So Iggy now proudly exclaims having friendly chats with Lyin Brian Muldoon.
He repremands Harper publicly for not showing Brian enough respect or attention.
Mulroney spokespersons now says Brian may not necessarily be a "Lifetime Conservative".
And now Andrew Coyne comes out with this little gem that says the Harper Conservatives have shifted far to the left of the traditional Federal Liberal Party.
Quote Andrew Coyne:
I fear I am here under false pretenses. I was introduced as being a real conservative, somebody who sees things in pure, free-market terms, sort of the good old-fashioned religion.
I’m actually not a conservative — either in name, or in any other way. If forced to describe myself, I’d say I’m a socialist, because by any usual or sensible definition, I would be.
I favour public pensions, public health care, public education, public unemployment insurance. I favour a whole battery of things involving the state function. In fact, I’ve had tangles with some of my conservative friends over things like user fees for health care, or the necessity of carbon taxes to combat global warming.
But where I see a role for the state, I also happen to see a role for markets. The only thing I try to insist upon is that people should be clear about which is which, and shouldn’t try to justify bad policies by hand waving about moderation, and suggesting that anybody who’s opposed is some kind of fanatical purist.
One of my realizations regarding how far things have gone in this country was when U.S. Senator Judd Gregg was asked to join Barack Obama’s Cabinet. He first accepted in the spirit of bipartisanship, and then decided he couldn’t do it because, as he said, he didn’t actually agree with Obama’s policies.
I was nodding my head, and then I thought, wait a minute: This would be literally incomprehensible to a Canadian, practising Conservative today. To say that you would not accept power, or share power, because of your principles? What is he talking about? Principles are the things you jettison on the way to power. Gregg was speaking a language that I don’t think exists anymore in this country.
In the United States, in Britain, in Australia and in other countries around the world, there’s a debate going on about what is the appropriate response to the current recession. And there is on one side those who say, in the good old-fashioned Keynesian religion that suddenly popped up again, that we need to run large fiscal deficits. And there are those on the other side who say: This is probably not terribly advisable, it won’t work, it’s going to cause a lot of problems. Only in Canada is there not any debate on this.
What you get instead is all sorts of condescending lectures about the necessity of compromise in politics, you know, half a loaf is better than no loaf, we need to put water in our wine, we need to realize there’s all sorts of ways to skin a cat. And I get that, I promise you I get that. I understand that compromise is a virtue. I understand that it’s something you need to do.
But it’s not the only virtue. And if you think it’s the only virtue, then you have to ask some pretty existential questions about what you’re doing in politics. What are you trying to achieve?
My point is not that Harper has compromised on some things. My point isn’t even the budget. I could handle the budget if it were just a one-off indiscretion. If it were just this one time that they pushed spending to all-time record levels per capita, after inflation, by a wide margin.
Don’t be lulled into thinking this is some kind of short-term expedient. It’s long-term expedience. It’s an example not just of watering things down or putting things off, but of abandoning policies altogether. The tax code is now littered with all kinds of special-interest tax preferences. Balanced budgets are no longer something we can afford: They’re not even desirable, apparently. Deficits are now “essential.”
It used to be an absolute badge of membership in the conservative movement that you were opposed to corporate welfare, you were opposed to subsidies. We now have them littered all over the country. We now have a regional development agency for southern Ontario. So, if the purpose of regional-development agencies was to pull investment from one part of the country to another, we now have — since we have regional development agencies for every part of the country — a policy of pulling investment every which way, simultaneously. That is what we’ve arrived at in this country.
On policy after policy, the Conservatives have abandoned their convictions, they have discarded their principles, they have at times broken their promises, and even in one infamous case, violated their own law. So it’s an odd definition of compromise that suggests not just half a loaf is better than no loaf, but that no loaf is acceptable.
It’s too easy to say that politics is just the art of the possible, and leave it at that. That allows others to define what is possible. A truer statement is: Politics is the art of enlarging the possible. Politics is not just a matter of giving people what they want, it’s a matter of making them want what you want them to want. The great and successful politicians have been the ones who have been able to define the terms of debate, to make themselves the middle, to define what “moderate” is.
My complaint is not just that the Conservatives have abandoned conservatism themselves — which is annoying to me mostly because I believe there should be a conservative alternative, even if I don’t necessarily subscribe to it. But they’ve closed off the possibility of anyone else applying it either. They haven’t moved the middle to them, they haven’t even moved to the middle. All they’ve done is shift the spectrum further and further to the left.
The right wing of Canadian politics is now defined by $35-billion deficits, unilateral withdrawals from Afghanistan, the nationhood resolution for Quebec — go down the list. And so whole sections of public policy — privatization, tax cuts, you name it — have been ruled off-limits, because they’re now seen as just unimaginably extreme: Even the Tories wouldn’t do it.
We now see Conservative ministers going out and positively boasting that their approach to, let’s say, global warming, is more interventionist and more regulatory than the Liberals’. The Tories would say that the Liberals want to give people a licence to pollute, whereas we would forbid it. Conservatives now go about the country boasting about the pork that they’re bringing to the ridings.
And it’ll be a little late in the game if, some ways down the line, they want to turn around and say, “You know when we were saying all that stuff when we were a minority? Well now, we’re a majority, and we’ve changed our minds. We’d like to be judged by a completely different set of criteria. We’d now like you to applaud us for cutting spending or for cutting taxes, or for making the tax system more neutral, or for removing regional-development agencies, or for ending corporate welfare.”
Good luck to you. Once you’ve taught people how they should judge you, then don’t be surprised by how they will judge you.
Unquote.
So Iggy and Bush used to be in cahoots and now Iggy and Brian Mulroney are in cahoots. According to Iggy anyway.
Harper has become a hard left Liberal according to Macleans Magazine.
Black is white and up is down.
At least the NDP stay the course.
Granted its the wrong course but I give them credit for staying on target.
Trex
He repremands Harper publicly for not showing Brian enough respect or attention.
Mulroney spokespersons now says Brian may not necessarily be a "Lifetime Conservative".
And now Andrew Coyne comes out with this little gem that says the Harper Conservatives have shifted far to the left of the traditional Federal Liberal Party.
Quote Andrew Coyne:
I fear I am here under false pretenses. I was introduced as being a real conservative, somebody who sees things in pure, free-market terms, sort of the good old-fashioned religion.
I’m actually not a conservative — either in name, or in any other way. If forced to describe myself, I’d say I’m a socialist, because by any usual or sensible definition, I would be.
I favour public pensions, public health care, public education, public unemployment insurance. I favour a whole battery of things involving the state function. In fact, I’ve had tangles with some of my conservative friends over things like user fees for health care, or the necessity of carbon taxes to combat global warming.
But where I see a role for the state, I also happen to see a role for markets. The only thing I try to insist upon is that people should be clear about which is which, and shouldn’t try to justify bad policies by hand waving about moderation, and suggesting that anybody who’s opposed is some kind of fanatical purist.
One of my realizations regarding how far things have gone in this country was when U.S. Senator Judd Gregg was asked to join Barack Obama’s Cabinet. He first accepted in the spirit of bipartisanship, and then decided he couldn’t do it because, as he said, he didn’t actually agree with Obama’s policies.
I was nodding my head, and then I thought, wait a minute: This would be literally incomprehensible to a Canadian, practising Conservative today. To say that you would not accept power, or share power, because of your principles? What is he talking about? Principles are the things you jettison on the way to power. Gregg was speaking a language that I don’t think exists anymore in this country.
In the United States, in Britain, in Australia and in other countries around the world, there’s a debate going on about what is the appropriate response to the current recession. And there is on one side those who say, in the good old-fashioned Keynesian religion that suddenly popped up again, that we need to run large fiscal deficits. And there are those on the other side who say: This is probably not terribly advisable, it won’t work, it’s going to cause a lot of problems. Only in Canada is there not any debate on this.
What you get instead is all sorts of condescending lectures about the necessity of compromise in politics, you know, half a loaf is better than no loaf, we need to put water in our wine, we need to realize there’s all sorts of ways to skin a cat. And I get that, I promise you I get that. I understand that compromise is a virtue. I understand that it’s something you need to do.
But it’s not the only virtue. And if you think it’s the only virtue, then you have to ask some pretty existential questions about what you’re doing in politics. What are you trying to achieve?
My point is not that Harper has compromised on some things. My point isn’t even the budget. I could handle the budget if it were just a one-off indiscretion. If it were just this one time that they pushed spending to all-time record levels per capita, after inflation, by a wide margin.
Don’t be lulled into thinking this is some kind of short-term expedient. It’s long-term expedience. It’s an example not just of watering things down or putting things off, but of abandoning policies altogether. The tax code is now littered with all kinds of special-interest tax preferences. Balanced budgets are no longer something we can afford: They’re not even desirable, apparently. Deficits are now “essential.”
It used to be an absolute badge of membership in the conservative movement that you were opposed to corporate welfare, you were opposed to subsidies. We now have them littered all over the country. We now have a regional development agency for southern Ontario. So, if the purpose of regional-development agencies was to pull investment from one part of the country to another, we now have — since we have regional development agencies for every part of the country — a policy of pulling investment every which way, simultaneously. That is what we’ve arrived at in this country.
On policy after policy, the Conservatives have abandoned their convictions, they have discarded their principles, they have at times broken their promises, and even in one infamous case, violated their own law. So it’s an odd definition of compromise that suggests not just half a loaf is better than no loaf, but that no loaf is acceptable.
It’s too easy to say that politics is just the art of the possible, and leave it at that. That allows others to define what is possible. A truer statement is: Politics is the art of enlarging the possible. Politics is not just a matter of giving people what they want, it’s a matter of making them want what you want them to want. The great and successful politicians have been the ones who have been able to define the terms of debate, to make themselves the middle, to define what “moderate” is.
My complaint is not just that the Conservatives have abandoned conservatism themselves — which is annoying to me mostly because I believe there should be a conservative alternative, even if I don’t necessarily subscribe to it. But they’ve closed off the possibility of anyone else applying it either. They haven’t moved the middle to them, they haven’t even moved to the middle. All they’ve done is shift the spectrum further and further to the left.
The right wing of Canadian politics is now defined by $35-billion deficits, unilateral withdrawals from Afghanistan, the nationhood resolution for Quebec — go down the list. And so whole sections of public policy — privatization, tax cuts, you name it — have been ruled off-limits, because they’re now seen as just unimaginably extreme: Even the Tories wouldn’t do it.
We now see Conservative ministers going out and positively boasting that their approach to, let’s say, global warming, is more interventionist and more regulatory than the Liberals’. The Tories would say that the Liberals want to give people a licence to pollute, whereas we would forbid it. Conservatives now go about the country boasting about the pork that they’re bringing to the ridings.
And it’ll be a little late in the game if, some ways down the line, they want to turn around and say, “You know when we were saying all that stuff when we were a minority? Well now, we’re a majority, and we’ve changed our minds. We’d like to be judged by a completely different set of criteria. We’d now like you to applaud us for cutting spending or for cutting taxes, or for making the tax system more neutral, or for removing regional-development agencies, or for ending corporate welfare.”
Good luck to you. Once you’ve taught people how they should judge you, then don’t be surprised by how they will judge you.
Unquote.
So Iggy and Bush used to be in cahoots and now Iggy and Brian Mulroney are in cahoots. According to Iggy anyway.
Harper has become a hard left Liberal according to Macleans Magazine.
Black is white and up is down.
At least the NDP stay the course.
Granted its the wrong course but I give them credit for staying on target.
Trex