Knock Down, Drag Out

The last time there was an anonymous gossip account that said mean things about the PC Party of Ontario, I got really mad instead of doing what I should have done, which was think about why these things exist, and of course the reason why they exist is because there is a huge, huge demand for PC Party of Ontario people beating on each other and an equally huge supply of PCPO people willing to beat on each other. 

When an anonymous Tweeter suddenly finds themselves in possession of difficult-to-justify material, it tends to upset pretensions by leadership candidates and spokespeople that the PC Party is a viable and united centrist alternative that won't alienate Toronto. Somehow, some way, this information got out, and if we were as united as we would like everyone to believe, it wouldn't have. 

What's the point of pretending otherwise? We really would rather slam each other than slam the Liberals. Hence the eagerness with which the party piled on Monte McNaughton yesterday for his comments to the Premier. 

Supposedly the problem is that Monte's comments distracted the party from staying on Wynne's tail about the ever increasing scandal burden (even though, as I've said before, the scandalmongering is itself a distraction from the PC Party of Ontario's ongoing internal issues), but if you accept that explanation, then how does stopping to dissociate yourself from Monte keep the focus on the OLP and their bad behaviour? 

Then I have to wonder: Where were these people before and during Rob Ford's mayoralty? When Doug Ford was being tapped, then not tapped, then tapped again as a possible PC candidate even as he was detonating some good-sized PR bombs of his own, did these same people get as outraged? No, because back then, the Fords could WIN (until they didn't win).  

Then, of course, the PCPO brain trust is perfectly willing to let McNaughton continue as a candidate and more importantly, take the money he's bringing into he party without too much hand-wringing. 

Christine Elliott could theoretically go before the people and say that Monte McNaughton and his people have no place in a party being led by her, but there is no possible world in which that happens, because she's building "the big blue tent" and she isn't quite sure whether people opposed to the sex-ed curriculum belong inside or outside of that tent. 

The fact is, too many PCPO people want to win, and win now, and they're willing to take any number of shortcuts to get there, and the voters can see right through that. How's that for "serving some realness?" 

The Old Adventures Of New Christine

In a couple of days, the Protest to Stop or Revise Ontario SEX ED curriculum will make its presence felt on the lawn of Queen's Park. I'm told it's going to be a big day for parent advocacy, and parents are going to be fired up. 

But you probably knew all that already. I want to talk today about something more important: Unless what I'm being told proves untrue, Christine Elliott will be in attendance at this rally. 

As you know, I have not been a fan of CJE as of late. Specifically because her talk about listening to the grassroots is just that: talk. She and her coterie of advisors, the same advisors who engineered four straight election losses, know that they have to make sympathetic noises in order to attract votes before May.

Christine's crew would just love to tell the parents involved in Tuesday's protest to go take a walk, because they believe that far-right stances like opposing the sex-ed curriculum killed the party. They like using this excuse because they don't like having to take a firm stance of their own, or come up with a actual plan that would give voters confidence in their ability to run the province instead of a list of talking points.  

But since the protest organizers are calling for the head of PC Education Critic Garfield Dunlop for speaking in favour of the curriculum, Christine has been dispatched to the rally to pre-empt this threat to her leadership. At this rally she will say things she doesn't believe, that the parents don't believe, and that lots of her own people who want the party cleansed of wacky so-cons don't believe.

Now I may not be voting for Christine under any circumstances, and as such her organizers have no obligation to pay attention to me. But I would caution them to to remember that waffling on the gas plants was what gave the Liberals the ability to say, "The PC's would have cancelled the plants too", and that yelling about the HST for years without telling people what they'd do instead convinced absolutely no one.

If that doesn't rattle their bones, they might consider the embarrassing photo of her at this rally, standing beside Dr. Charles McVety or someone like that, appearing on a piece of Liberal literature with HIDDEN AGENDA?!?!?!??!?! in enormous letters underneath.

In short, there is no reason for her to bother with this silly pretense. There are two perfectly good PC Party leadership candidates with much better bona fides in attendance already, and Christine would be a far more credible candidate if she spoke truth to power. Everyone could go home happy.

It could be so easy if everyone concerned would just stay in their lanes and forget about the political oneupsmanship, for the sake of the children.

UPDATE: Credit is always given where credit is due, and Christine did indeed back off. Now all she has to do is avoid all the other pitfalls in a similar fashion and she might not lose a general election!

We (Unfortunately) Hold These Truths To Be Self Evident

Our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was a drunk. It's an established fact that we're somehow reluctant to talk about, because we're Canadians and it's embarrassing.

I don't know why we find it embarrassing, though, because Sir John A. himself sure didn't. Like every great Canadian leader, he cut through the veil of keeping-up-appearances crap that blankets this country like a fog, and informed the crowd that they would rather have John A. drunk than George Brown sober, and shortly after that they found out that that's what they did want.

John A. was a Conservative, but he was one of those old school conservatives who didn't care for the Americans too much, and since then our establishment has been doing everything it can to elect and re-elect Liberal governments and their ideological fellow-travellers who will keep the government dollars flowing to all the right people. Given half a chance, no matter how corrupt the governing party is, they will gleefully participate in the stomping of an opposition leader or the outright ousting of a Prime Minister or Premier that's veered too far off the rails.

They would rather have corrupt Liberals than honest Conservatives, who are always somehow found out to not be honest Conservatives because they made some error or typo or were not ideologically consistent 10 years ago or said something that annoyed somebody.

When the Toronto Star, then, writes editorials saying that Justin Trudeau is running out of second chances and that Kathleen's Wynne's assistant-thingy needs to step down over the latest scandal or whatever, Conservatives should not be putting up their feet and chillaxing. The Toronto Star is doing this to ease their mightily overworked consciences. Their columnist says Trudeau is running out of second chances, which means he still has a few, or a lot.

Nor should they be doing fist pumps when Michael Colle is a crankypants about Eve Adams, because Michael Colle's utility to the provincial Liberals is that he holds a seat in midtown Toronto, and if he didn't have that seat he wouldn't be able to get his phone calls returned. Until Trudeau and Wynne are dead-which is to say, defeated on election day and having resigned, they are not dead.

I get it. It's nice to think that you will get a fair shake and that all sins are equal even though they're Liberals and you're not. But that isn't the case, my friends. You know it and I know it.

Four elections in which the PCs had it in the bag and then really really didn't for one reason or another are proof enough of that, or maybe we could recall the many, many times where the appointed guardians of the public trust, be they B.C. Liberals, PC Party of Alberta, or Manitoba NDP- or, for the sake of consistency, the Quebec Liberals, who had been found guilty of corruption- were all but dead and then miraculously came back to life because suddenly some errors mattered more than others.

You think Harper has the next election won? You think Canadians are solidly behind the mission against ISIS? You'd better pray, for all the right reasons as well as the wrong ones, that they don't capture a Canadian soldier and broadcast the execution, because as soon as that happens all the air is going out of that balloon very very quickly.

You think Harper is solid on the economy and Joe Oliver is a hero for slaying the deficit? You'd better hope, when the budget comes down, that there are no hidden holes, because the Star, for all their protestations about Trudeau, will find it and go full-on Crazy Town for weeks about it.

Think Wynne's in hot water over this Sudbury sleaze? Please. They won the riding, and there won't be any byelections for a while, and if it gets too loud all she has to do is ask for another meeting with Stephen Harper or fret publicly about how she hopes he doesn't hate Ontario. If she's really pissed she'll mention something about Deb Hutton getting a payout, or Ipperwash, or Walkerton, or SOMETHING ELSE THAT HAPPENED DECADES AGO.

Down south and worldwide, the big story is always, "Look at the conservative doing something stupid" instead of a focus on how Obama is ruining things or how a certain religion does, unfortunately, play a disproportionate role in terrorism. But even if they were putting a focus on that stuff, that's no reason to forget about the Crusades! Or slavery! That was a thing!

Liberal bias is a fact, not a theory, and the proof is in which balls everyone lets go by, not which ones they hit. Every conservative worth a second thought knows that the deck is stacked against them, and yet, nobody on the right side of the aisle can get it through their heads that it is never time to let it all hang out. The Republicans won midterm elections for the House and the Senate? The Quebec Liberals are embracing austerity? Harper won a majority? Ford's Mayor of Toronto? Big woopity doo, doesn't matter. Progressives will shrug it right off and come right back, because they want all of the marbles and we're content with just some.

Trudeau should not even be in the picture at this point. He should never have come close to the picture. He is everything the left hates: a white, privileged, cisgendered wealthy male with good looks and an unhealthy relationship with power and control. He's a less interesting version of Christian Grey, but you had best believe that the progressives are going to show up for him on E Day in significant numbers no matter what- the only question is, will those numbers be significant enough?

I hate to say it, but it looks like us independent, rebel-minded conservatives are going to have to become unthinking robots ourselves, unquestioningly obeying those above us, if we are ever going to really change the culture and stop the endless advance of progressivism into our lives.

60 Revolutions Per Minute

Today, because I'm really bored with this stupid leadership race, I would like to outline the process by which the PC Party of Ontario manage uprisings of one sort or another. They've had to get very good at doing this, as it comes with the territory.

To begin with, whether you're a PCPO rank and file member or the most powerful person in the party, you most likely share a characteristic of the late and unlamented Sun News- you think that just because you're not the corrupt and dirty Liberals, you deserve everyone's unquestioned support. You do not have to do a good job- you just kind of have to be....there?....and everything will kind of just fall into place.

The base doesn't really want to be involved in driving the party (though they really like complaining about how the party is run), and the party brass doesn't really feel like working too hard to get people involved (because the less complainers they have to manage, the better). So we're on cruise control for 90% of the time here.

This is how you end up with a campaign like Christine Elliott's, and really, a leadership race like the one we're having right now. The PCPO should not be able to handle all the requests for memberships and donations with the way the Liberals are driving this province into the ditch, but why would people be actively trying to build the party when people are just kind of gravitating towards Christine without her really doing anything? Who's going to stop her from not really giving a crap about the grassroots, or not really building a Big Blue Tent? Not the PCPO base, that's for sure.

So, not really much has to happen until the party, which has been on cruise control, blows it massively (as it often does). Then the gears start turning, because then people start getting pissed off.

First, those responsible for such debacles usually pen op-eds saying that they are proud to have been involved in the debacle in question, that nobody foresaw the particular result, that everyone else had advantages that they didn't, and that the bitter, jaded, and clearly very wrong individuals who think differently are entitled to their untrue and incorrect opinions. 

Then we have public complain sessions which are done not for the purpose of identifying any actual problems, but to give members a chance to spout off so they don't actually get together and start plotting the removal of the party elders. 

Then we arrive at a solution that is not a solution at all, but merely sets the stage for an even bigger screwup that "nobody could have foreseen". 

The most current "solution" is the one being pushed by the Christine Elliott campaign, which, not so coincidentally, is the campaign that most of these establishment folks are working on. Basically, we, the PCPO, have to put a nicer face on the party and stop saying mean things about the Liberal government. We lost in June because we looked critical, snarly and mean and we alienated Toronto.

Before that the solution was that we were light on policy and that we needed a bunch of white papers that nobody read or cared about.

Before that, the solution was that we needed a tougher, more boldly conservative vision because the Liberal lite vision we'd offered people in 2007 opened us up for criticism on funding faith based schools. So as you can see, we've come full circle.

This holding pattern has served the party mandarins well since 2003 because the base is too busy being angry about scandals and hating the Liberals to realize they're being led around by the nose. So when there is an attempt to throw the bums out, it usually fizzles because a) it's not very well organized, because the organizers of the attempt to purge the party think they will receive medals just for showing up, and b) everyone suddenly becomes really concerned about looking like a divided party and fighting in public.

The fact that the other two campaigns are doing as well as they are shows that there are lots of conservatives who want change, even if it is just for change's sake. The party elders, of course, have decided to dismiss them as disloyal reactionaries who want to blow up the party. It's nice that people are getting mad enough to loudly demand change, but the fact that they want to kill the other half of the party doesn't make them any better than the people at the top now who are pretending they don't exist.

The solution is to have a party leadership that is really interested bringing in disaffected conservatives, not just having them spout off or saying, "We need to consult the grassroots before we announce stupid policies that make us lose elections" and then not really doing it.

But that's hard. 

Black Hole Sun

What can I say about the death of Sun News that I haven't said a million times before about other topics?

-The Canadian Right is not interested in delivering quality product- they think people will ignore the massive gaping holes in their credibility just because they're daring to be different

-Principled Conservatives who cried aloud for a right wing alternative had their chance and blew it, just like they always do

-You're not fooling anyone with your idiotic talking points- people can SEE you're losing

-If people are saying bad stuff about you, they're probably right

-Random yelling about conservative Outrages of the Day does not make for compelling viewing, nor does it make for a narrative. Having an actual goal for the conservative movement in this country to achieve and rally towards would be nice, but that's reaching wayyyyy too far

Hmmmm, there's got to be something new.....Oh, I know!

-Stop posting selfies of your favourite Sun News moments!

Sun News has failed, and right wingers are celebrating. Celebrating what a wild, fun ride it was! How proud they were to appear on a network that was laughed at and derided as a cheap imitation of Fox News from Day 1. Nobody wants to talk about what went wrong.

So, of course, I will.

Sun News did, often, get it right. They did say what nobody else wanted to say.

But when you started watching Sun News for more than 10 minutes at a time, you found yourself stranded in downtown asshole-ville. You would come for, say, a segment about the curtailment of free speech at a university, and then you would be expected to stay for someone concerned about abortions. You would come for an analysis of a provincial election, and then be expected to stay for someone talking about U.S. politics. You would come for an expose of misspending on reserves, and then be expected to sit through a bunch of white guys denying white privilege exists.

This is why people would share clips instead of continuously watching the network. Nobody wants 24 hours of ranting.

But if you have your heart set on 24 hours of ranting, then you might as well open your floodgates to everyone who has a bone to pick with the system. This would be the daily struggles of everyone who has had a bad experience with the health care system, who had their business closed due to out of control laws, people who are struggling to pay the bills because their hydro bill has skyrocketed. Imagine how much interest there could have been if everyone had been allowed equal time on Sun News and could see themselves on TV. Imagine if they had allowed actual comments and phone calls from viewers.

Oh, but suddenly Sun News has to have standards. We've got to give the Ethical Oil stuff its time (when it has no relevance to anyone outside Alberta, sorry not sorry), and we've got to give plenty of time to whining about the CBC and for Brian Lilley to plug his book, and we've got to give Adam Giambrone his spot as well for some reason, and generally we've got to decide at the beginning of each day what we're going to pretend to be righteously indignated about instead of listening to our viewers and letting them decide what they want to see. 

This is the infamous Margie Gillis clip. I've watched it several times. It's not that Krista Erickson is yelling at a member of the Arts Community, because Margie Gillis was obviously prepared for that. It's that Erickson is engaging in BAAAAAD ACTING. AHHHH. I AM ANGRY. LOOK AT HOW MAD I AM ABOUT THE WASTE AND THE MONEY BEING WASTED. RAWR. RAWWWWR!!!!

And that's when Sun News was at its worst. Forced, awkward, boardroom-approved crap like this, meant to press our outrage buttons, on a channel that's supposed to be authentic and raw. It doesn't work. The cardboard sets don't work, the constant haranguing for mandatory carriage doesn't work, the talking points at the bottom of the screen telling us what to think don't work, and the billionaire owner who happens to be a separatist running a network big on rah-rah support the troops Go Canada Go patriotism really doesn't work.

It's a miracle that it lasted as long as it did.  I have no doubt that they'll try to bring it back, and make all of the same mistakes as they did the first time around.

All About Eve

One of the big underreported stories of the last year, which had probably more relevance for the political world than anyone will ever know, was #Gamergate.

I'll summarize it in three sentences for those of you who missed it: 

-Feminist Anita Sarkeesian said video games reinforced sexism and made people who played video games more likely to have unconscious hatred of women (because, again, hatred is not natural) 

-The video gaming section of the Internet took it personally, exploded in stupid-angry denial and in some cases threatened Sarkeesian personally with lots of sexist abuse and violence instead of responding to her (debatable) points

-Because there was a lot of sexist abuse and violence threatened, it proved Sarkeesian's point better than she could have ever proven it herself. 

I can't prove whether Sarkeesian and her crew of feminists knew the gaming section of the Internet was going to erupt in rage and prove her point. I did know, however, that when Eve Adams crossed the floor there would be an extremely predictable and quite similar rage-offering, wherein Adams would be called a bimbo, a crazy lady with too much makeup, an opportunist backstabbing woman, and lots of other unprintable things that for whatever reason focused on her being a woman instead of the utter hollowness and disingenuity of her reasons for crossing the floor. 

This may be difficult to understand, but the chuckleheads on Facebook and Twitter who think they are advancing the CPC cause by saying these things about Adams are doing Trudeau's work for him. 

All they had to do was keep their mouths shut and let Trudeau and Adams embarrass themselves at that disaster of a press conference. There was an inordinate amount of fail up there already and if they hadn't turned Adams into a victim the LPC wouldn't have had a leg to stand on. Liberal staffers were gagging on this latest poison pill they were forced to swallow. 

But no. You fools are so frightened of Trudeau that you just cannot restrain yourselves. And so the Liberals rallied around Adams instead of rejecting her, and the completely reasonable and logical case to be made for saying "WTF?" to Eve Adams the instant Liberal went right out the window. Trudeau lives to fight another day, Adams gets to play the wounded gazelle, and conservatives get rope a doped yet again. 

Trudeau being a complete ninny doesn't give conservatives the green light to start flinging their poop everywhere and hoping nobody notices. I pray that this gets remembered come election time, or else the CPC will be looking at opposition for long, long while. 

Measure Of Central Tendency

All this week, I have been holding my breath waiting....hoping....praying for the backlash from the left against Justin Trudeau for supporting Harper's anti-terrorism bill.

We've seen Junior drop bombs on his own troops before. Denying open nominations. Decoupling the Senate caucus. Putting Massimo Pacetti and Scott Andrews into limbo.

But this? This goes against the very grain of Liberalism as it currently stands. And nobody within the Liberal party seems to care. Not only that, but none of the social justice warriors outside the Liberal party seem to care.

Coming off the heels of the Charlie Hebdo killings, where the left loudly and proudly blamed the racist French for the violence, this is a startling turn. I'm at a loss for how to reconcile it, especially when we have Liberal MP's saying aloud that Harper is to blame for ISIS targeting Canadians and when Obama ignores the elephant in the room in favour of the Crusades and slavery at a prayer breakfast.

The CPC have long since declared Trudeau dead. They look at polls, at by-election results, and the like. What they're not looking at is how Trudeau's own supporters are behaving, and what the rest of the left are saying. They consider these people to be marginal.

Even in the wake of the recent municipal and provincial elections, they do not understand that how the left feels about how authentically progressive a candidate is means a lot more for an electoral result than any of their vaunted "messaging". If your opponent's campaign is self-destructing, that doesn't make you a genius (though they would, naturally, very much prefer to take credit).

The Liberals do understand this at some level, because they dispatch one of their sycophants in the Huffington Post to condescend to NDP voters on the subject of how Mulcair's middle class tax credit helps the rich instead of the poor and downtrodden. They did the same thing to tremendous effect in the provincial election, and I could see the NDP implosion coming a mile away. Then Olivia Chow did the same thing to herself in the municipal election, and the outcry from leftists was loud and insistent and, most importantly, fatal.

For Trudeau, or Mulcair, to go down in flames, this is what needs to happen. The left must engage in a fit of self-immolation, which must be public enough that the party elders can't keep a lid on it.

Until this final piece of the puzzle falls into place, Trudeau is not dead.

Now there is another and much more terrifying possibility. Because of his lineage, and because of the desperation the Liberal Party of Canada is in, it might very well be that Trudeau's supporters will follow him no matter where or how he leads them. And if this is true, the CPC is toast.

When I see Muslim groups denouncing Harper for his comments and ignoring the fact that Trudeau has signed on to a piece of Harper's legislation that many on the left have written off as another method of targeting Muslims, I get the uneasy sense that it really is all about #StoppingHarper. That the left in this country will become an unthinking mass of robots determined to vote Liberal, blind to Trudeau's real and very dangerous flaws, to say nothing of his lack of progressive credibility.

As terrifying as this is to write, the future of this country depends on how good the left is at sucking a golf ball through a garden hose.

The Banana Split Lady

Christine Elliott, and a significant portion of the PCPO membership, believes that she can convince Ontarians that the PCPO is progressive and acceptable and something you don't have to be terrified of. She and her supporters think it is possible to win the province by putting a nicer face on the party.

They are wrong.

It isn't her fault. I truly believe that she is a kind, socially progressive, and caring person who is just tired of scandals and waste and doesn't think we can go on spending forever. But unfortunately, the people of Ontario who aren't active party members don't see that when they look at her. They see her as another Mike Harris.

The reason why the people of Sudbury just put the PCPO candidate behind the independent candidate in yesterday's byelection, and the reason why the rest of the province is still blaming Mike Harris for everything wrong with the province decades after the fact, and the reason why they don't appear to care about the endlessly sleazy behaviour of the OLP is because they have an organic dislike of the PC Party of Ontario. They don't care who's leading it. They're not interested in how bad the Liberals are.

The Liberals will, without shame, tell Ontarians that Christine has a hidden agenda. They will run ads saying that under a Christine Elliott government, nurses will be fired and schools will be closed and inspectors will be fired. They will link her to Hudak because she happened to be deputy leader. They will ask why she hasn't purged the party of right-leaning elements, why she took the endorsement from Doug Ford, why she was seen within 10 kilometres of a gathering of the Ontario Landowners. If she votes against the Liberals on any money-spending measure, they will question her commitment to being as progressive as she says she is.

In short, they will ask what right she has to criticize this government when she herself is not perfect.

Tim Hudak, for all his faults, knew the Liberals were going to do all this to him and he didn't care. He assumed Ontarians wouldn't fall for the Liberal distractions, and he also assumed that nobody was going to question him or his party when they did do something egregious, but at least he wasn't kept up nights when the Liberals were mean to him.

Christine, on the other hand, will do everything she can to prove how progressive she is. She will loudly deny the accusations against her, and in doing so, will only prove the Liberals right.

This is because an astonishing number of people believe that if you say you are a thing, then there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that you are that thing. If a person has to say, for example, that they are not racist, then they are the world's biggest racist. If a person says they are nice, they are not nice, because they should never have to say that out loud. If you have money and someone else has less money, you should be giving that money to that other person without having to be asked. You must be above suspicion, or else you are just as bad as everyone else if not worse.

Because the PCPO is in some measure a conservative party, it is comprised of bad people. That's what Ontarians believe. So putting a nicer face on a party of bad people is just going to piss the voters off because they will interpret that as us thinking they're too dumb to see that the PCPO are, in fact, bad people. This is a far bigger problem than the problem of whether Christine is ideologically pure enough, because enough conservatives will go along with her anyway because they have no other option.

Stephen Harper, Rob Ford, and Mike Harris are three conservatives who have won elections with the full knowledge that people hated them, and were reasonably comfortable with that fact. They were and are violently partisan, held and hold views that horrified people, and did and do things that shocked the nation while in power. They are reviled. They are villains.

As far as I know, however, they have never gone on TV and told people they are nice and relatable.
guys.

The next conservative Premier of the Province will have understood that you can't get elected trying to be something you're not.

The PCPO/NDPirates Who Don't Do Anything

It's not so much that the people who are supposedly trying to stop Kathleen Wynne from driving this province further and further into the ground are doing a bad job (although they certainly are doing a bad job). 

The problem is that they have convinced themselves that they are doing a good job. That is why they fail, and continue to fail. 

This byelection was particularly instructive in that respect because there is no half-truth that can be told in the aftermath that makes the opposition parties look good. There is no spin that can be put on these results. It simply is what it is, and what it is is that Kathleen Wynne can do whatever the hell she pleases with zero consequences, having just proved that not only are the haters totally wrong, but they are singularly useless as well. Their "opposition" amounts to sitting around waiting for the voters to "send the government a message" because nobody could possibly be voting for this government. After all, nobody they talk to is voting Liberal. 

And so, the NDP (and the PCPO, to a far lesser extent because they are a non-entity up in Sudbury, but I could have written the same thing about them in any other case) spent the last few weeks (not really) trying to convince Sudburians that the objectionable way in which Kathleen Wynne poached Glenn Thibeault was a reason to vote for another party and to reject the Liberal goodies that were being dangled seductively.

They failed spectacularly because everyone knows what Glenn Thibeault figured out: that if you want to go anywhere politically, you hitch your wagon to Kathleen Wynne's Liberals, scandals be damned. You don't mount principled opposition to all parties like Andrew Olivier did, either, because ain't nobody got time for that. 

The fact that the Liberals are untouchable is by this point entirely obvious to everyone except the opposition. At this very moment party workers are struggling for answers, open mouthed in shock. There was a poll- there is always a poll- that showed the Liberals were "neck-and-neck" with (insert-non-Liberal-party-Party-here) right before the byelection. Hours before the polls closed, the Liberals were found guilty (again?) of corruption by the OPP. How could ANYBODY be voting for these Liberals?

Then someone comes along and says, "Because you guys are expecting the government to just fall into your laps? Because you're lazy?"

And oh, the horror. Oh, the anger. How dare you imply that anything less than 127% was given, in Sudbury, and in the last four general elections? So the complainers are taken out behind the barn and shot and we go right ahead derping along about scandals that nobody cares about.

Well, I don't know about you, but I think it's time to start pointing the finger at ourselves, because pointing the finger at the Liberals isn't working. They are still winning seats despite Glenn Thibeault, a hospital worker strike, and a pedophile in charge of creating a curriculum for preschoolers on top of all of the other mismanagement, scandals, waste, general poor governance and all the rest of it.

When your opponent is daring you to hit them and you still can't do it, that's not their fault- it's yours.

The Shadow Knows

Like some other bloggers you might read, I was also in attendance at last week's Mark Steyn book signing at the Bay and Bloor Indigo. I didn't get a front row seat- I stood at the sidelines, in the shadows.  

As these other writers note, it was a case study: articulate, wordy, and prescient author calls attention to things that are desperately wrong with society, and the peacemaking, bridge-building, empathic, centrist elites pulls the veil right back over what has been revealed. There, in the soft light of the Manulife Centre, the central tension of what we do was exposed for all to see, if only for a moment, before Heather Reisman smoothed it over.  

And yet Steyn, to his credit, was able to pierce the veil by exposing the flaw inherent in Reisman's calls for tolerance. "A society, that is prepared to tolerate extreme intolerance in the name of liberalism, has signed its own death warrant"- this, of course, struck a chord with Reisman because she and all the others who cannot bring themselves to accept the existence of evil know that we are right. In the dark corners of her mind, she feels the same fear of the Other that all humans feel.  

She cannot allow herself to acknowledge that fear. None of them can, because they prize social acceptability over all. But the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men (and women, and transpeople, and two-spirited individuals, etc. etc.....)

Ignorance of the darkness, the looming threat- be it a refusal to accept the corruption of a Liberal government at Queen's Park, soft-pedalling the threat posed by Justin Trudeau on the part of CPC staffers grown complacent, or the attempt to normalize the loss of speech caused by the Charlie Hebdo killings- leads inevitably to disaster. It is the same covering of the truth by the polite segment of society in every case, every time.  

The left can be counted on to acknowledge the place of ugliness and darkness in society, as something to be fought against. In this, they are closer to the truth than the dead weight centre represented by Reisman. But they see this darkness as unnatural. They believe that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and general dislike of the Other is the result of invisible conspiracies by the powerful perpetrated against the powerless as opposed to natural, basic feelings felt by everyone. 

When the various segments of the left proclaim that they are bathing in male tears, shouting "die cis scum", calling for wealth redistribution through government action or saying racism against white people does not exist, it is the same unwillingness to look at the truth, to accept that these thoughts come from the same dark places as anything that issues forth from the right side of the spectrum. No amount of education, of validation of feelings, of common ground or of striving for intersectionality can ever fully beat back the darkness. 

It is with us everywhere, and the only cure is too look into the shadows and confront, to accept, what is there without fear, to constantly remind ourselves that we are human despite our best intentions and our best actions. 

The spectre of hate and intolerance will haunt us forever. Fight it, but acknowledge its power, and your own lack of power in the times that you fail. 

Ah, but no. You will throw it back in our faces and say, "I don't believe." You will hide in your safe spaces. You will judge and cast us out. Again, the supposedly tolerant will reveal their own intolerance. Predictable. All too predictable. All too human! 

And so the cycle continues. Plenty followed by war, boom followed by bust, empires declining only to be replaced by new empires. This is the story, the only story, told and retold a thousand different times.    

Just wait and see.