“A nation of cowards,” says the South Korean college roommate of a high school friend of mine, who has trodden the same path from Marxist sympathizer to neo-/classical liberal. (The high school friend, not the South Korean roommate. The latter gent worships Al Gore and will be a loyal Democrat if/when he becomes American. The former will be on the right of the Republican Party.)
Why? The separatists are too scared to separate, and the opposition is too frightened to oppose — even with the prime minister as weakly situated as he is. (Maybe Stephen Harper is using Jedi mind tricks.)
This happy state of affairs won’t persist forever (although the latest CROP/La Presse poll, with the Tories and the Grits/Dippers doing a 1-2 on the Bloc in rural and urban Quebec, is very promising — CPC 31, BQ 31, Libs 17, NDP 14), but it’s oh-so-fun for now.
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Anyway. Just thought I would let my Canadian readers know that our happy state has attracted the ridicule of some somewhere near Seoul.
Put your hands up, said Amis, if you think you are morally superior to the Taliban. When a minority of the audience did so, Amis muttered: ‘About 30 per cent…’
We knew Hillary was this slippery. And, honestly, after watching John Kerry fall into a heckler’s trap and blurt out his “I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it” in the ‘04 campaign, I don’t think that Democrats will be all that dismayed to see someone refuse to provide a soundbite — this is not unlike George Bush refusing to name one thing he had done wrong during his first term, during his last debate with Kerry. (Incidentally, he approached the woman who asked the question after the debate, assured her that he knew he had made mistakes and that he knew she wasn’t playing games with her question, but that he couldn’t give an answer without him wearing it for the rest of the campaign.)
Sometimes, you have to take a hit in the short run in order not to take an even bigger hit in the long run.
Update: Strange times. The liberal MSM thinks she bombed, while the conservatives thought she did well.
To improve productivity, employment and prosperity in an uncertain world, a bold, new tax reduction initiative will reduce the general federal corporate income tax rate to 15 per cent by 2012 from its current rate of 22.1 per cent. The general corporate income tax rate will decline by 7.12 percentage points between 2007 and 2012—giving Canada the lowest overall tax rate on new business investment in the Group of Seven (G7) by 2011 and the lowest statutory tax rate in the G7 by 2012.
Federal corporate tax rates have fallen from 29.1 percent in 2000 to 22.1 percent in 2007, and they’ll head down to 15 percent by 2012. This is awesome.
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First impression from the Mulroney and Chretien books — this is totally the difference between Liberal and Conservative prime ministers. The Liberals have all sorts of cabinet experience. The Conservatives have to start from scratch and learn on the job. Makes for a very different tone to the first years in office. (Or maybe this was just a Chretien thing — the man held almost every major cabinet portfolio.)
… for any aspiring politician. People remember what actually happened when you were young, not the story you feel like telling.
Personally, I’ve been the only non-white face in a room tonnes of times (most often in Halifax). I don’t think spinning some great narrative about race from it is especially realistic — but hey, politicians deal in allegories. So Obama isn’t really any worse than the others.
If I were a sincere critic of the current government in Canada, and I were a serious person, I’d be looking to Inkless Wells for proper lines of attack.
I haven’t found a single one for which I haven’t said, “Well… yeah, he’s right.”
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Post to come later today (or tomorrow) on Chretien and Mulroney. (Jean’s tomb arrived yesterday, and I’m about 3/4 through it.)
The headline-writer for this piece messed up Steyn’s joke with proper capitalization.
But this was funny:
As far as I know, the movie Deliverance has featured in political discourse just the once. Back in 1996, Pat Buchanan, hot from his triumph over Bob Dole in the New Hampshire primary, warned the country-club Republicans that he was coming to get them “like a character out of Deliverance.” In the film, you’ll recall, a quartet of suburban guys spend a nightmare weekend in the backwoods, in the course of which one of their number winds up getting strapped to a tree and sodomized by a mountain man. (“Squeal, piggy!”)
At the time of Pat’s remark, I remember thinking: What a great country! In how many other political cultures can a fellow identify himself with a stump-toothed inbred psycho hillbilly homosexual rapist as an applause line? I’d love to think he’d paid some demographic-positioning consultants to focus-group the thing, but it seems more likely it was an impromptu flourish by the candidate.
Lovely.
In the body of the article, Steyn warns against the over-use of metaphors — dangerous when they start to overtake our perceptions of reality.
The cure for that, one might guess, is to pick leaders with real-world experience. But that’s tough. If one is being honest, the last such national leader in the USA was George Bush. (The elder, not the younger.) … And perhaps it’s a bad test. After all, that would have ruled out Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, and Reagan. (But not TR!)
If this is just a matter of competing on even turf, that’s one thing. However…:
Allies of the Kremlin have also begun buying some of the companies that have helped make the Internet a bastion of free expression in Russia. Gazeta.ru, long the country’s most respected online newspaper, was sold in December to a metals magnate and Putin loyalist.
And last October, Sup, which is owned by Alexander Mamut, a tycoon with ties to the Kremlin, bought the rights to develop the Russian-language segment of U.S.-based LiveJournal. The segment, with half a million users, is Russia’s most popular blog portal. …
So far, Gazeta.ru has continued to publish articles critical of the Kremlin, and no widespread censorship has been reported on blogs run by Sup. But as the government wakes up to the Internet’s potential, many of Putin’s critics are growing nervous.
Prosecutors have begun to target postings on blogs or Internet chat sites, charging users with slander or extremism after they criticize Putin or other officials. Most such incidents have occurred outside Moscow, and federal officials deny that they signal any broader campaign to control the Internet.
… you look around, and you find that people you thought were on your side aren’t.
Sometimes the people labelled as racists, well, are.
How can you tell who they are?
Well, one easy sign is when they call Little Green Footballs a “pro-Muslim, left-wing, politically correct” blog and a “puppet of the multiculturalists”.
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And then sometimes there are fights where, as Kissinger put it in the 1980s about the Iran-Iraq war, it’s a pity both sides can’t lose.
Update: Actually, on a personal note, I found something like this when I was talking over the French elections earlier this year with a friend and he started — on more than one occasion — to express sympathy for Le Pen.
The dark side is closer than one thinks, sometimes… and there’s a temptation among some to say, all too early on, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Update again: It’s also a case of brand-squatting. The national office of YAF has apparently melted away. There are fewer than twenty chapters. Once the Cold War ended, the Sharon Statement lost its bite. (Contrast this with the other YAF.)
Am still ploughing through Mulroney’s memoirs — have hit Meech Lake.
It occurred to me that our impressions of Canadian political history are skewed by the fact that, well, our leaders’ terms are not set, and that it therefore proceeds rather irregularly.
So we have, since the Second World War, these main periods:
1949–57: Uncle Louis and a strong, continentalist Canada. High spending on defence, the St. Lawrence Seaway, NATO founded, Ottawa siding with Washington on the Suez crisis. 1957–63: The Chief, and a last gasp of British Canada. Rather anti-American. Major defence cuts. 1963–68: Pearsonian nationalism. Expo ‘67. The rise of socialism in Canada. A fixing of an intention (unrealised) to cut ties with London. Unification of the services. Flag. 1969–84: The construction of Trudeaupia. The fight against Quebec separatism. Further growth of socialism. 1984–93: Mulroney. Crony diplomacy, both internal and external. Free Trade. Privatization. The failure of Meech and Charlottetown. 1993–2005: The Chretien-Martin period. Unity of the country saved. The economy and state finances saved. (Far from being insignificant, the leaders of this period saved Canada. Almost every article & book published in the early 1990s about the future of Canada assumed that there would not be one country.) 2006–present: ? Next period still unfolding. Will it be the Harper era? Or is his time simply an interregnum that will be written off, till the next great PM arrives?
That’s the question we have right now. Is this a significant prime minister? (I count six after Mackenzie King right now.) If not, will his opposite number be one?
I mean, honestly, what does the guy think this means:
All around that dull gray world
From Moscow to Berlin
People storm the barricades
Walls go tumbling in
The counter-revolution
People smiling through their tears
Who can give them back their lives
And all those wasted years?
All those precious wasted years –
Who will pay?
Additional irony: the lyrics conclude that we must be forgiving at last. The pictures it is set to, on the other hand, are very much on the side of not doing so…
I don’t know if I’ve blogged about it, before — at least, possibly not at this location.
Reason Magazine has an interesting article on Iraq. They say, well, suppose we assume that the surge is indeed working, and that Iraq will emerge as, well, not all that bad.
There’s a neat framing:
I’ll make an easily-refutable prediction, and will admit I’m wrong a year from now if necessary: I think the “surge is working” types are on the winning edge of American political argumentation, and that the American people are more than ready to try to put this all behind us if given half a reason to before the next election. Especially if the Democrats go, as seems likely, with their most widely hated candidate, Hillary Clinton, they shouldn’t count on disgust with Bush’s Iraq policy to shoo them in.
If this turns out to be true, what will this mean for the future of American foreign policy? (more…)
If the Liberals have been asking questions for a week solely on the elections spending issue in an attempt to create a scandal, and if the PM was getting under their skin by refusing to answer, denying them their nightly newsclip from it, wouldn’t this be playing right into their hands?
