Clap Your Hands And Believe

Somewhere between the Liberal death rally of last weekend, my encounter with Dalton's press drones of a few days ago, Dwight Duncan's broadside against right wing broadsheets, and writing my post on my buddy Jordan (who has taken to posting instances where the Ontario government has fined and punished companies who screw up), I had a sobering thought:

These Liberals actually believe the stuff they're saying.

I'd chalked it up to them putting on a brave face in public as they waited for the inevitable. I thought the attacks on the media were a desperate attempt to appear in control. With McGuinty's poll numbers bottoming out and almost a fifth of their caucus quitting, I thought their performance of the past few days was frightened casting about in an attempt to break Tim Hudak's stride. And to be sure, they are casting about.

But then I read that, far from hiding his face until election day, Dalton is going to take his case to Ontario voters. Again. And, even as his cabinet ministers jockey for position, they still take potshots at us. Like for example the community safety minister- the guy who's supposed to lead the attack on our prisoner proposal- who STILL won't confirm whether he's running or not. To say nothing of the Liberal War Room, where the partisan frenzy is approaching Charlie Sheen levels as, for what seems like the past month, they pound away on the abortion issue in an attempt to make all the bad news about Dalton and the polls go away.

Let me repeat a point I've made on this blog many times before: The Liberals today have no reason to exist other than to fight against the imagined evil posed by Conservatives. Whereas the Liberals were once the people who instituted the Canada Pension Plan, designed the flag, and created our health care system without any help from anybody, they are now the people who tell you that you need to hold your nose and vote for them to block a fictitious Conservative backdoor scheme to kill abortion. Or because some Conservative somewhere said something silly or wrong or offensive. Or because of jets and jails and if you get the grades you get to go or any other talking point that fails to address the underlying issue.

This shift occured because some time ago, a certain Liberal pulled a Barney the Dinosaur doll out of a gym bag on TV and everyone laughed, and everyone decided that that was the way to win elections. Not by doing anything substantive or putting forward a real plan, but by making everyone laugh at the other guy. Well, guess what: that routine has become....well, routine. The show must go on.

So let's be clear here: Our job in this election is not merely to defeat Dalton because he deserves it, not merely to elect a Tim Hudak government, not merely to get Ontario back on track. Our job is to drive a stake through the heart of the Liberal Party, in all its incarnations, forever and ever. And the only way we can do that is to win this election despite every Liberal attempt to find a quick fix or to scare voters with Mike Harris. If "Harris 2.0" can be Premier in Ontario despite all the Liberal attempts to brand him as pure evil, then why vote Liberal at all?

Not only do we have to win, we must defeat the Liberals so decisively that the truth of Canada's new political reality- namely, us on the right vs. Big Labour on the left- is etched into the nervous systems of everyone who calls themselves a Liberal today. They must be forced to accept that truth by outside means, because they will quite simply never accept it any other way. If we win a minority, then the Liberals will dismiss this Conservative victory, like all the other ones, as a fluke where 60% of Ontarians blah dee blah dee blah, and the Liberals are going to win the next election in a landslide because of reasons.

These half-crazed Liberals, who will do anything to keep from accepting their own irrelevance, will tell voters with a straight face that Dalton has run the best government ever. They are past any consideration of "principles." They are past any consideration of "policy." Those things may matter to you, the Principled Conservative who reads this blog, but to the people out there sifting through the smog generated by all parties, it is meaningless. What matters now is how doggedly the supporters of a party support the party. If the Liberals believe in their own propaganda more than we do, then the voters are going to be drawn to them.

So as I see it, the only way for us to seal this deal is to show these Liberals that we are utterly unmoved by their pleadings and that we are more serious about putting an end to Dalton than they are about staying in power. Assuming the voters hate Dalton too much or the NDP will surge or that there's no way that the Liberals can snatch this one isn't good enough.

In addition to outplaying these Liberals, we also have to out-believe them.