Brooks: Iowa and Canada want to take over Minnesota. Can you blame them?

Canada wants to buy us. Iowa wants to stage a hostile takeover.

Excuse me, despite what the windchill might indicate, we are not actually Greenland.

Iowa state Sen. Michael Bousselot, R-Jealous, announced Tuesday that he’s going to introduce legislation to annex Minnesota. But only part of Minnesota: specifically, the parts of Minnesota that already touch Iowa.

This is not an appropriate way to fill the void left by the Iowa caucuses. We all miss the caucuses, but stealing other people’s counties is no way to make you feel better about your state. The low-energy bill Bousselot proposes wouldn’t even try to steal all 88 of us. Love all of Minnesota or love none of Minnesota, bud!

Instead, he wants to buy Rock, Nobles, Jackson, Martin, Faribault, Freeborn, Mower, Filmore and Houston. As if they weren’t priceless. As if we wouldn’t miss us.

And look, you definitely cannot steal Mower. That is where Minnesota keeps its Spam, and it is where my grandparents are buried. If Nanny and Grandpa Brooks wanted to be Iowans, they would have moved to Iowa like Auntie Dedie.

You can’t really blame Bousselot for behaving badly when the incoming president keeps pointing all over the map like he’s trying to order off-menu.

President-elect Donald Trump — a convicted felon who can’t own a gun and who has been found liable for the sexual abuse of a woman who thought he was her friend — wants to annex Greenland. He wants to annex the Panama Canal. He wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico. He thinks it’s funny to threaten Canada with enough tariffs to crush it into our “51st state.”

Last week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford made a counteroffer.

“How about if we buy Alaska and we’ll throw in Minnesota and Minneapolis at the same time?” he joked.

Excuse me, Canada. You do not “throw in” Minnesota like the 13th donut in a baker’s dozen. Sure, the idea of being Canada’s Florida does have its appeal. We’d get universal health care and probably another hockey team. I’d finally learn the metric system.

Politicians have been working tirelessly for years to turn half of this state against half of this state. A few years back, it was one of Minnesota’s own trying to tear us apart. Former state Rep. Jeremy Munson, R-Lake Crystal, once tried to coax the majority of Minnesota counties to secede — a move that risked both cartographic chaos and the creation of a Mega-Dakota.

Our neighbors want what Minnesota’s got. Well, two can play that game.

Let’s Make Minnesota Bigger.