Turn Of The Screw

Glen Murray was pinned down in Queen`s Park yesterday over whether snow is being cleared from highways fast enough. And when he was, he was careful to say two things:

1) The problem of snow being cleared isn`t a problem- it`s opposition small potatoes
2) The real problem is global warming, which is big and important and complicated and which the Liberal government is focused on fighting, so please don`t distract us with this nonsense.

Note that Murray made no attempt to say he was changing the way highways were being cleared to take global warming into account. Because that would be solving the problem. And Glen Murray really, really doesn't want the problem to be solved so that he can keep using it as an excuse.

It took a very long time before I was able to isolate this pattern, but it's one of the undeniable hallmarks of blame defection by progressives. Perhaps one of the most incredible things I discovered while researching the Liberals last year was a seemingly innocuous four-word comment by Jean Chretien made, in regards to Preston Manning.

That quote was, "We need this guy."

Think about that for a second. Jean Chretien, the mightiest Liberal PM in living memory, he of the three straight majorities, needed Preston Manning and the Reform Party.

Why? Why would Chretien say something like that? Why couldn't he go all out and declare war on Manning and his knuckle dragging form of Tea Party conservatism?

Because when Manning or one of his MP's said something ridiculous about abortion, it took the heat off the Liberals. Suddenly, all everyone wants to talk about is abortion and how the scary Conservatives would gut it if given the chance.

 

 

This is the enduring image of Stockwell Day. Nothing Stockwell Day will ever do, or anything he ever did, will erase the above image. That's how he's always going to be remembered; as the guy who rode a jet ski.

Why? Why overlook his tenure as a fairly successful cabinet minister in the Harper government?

Because we don't want Stockwell Day, successful cabinet minister who learned from his mistakes. We want Stockwell Day, tone-deaf, out-of-touch, fundamentalist goofball.

And we want to praise Chretien for successfully defending women's wombs against Mr. Jet Ski up there.

We know the silly looking guy on the jet-ski isn't going to gut abortion. But we'd rather fool ourselves into thinking abortion rights are so tenuous in this country that any old gang of conservative yahoos can and will rip them to shreds given the chance. We would rather pretend he's an actual threat, so that when someone yanks out a Barney the Dinosaur doll on TV and blows the guy on the jet ski's credibility (credibility??) to smithereens, we can all pretend it's a blow struck to defend progress.

This is how singularities get formed. We know the Liberals are corrupt shiftless liars who are bankrupting us, but we need- we have to have- that excuse to vote for them. That way, the corrput shiftless liars can continue to be corrupt shiftless liars.

Yeah, maybe there's corruption in Quebec. But rooting out corruption means the people running the show over there need to take a hit or two. If they declare it's English bigotry at work, nobody needs to take a hit. Except the anglais, and they don't count.

You can tell by the way that the people against whom allegations of misspending are being leveled always insist that there is no wrongdoing. No money is being misspent. No Liberals are to blame for ORNGE- it's all conservatives. There are no overpaid teachers.

(There are no structural problems in the PCPO *cough cough*)

The problem (i.e. the deficit) is a phantom one, conjured up by malevolent entities. The actual problem is way, way more serious, and we need to do everything we can to focus on it to the exclusion of anything else.

This is how things end up not changing.