Smart and Dumb

I, along with a lot of Canadians I suspect, have spent much of the past week not reading about Justin Trudeau as either the Second Coming or Chief Rider of the Apocalypse. He’s neither.

Smart people, regardless of party, are intrigued with how Trudeau is going to set about governing. He has a lot of choices, a fairly vague set of election promises and 39% popular support. Dumb people are foaming at the mouth and finding ever more scathing things to say about the Liberals, Premier Wynne, marijuana legalization and Canada’s international commitments. (Given the farcical nature of Obama’s feckless non-commitment to wiping out ISIS we are well out of any combat role in that fiasco.)

I have no doubt that Trudeau will have to throw some red meat to his base and, unlike Harper, he might be bright enough to do that at the outset of his term. He also has a lot to actually do with assorted international conferences to attend and a Cabinet to appoint and priorities to set.

Smart people will wish Trudeau well as he embarks on his Prime Ministership. Dumb people are going to try to stoke the 24 hour outrage machine and hysterically nitpick the guy.This is dumb because it is so patently partisan. Smart people want Trudeau to be ready and to be the best Prime Minister he can be. The Liberal Party and Trudeau himself are likely to be wrong about any number of things and, as those errors are made, it will be time to point them out and suggest better alternatives. But Trudeau has to make the errors first.

Smart conservatives, after they have been annoyed at losing and after they have realized that it was not just Harper’s fault – a realization which seems to be taking a bit longer than is reasonable – need to get to work considering where they lost the 8% of the electorate who swung over to the Libs. What was it about the Harper government’s approach which alienated so many people? It will be a lot more useful to think about where modern conservatism is going in Canada than it will be to fire spitballs at Trudeau.

Betrayed: Stephen Harper’s war on principled conservatism – A Review

Various people have asked me why I will not vote for Stephen Harper and the Conservatives in this election. While the Cons’ failure to seriously tackle the deficit, reduce the size of government and begin to dismantle the Liberal state are all good reasons, I probably would hold my nose one more time if it were not for one, fundamental fact: C-51. And I might have even given Harper a pass on C-51 if I didn’t know the Conservative record on free speech, the perversion of the Human Rights Commission and the legal thuggery which attended it.

Connie Fournier and her husband Mark are not going to be voting for the Harper Conservatives either: Connie has detailed her reasons in Betrayed: Stephen Harper’s war on principled conservatism.

Full disclosure: I’ve met Connie and Mark once and I provided an affidavit in their defence when Dr. Dawg sued them for libel (a case which they won at great personal expense). Connie and I chat on Google and, in so far as it is possible to have friends you only chat with on the internet, I’d like to think Connie is one of mine.

The Fourniers are ordinary, middle class Canadians – Mark drives long haul trucks, Connie was a homeschooling stay-at-home mum – who were politically involved as far back as the Canadian Alliance. They started a website called Free Dominion in 2001 where conservatives of various sorts could post topics and comments and have a good time arguing among themselves.

Nigel Wright = Dudley DoRight

Revulsion appears to have driven him personally, not only to make out the bank draft for Duffy but, before that, to try to make him see that whether or not what he’d done was illegal, it was improper, and that ordinary people would recognize it immediately: Duffy had been caught with his snout in the trough, and he needed to make it right.

Happily for Wright, his personal raison d’etre coincided with the needs of his job, to protect Harper and his government and to stifle scandal, wherever it bred.

He must have been as much of an anomaly in politics as he is in that courtroom, an honest witness sitting in a chair most often occupied by mooks, thugs and liars, this man with the great wide streak of hard-as-nails pragmatism and the almost ridiculous sense of propriety. christie blatchford, national post

As show trials go the Duffy trial is a bit of a damp squib. Duffy is an obvious scumball. Well, yes and it was idiotic to appoint him to the Senate. And he was a greedy scumball who got himself into a shitload of trouble for being greedy.

Nigel Wright bailed him out. In Wright’s world 90K to make a problem go away is nothing. It was his own money. He solved a problem. The media frenzy – and it seems pretty much the only people who give a rats ass about this are the media, jealous no doubt that one of their own hit the Senate – needs to prove some sort of conspiracy in the PMO/PCO to what? Bribe Duffy? (If it was a bribe it would be Wright, not Duffy, who would be charged.)

Wright wanted to make a nasty situation go away. Duffy had not done anything which was illegal (by the quaint rules of the Senate which assume, contrary to experience, that Senators can be counted upon to be gentlemen) but his troughing was extreme even for that august body. He needed to repay his crappy expenses and Nigel had the money to make it happen.

Did Wright structure the transaction to keep his name out of it? Er, no. His name was all over the thing. He did not hide the fact he gave a piece of shit 90 thousand dollars. All he asked in return was that Duffy fess up to his not terrifically major transgressions.

Losing Duffy is, all things considered, a bonus for Canada; losing Wright is a tragedy.

 

Election Fever! Liberal Collapse Edition

Supermoon Rising – Liberals Setting – Election Coming

In my little resort town the yahoos are drinking hard and yelling now that it is too dark to run the jet skis – but with a full moon rising that may not last.

The idea that we are only a day or two away from the thrills and chills of a long writ and a Fall election has yet to make the rounds at Timmy’s and, even after it is called, it will be a week or two before this solidly NDP neck of the woods pays much attention.

The economy is crappy. But the boys are still hauling logs down the road in front of my place. The old guys I drink with once in a while, NDP to a man, will, occasionally rise to a joke about Justin. But they just hate Harper. Incoherently, viscerally, they hate him. They have hated him for the decade he’s been in power and they are not going to change now.

Mulcair is not Harper and that is really all that matters.

On the grander scale, outside the “yokels with pitchforks” demo there are plenty of Harper haters. The question for the NDP is, “Are there enough?”

The coming election, whether called this Sunday or a few weeks from now, will be all about whether or not the NDP can attract enough Liberal Harper haters to win. The seeming collapse of Justin – well deserved but is it real – puts a segment of the Liberal vote into play. (The dimwits in the Maritimes will vote Liberal as a matter of limbic function.) In a hundred ridings across Canada Liberals will either stick with the sinking ship Trudeau or they will jump. If they jump the question is which way.

There are plenty of left Liberals but, to be fair, they are the dumbest and likely to be most loyal to Justin. Much as they hate Harper they love the idea that the Liberal Party really is the natural governing party of Canada.

Liberals of convenience – principally the New Canadians who see the Liberal Party as a way of paving their future – are a wild card. Politically they trend conservative, culturally they have no particular stake in the identity politics of the left simply because so many of them are doing so well. There is no particular reason to believe that Chinese Liberals or Sikh Liberals, when they realize that the good ship Trudeau is holed beneath the waterline, are going to jump to an anti-business, anti-growth party like the NDP. More to the point, there is no hard evidence that New Canadians loathe Harper with quite the passion that the media and political class do. In fact, years of Conservative outreach to the New Canadian world may actually pay off.

Business Liberals, the lawyers, dentists, doctors, bankers and such like who liked the Liberal party for the social cachet are unlikely to jump to the high tax alternative of the NDP. There are BMWer leases to pay and private school fees to cover. While they may never admit it, I suspect about a 4:1 Con split of the Business Liberal class.

Liberal youth, official women, green zealots, will not be coming over to the CPC. They hate Harper. But a fair number of them are dim enough to shoot right past the NDP and vote with their hearts for loony Green candidates. These people are dumb as planks and the very concept of voting strategically is well beyond their comprehension level.

A true implosion of the Liberal vote will obviously favour the NDP. But riding by riding it is not obvious that the NDP will take a lot of seats. If the New Canadian vote goes to its interest, the collapse of the Liberal Party could well enhance Tory chances in many ridings the Grits took in the last election.

People are now shooting off fireworks and bear guns…Election fever is a distant thought under the blue super moon shining across the lake. Sunday is still two drinking days away.

Campaign Strategy

I have nothing to add to this.

If the Republican Party wants to win something more than a seat at the pork table, its candidates will have to fight. They will get hurt. They will get beaten. But if they fight hard and well enough, the momentum will shift. Playing defense will never shift the momentum. At best it will extract the occasional meaningless victory that will end up disgusting even its own supporters.

The basic formula isn’t hard. Take an issue. Punch the left in the face over it. Don’t go on the defensive when the media whips up outrage. Don’t justify, apologize and explain. Instead punch harder. David Greenfield Front Page

Well, other than read the whole thing.