Apolitical Staples

He’s blaming the voters, but he should also blame himself. When Dion came out with his Kyoto guff, which Dion himself knows to be false, did Coyne, or any other columnist, announce the disproof of Dion’s “unimpeachable integrity?” Not at all.

Besides, there is a big difference between “we are delivering” and “we have delivered”.

Coyne is being too pessimistic. Harper hasn’t been rewarded with anything yet and if the readers of this blog and their ideological mates don’t vote for him in the next election, he will be gone.

And we will have Dion instead. For another 13 years. Don’t hold your breath, Sinister Greg.

Not a very pleasant choice, I will grant you that. Still that is what Coyne is saying. Partisans on either side will vote for “their side”, no matter how putrid their side is, in order to keep the “other side” out of power.

so this is a journalist ragging on politicians for having disregard for the truth ??

Kettle. Pot. Black.

Speaking of geting what you ask for . With the msm picking apart harpers every move , looking for every possible fault and even inventing a few ,plus pushing for an election and now some conservative ? bloggers doing the same thing i think we’ll be seeing a stephane dion government. i don’t remember harper ever saying he ws going to be perfect but everybody seems to be expecting just that.

“With the msm picking apart harpers every move , looking for every possible fault and even inventing a few”

Cough. Cough. What?

The media is doing everything in its power to sustain Harper and even with all of that support he’s going nowhere - polling exactly where he was after the election despite billions of our tax dollars spent willy nilly.

The media is content to simply regurgitate Conservative talking points without any challenge. So Harper can stand up and say that when he was a kid in Toronto, crime wasn’t as bad… yet, in reality it was way worse in the 1970s Toronto than today and no one challenges him on it.

So Harper can stand up and say he is an environmentalist… yet, only a few years ago he said the science was all junk and very few challenge him on it.

So Harper can stand up and say the Liberals, who sent Canadian soldiers across the world to defeat the Taliban, prefer the Taliban to our own soldiers and lies about a Liberal MP appointing her husband to the Refugee Board, when it was Mulroney who did it, and the media just sit back and say ‘well, that there is politics’.

So Harper can stand up and pour billions of our tax dollars into Quebec to try to get Charest re-elected and to give Quebecers a tax cut… yet, when the hard and soft separatists (PQ and ADQ) win 60% of the seats the media claim Harper won.

So Harper can pull a budget over our eyes and have the media say he hit a home run… yet, every stakeholder from big and small businesses to anyone not specifically targeted as a Conservative targetted voter gets nothing if not worse.

So Harper can put out a few cheaply made ads and this so-called anti-Conservative media spends weeks repeating it and even though no one had questioned Dion’s leadership abilities before, suddenly, magically, after the Conservatives run some ads about Dion’s leadership abilities that’s all anyone can talk about.

Meanwhile Dion struggles to get even the same favourable press that Layton gets, let alone the favourable press Harper gets.

With “friendly” media like this, Dion sure doesn’t need another Sun chain.

“Still that is what Coyne is saying. Partisans on either side will vote for “their side”, no matter how putrid their side is, in order to keep the “other side” out of power. “

No. No. No.

That’s not the point. The point is that we get crappy statist “solutions” to every “problem” because that’s what we, well you, vote for. Don’t blame the CPC. Don’t even blame the Liberals. Blame the voters.

Because it’s their fault.

It’s the voters who demand huge budgets. It’s the voters who sheepishly accept every new regulation and rule. Blame them. They are blameworthy.

One question here is whether a politician should remain pure and unelectable, or work with the voters as they exist, playing a long term game to move Canada in a less statist direction. Coyne affects to believe that purity is in fact electable, but I think he is living in a dream world. I think that these attacks on Harper don’t really stick, because everyone, left and right, actually believes that Harper still wants to move Canada away from big government and centralization. In fact, I think that this is exactly why the Conservatives are finding it hard to really gain traction: Canadians just don’t believe that the CPC are just blue Liberals.

The other question is for us as conservative / libertarian voters: Yes, it is fun to remain like Achilles in his tent, refusing to come out and work with others when they are not doing exactly what we want. But is it responsible to behave this way? If I am not going to live to see a libertarian utopia, what should I do in the real world? Advocate libertarian policy, yes, but I will not slag Stephen Harper, who has made the tough choice I have not been faced with: between “clean hands” impractical purity, and “messy hands” work in the real world.

MarkCh:

Actually, Coyne addressed the issue of purity vs. electable earlier in discussing the budget.

He said, if you are an honest results-oriented true fiscal conservative, then you have got to like the results you were getting when you had an honest true fiscal conservative - and pure and unelectable - opposition in the form of the Reform Party.

Instead of trying to (all too successfully) outspend the Martin Liberals in the pursuit of votes the way Harper has, you had Manning pulling the Liberals and everyone else with them to the right. You had real spending cuts and balanced budgets and real tax cuts became the standard. The Liberals even paid down huge amounts of the debt and gave everyone, instead of targetted voter demographics, tax cuts.

Until Harper merged and watered down the “conservative” in the two conservative parties (while also jettisoning some of the wacko and naive and the socially conservative), the Liberals were being, in context, extremely responsible with our fiscal policies and also introducing a number of successful non-vote winning competitiveness strategies which they never would have considered under Trudeau.

Many on the left and certainly the true real, non-Liberal Party left have been calling for proportional representation in Parliament. But I think it is really the fiscal conservatives and the social conservatives who would benefit the most from PR. They could have their “pure” conservative party and eat their “electable” conservative party too.

Lorrie Goldstein had a similar column the other day, ranting about the wait times promise.

My question is, why make a promise in the first place that impacts a provincial jurisdiction?

No. No. No.

Well Alan, the readers of this blog certainly don’t call for statist solutions to every problem, but they all seem content to vote for the CPC, even when it betrays them, simply because it is “their team”. So in some ways you are right it is voters fault, but I think it has more to do with brand loyalty than pining for statism.

Baloney! More people with selective memories…. Conservative voters have proven that we will destroy the party that betrays us. What the hell do you think happened to the old PCC?

The problem lies in the deluded fools who continue to vote Liberal regardless of what they do!

The problem lies in the deluded fools who continue to vote Liberal regardless of what they do!

I wouldn’t disagree with that statement at least in part.

I expect to go either Harper or NDP or Green.

Coyne’s gripes don’t really bother me - Harper is still the best party leader in Canada, imo. I know many hard conservatives and leftists have problems with him, but I find him pretty good.

Ted’s complaints don’t bother me, either. Harper hasn’t lied like Nixon or Bush2* (just to run with prominent examples everyone knows), and in the big picture, I choose Harper over Dion by a longshot. Was crime worse in 1970? Who cares? There’ve been 4 people shot on my immediate block, 2 of whom have died, in the past 6 months. Prostitution is common, and a woman was dismembered and deposited all over the neighbourhood a year back. I’ve been physically assaulted (though not injured) 2 times in 15 months.

I’m a voter, not a statistician - I comprehend Harper’s point (crime sucks), without even remotely considering what crime in the 70’s was actually like. All I’m hearing is that he’s taking my street seriously - and that’s what I want to hear from party leaders.

*I grant that it’s possible Bush didn’t lie but was poorly informed - I’m just using him as an example.

“but I think it has more to do with brand loyalty than pining for statism. “

You have completely missed my point. Of course, you have completely missed it completely on purpose, so I suppose it’s acceptable.

We get crappy spendthrift socialist, interventionist government because that’s the only government “we” will vote for. That is my point. It has nothing to do with blind partisanship or marshmallows or the value of pi or the price of tea in China.

I might be missing Alan’s point, but - what choice does a person have? I’m not about to start up a new party, and it seems the Tories and Liberals are putting out similar budgets.

I’d be really, really interested if the Liberals did take this advice, and would absolutely consider voting for them - but who else is?

Who do you plan on voting for, Alan? If that’s not private info - I respect it if it is.

Jason:

I will be voting CPC because they represent the only reasonable chance of anything even remotely (very remotely, unfortunately) conservative happening in government and I do believe Harper is ultimately conservative in his outlook. They are constrained in their policy choices by the public’s taste for the state as a mother substitute. If they want to govern, for the time being they must be socialists. I hope my point is sufficiently clear now. I blame the voters.

A famous passage which summarizes the process, and unfortunately identifies our place on the continuum:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence; from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again into bondage.” —Sir Alex Fraser Tytler, Scottish jurist and historian writing over 200 years ago on the fall of the Athenian Republic

I suspect that our transition from dependency will follow the course laid out in the quote, and not some democraticly led retrenchment by well meaning conservatives.