries to indulge their fantasies of personal importance is quite simply amazing.

And here is Stephane Dion adding his shrill voice of condemnation against Prime Minister Stephen Harper on behalf of this now-famous Brenda Martin; another clown heard from in this sad and sorry travesty of international relations and the making of mountains from molehills. This woman, seasoned, mature, all her wits about her, who deigned to live for a decade in a country under illegal circumstances, demands her due.

Of both countries; one as her right as a Canadian citizen to conduct herself unbecoming a visitor in a strange country, demanding protection in Mexico for a crime she is accused of; two her right as an accused person in Mexico to be set free because she is Canadian. That she herself, through her vexatious machinations, is responsible for the legal position she is held in, is handily overlooked, swept aside in the mass hysteria of misplaced compassion.

We've been down this road before, when, famously, former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, pleaded with his then-counterpart, Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto, to release a suspected jihadist from incarceration, enabling Canada's most bizarrely infamous Islamist terrorist to go on to greater glory within al-Qaeda, and leaving Canada with the headache of his jihad-pledged sons, the youngest now an international cause celebre as an unjustly-held child soldier.

Ms. Martin inveighs against the government of Canada and its ministers for not launching a strong appeal - or a military invasion - against the Mexican judicial system, denouncing the prime minister and his cabinet for not sufficiently strenuously working on her release. There is nothing occurring in the world and within Canada that should detract from the immediate necessity to come to her aid; first things first, after all.

Hers and her supporters' carefully engineered public unveiling of the injustices inherent in the Mexican justice system - most particularly as it applies to her case, as an innocent taken advantage of - is an example of cleverly drawing the public attention to a monstrously unfair advantage taken of a poor Canadian by an evil and alien society.

Given all the prior bad press Mexico has received with respect to questionable accidents befalling Canadian tourists this woman has lucked right in. There is a real problem there, in the incidence of casual violence impacting on legitimate Canadian tourists. But where there's the smoke of suspicion, as in the case of Ms. Martin, there isn't always necessarily the fire of righteous rescue.

She made her choices, suitable to her at the time. She can live with the consequences. Her threats to commit suicide in Mexico rather than face jail time in Canada, should she be extradited under a mutual international agreement, tell the truth and nothing but the truth.