Wednesday, November 9, 2011

A Drop In The Bucket

And so ends the 2011 election season, an utterly disgraceful one for the Liberals by any measure. Not one result, coast-to-coast, that they can point to and say, "We have the momentum." The best they did was their wins in PEI and here in Ontario, where they held us off at some cost.

So what?

Does anyone out there think that these Liberals are going away any time soon? Did we win?

Absolutely not.

This country, all of it, still belongs to the Liberals. Nothing has changed that. Not the federal majority in both houses. Not our advances provincially, such as they were. Not our victories at the municipal level. Not the establishment of Sun News. Not the dominance in fundraising. Not even the fact that Conservatives seem to be on the rise worldwide. None of that matters.

For you see, I talk to Liberals. And they remain hopeful. Hopeful that good, as they put it, will triumph over evil in the end. All of their misfortune is just a setback. All of our gains are just a bad dream that will end soon.

When I can open a newspaper and see ridiculous, unfounded rumours about leadership challenges to Tim Hudak reported on as if they are fact (and remember, this is a guy who did just take a piece of Dalton's rear end, something nobody else has accomplished in recent memory)....

.....or when, a day before Brad Wall wipes the floor with the NDP, I read about how Harper's decision to dismantle the Wheat Board might hurt the Saskatchewan Party's hopes, and then, after Wall is done wiping the floor with the NDP, there is not even an acknowledgement of how wrong they were.....

....or when people -any people- refuse to take the CBC to task over this ridiculous, ridiculous situation with Rob Ford......

....or when Margaret Wente points out that the Occupy protesters are overeducated, irresponsible adult children who put the cart before the horse in a big way, expecting to graduate into a world that would shower them with neverending praise, and the next day there are letters taking her to task for being too harsh on single mothers.....

.....or when anyone gives a toss about what Bob Rae has to say on any subject, given that he is a carpetbagging, limelight-seeking opportunist of the first order (and that is something not even the Liberals I talk to try to deny).....then I have to conclude that the Liberals, deluded as they unquestionably are, still have reason to hope.

Compare their state of mind, if you will, to ours. I- we- are currently engaged in soul-searching, debating, deliberating, pondering, on what our next tack will be. We actively fear losing what we've gained while the Liberals look at their troubles as just a down period that they'll bounce back from. That's why we are so reluctant to criticize Conservative leaders who do the wrong thing. I don't like that tendency, but I understand it.

I understand it because the battle between us and them has never been a war between equals. Central to Liberal electoral success is the Heritage Moment illusion of the quiet northern nation, governed by the sane, sage practitioners of the golden mean, where we peacefully play hockey on frozen ponds, are kind to our neighbours, are proud of our healthcare system, dutifully watch the CBC and read Canadian novels, and settle our differences without getting emotional. And we Conservatives, who believe people are naturally selfish and self-interested, are an affront to that. We don't have anything as soothing as the Heritage Moment illusion. All we have are hard truths.

Aye, Mr. Liberal Voter. Why don't ye jes' REEEAD it, then?

Nobody likes having their illusions challenged. But challenge them we must. And if the economy craters, or the Liberal abuse of trust becomes so massive that it cannot be rationalized a la Adscam, then the illusion will disappear and we will have an opportunity to take this province back.  

5 comments:

  1. The country still does belong to the Liberals, and in the worst possible way. The nation is in the hands of unaccountable, unelected Liberal bureaucrats, Liberal media, a Liberal educational establishment and Liberal NGO's.

    We don't just need to dismantle the LPC (and the coming bloodbath between Bob Rae supporters and the other contenders will cripple the party machinery), we also need to root out the "Institutional Liberals" and figuratively burn down their institutions and sow salt on the ground.

    Defunding is an excellent step; they don't know how to create wealth so closing the door on their ability to siphon tax dollars will cripple their ability to influence Canadians. Offering school vouchers and the equivalent for higher education will free millions of children and students from the grip of ideological conditioning, and breaking government monopolies will allow free market institutions to flourish at last.

    As for the LPC, they have literally been squeezed out of the political dialogue; the Greens and NDP are firmly entrenched in the "progressive" spectrum of politics, while the CPC has staked out "classical liberal" values like liberty, property rights and Rule of Law. There is no room in the middle, and the farther they go Left or Right the more they simply stumble on minor or fringe parties (on the Left they will eventually find the National Socialists, Communists, Maoists and Trotskyites, while on the Right they will meet the small "c" conservatives, Libertarians and Objectivists.)

    The LPC is irrelevant, but inertia and the inability of the NDP to be an organized or coherent force and capitalize on the Orange Crush will keep them hanging around like smelly trash for years to come.

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  2. Very well said.

    Three observations:

    If your party campaigns on robbing Peter to pay Paul,it's tough to win if there are more Pauls than Peters voting.

    Yes, the establishment of Sun TV news was a great thing while it lasted. But here in the Toronto area it suddenly disappeared about a week ago. It moved to channel 142 - which is unavailable to many cable TV watchers. One of its on-air personalities said it had always planned to be a "pay-extra" station. Really? I must have missed that memo.

    Bob Rae's latest manifesto insists that everyone should have a job that is "interesting and rewarding". I can just hear the occupiers chanting "INTERESTING AND REWARDING" in chorus. But the blunt fact is that some, if not many jobs, are duller and less rewarding than what the occupiers think they are entitled to.

    All things considered it's amazing that the conservatives have accomplished what they did.

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  3. Thucydides you live in a dream world. Paul Martin balanced the budget 8 years in a row. The Harper/Flaherty dynamic duo lack the fiscal discipline to balance the books. When Harper ran a deficit the first time and broke a campaign promise he said it was the fault of the minority government. Then he made Canadian history by running the largest deficits ever. Everyone said it was the Liberals fault. Harper has his big phat majority and he still can't balance the books.

    Harper the economist is incompetent and hurting Canada's economy.

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  4. Paul Martin had the good fortune to be finance minister in an economic boom. Harper governed through a recession. So did McGuinty, but you don't criticize him.

    The illusion is powerful indeed, isn't it, folks?

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  5. Anonymous at 1:17PM, balancing the budget isn’t the issue. It is how it gets balanced that is relevant. For example even the NDP would balance the budget, they would do it by redistribution. The budget would be balanced for awhile but it would eventually kill the economy. Balancing it isn’t the moral issue, the “how” is.

    Martin did nothing to balance the budget in terms of good fiscal stewardship.

    His budgets primarily got balanced because of a 10% drop in interest rates (nothing to do wilt Liberals, global phenomena of inflation killing by Central Bankers ending). Remember 15 % mortgages suddenly dropped by 10%? The same happened on Trudeau’s hangover of $600 Billion in debt…presto lower interest rates saved $60 billion and the budget becomes balanced. There’s more

    - NAFTA kicked in…the trade deal Chretien was going to kill when elected
    - GST kicked in…the highly efficient tax Sheila Copps and her Rat Pack were going to kill
    - Health Care downloading kicked in. …Martin cut it from 50% to 18% and then with his pals in the Globe and Mail blamed Health cuts on Mike Harris who in fact increased spending on Health at the Provincial level
    There’s more …but that should put an end to the “dream world ” that Liberals balance budgets by sound fiscal management.

    As to our present situation, there is plenty of revenue coming into Ottawa, we do need to cut spending and that will happen; watch government monopoly union’s behaviour as that happens.

    nomdeblog

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