Prime Minister Paul Martin may have been chastised for his blunt talk on U.S. relations, but his comments have sparked a spate of anti-Canada rhetoric south of the border.

Last week, MSNBC host Tucker Carlson told his audience Canada "is like your retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving."

"He's nice, but you don't take him seriously."

And that was just one of the famously right-wing political pundit's rants.

"Anybody with any ambition at all, or intelligence, has left Canada and is now living in New York," he told his audience, insisting it was pointless to tell Canada not to criticize the United States.

"It only eggs them on. Canada is essentially a stalker, stalking the United States, right? Canada has little pictures of us in its bedroom, right?"

"It's unrequited love between Canada and the United States. We, meanwhile, don't even know Canada's name. We pay no attention at all," he said.

And Carlson wasn't alone in his criticism.

"So have the Canadians gotten a little too big for their britches?" Fox News host Neil Cavuto asked his viewers last week. "Could our neighbours to the north soon be our enemies?"

Even the press secretary to former Republican senator Bob Dole weighed in, charging in a Washington Times commentary that Canada is a haven for terrorists.

"Can Canada really be considered our friend anymore?" he wrote. "What other question can be asked when the Canadian government not only willingly allows Islamic terrorists into their country but does nothing to stop them from entering our nation?"

The comments came amid a flurry of cross-border rhetoric touched off by an address Martin gave at the United Nations climate change conference in Montreal.

After the prime minister described the U.S. as a "reticent nation" lacking a "global conscience" on environmental issues, U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins answered with a warning: tone down the anti-American jabs or risk a chill in bilateral relations.

Despite the ramped-up rhetoric, Paul Waldman of the non-profit watchdog Media Matters for America believes this to be just the latest in a series of favourite flash-in-the-pan, headline-grabbing issues.

"What usually happens with this kind of controversy is that it gives the right-wing media something to talk about for a couple of days," Waldman told CTV's Canada AM in an interview from Washington on Tuesday.

"They need somebody to be angry at, someone to build up resentment against -- that's sort of their modus operandi."

It could be Canada today and France tomorrow, he said.

And the effect could work both ways, as Martin's tough talk on the U.S. appears to be resonating with some Canadian voters pondering the Jan. 23 election.

In a recent poll conducted for CTV and The Globe and Mail, The Strategic Counsel found 48 per cent of Canadians believe relations with the U.S. have worsened in the past year.

The pollsters also found 63 per cent of Canadians believe the U.S. is responsible for what they see as a souring relationship, while 28 per cent said it is Canada's fault.