Smoove B Hits A Rough Patch

This post is dedicated to all the Liberals who have had enough of The Man.

The Toronto chessmasters are hard at work making life difficult for my pick for next Liberal leader, Chris "Smoove B" Bentley. Always trying to hold a brother down! As Marcus Gee reports in the Globe, Smoove B's been made into the whipping boy for Dalton's unpopular Green Energy Act. Don't like wind turbines? Think the whole thing's an expensive mess? Having problems getting your solar plant up and running? Go complain to Chris Bentley, because Dalton ain't hearing it. 

Now isn't this so typical for Dalton McGuinty? The Green Energy Act was conceived in Toronto, for Toronto, by George Smitherman, yet another Liberal who got too big for his britches and got shown the door. Now it falls to Smoove B, the Working Liberal's Liberal, to defend the thing from his Liberal outpost in London, where the NDP took the neighbouring seat of London Fanshawe and the PC's grabbed a ton of land surrounding the city. If Bentley gets tumbled out of office because he can't make the thing work? Problem solved for Dalton! They bury Bentley and get on with finding the next patsy.

You would think that Dalton, having lost three cabinet ministers because of opposition to wind farms in this province, would be a little worried. And he probably is. But Dalton has never been one of the Toronto chessmasters, has he? And for the strategic geniuses, it is always about the next move, how they're going to *get* those yokel PC's. They don't care how many cabinet ministers and MPP's and staffers they have to bury in the process.

And what do those staffers have to say about all this, as their political careers come to early ends? How long can Bentley and the rest of the leadership hopefuls slog through the mud while Dalton basks in the glory? To say nothing of the talent that didn't get promoted to cabinet, and likely won't as Dalton girds for cuts to the cherished programs he spent time defending. I talk about how grassroots PCs would rather sit and complain than try to take ownership of their party, but they have nothing on the Liberals when it comes to willful blindness.

No matter. Let Bentley get whipped like a government mule, and let the staffers stew in their own juices. Let the resentment build. In time, it will boil over.