Barrel Strength

Now that the other clown shoe has dropped, one wonders if Grits will check out this movie rental.

According to the Globe:

The parliamentary caucus is about evenly divided in its support for Mr. Ignatieff and Mr. Rae, who came second and third, respectively, after Mr. Dion in 2006. But a significant chunk of MPs – so-called soft supporters of the two men – fear a party cleavage in an Ignatieff-Rae contest and would be open to a third candidate.

Second time’s the charm, huh?

Heather Mallick breaks through the galactic moonbat barrier into uncharted lunacy.  The morally bankrupt meet the financially bankrupt.

I’m taking the Canadian flag off my luggage tag and telling everyone I’m from Iceland.

This is an exchange today between Oban and Dalwhinnie by email.

Oban:

Canada

 Obviously Stephane Dion is toast, so the next year will be spent selecting a new Liberal leader.

The real lesson of the election is that Moses cannot take the Israelites to the promised land.  Harper has now had three electoral opportunities to provide a Conservative majority.  He cannot deliver, and the failure to gain in Quebec means that he will never breakthrough there.  I think he has completed his mission.  He rebuilt the Canadian right, created a somewhat unified party, and even made it somewhat respectable.  However, his day is now over.  The next liberal leader will beat him to a pulp, take seats from the BQ, and put a Conservative majority out of reach for a decade to come.  Harper should wait until the Liberals have selected their new leader and then step aside to make room for a leader who may be able to connect with voters in a way that he simply cannot, and that remains the biggest liability for the Conservative Party.

USA:

It’s never over till its over, but I see the fat lady warming up in the wings.

Last night’s was the first debate I was able to watch.  Obama is not perfect, but he is a near perfect candidate, and John McCain is not.  Also, John McCain has, I am sorry to say, acted dishonourably as well as petulantly as regards the kinds of attacks he chose to make on Obama, the choice of Palin, and the fundamental cynicism of his approach to the American public.

Last spring, when we were down to McCain, Clinton and Obama, I said any country would be lucky to have any of the above as President.  I eat my words.  The campaign McCain has fought since August has diminished him, and it is sad to see.  In the last analysis, he is revealed as a tired old man, out of ideas, who desparately wants to be President, but doesn’t display a “presidential” temperment.

The Kenyan may have a lot to learn, but one gets the feeling he learns fast, is far from doctrinaire (although is of the left of centre), is capable of listening to many kinds of advice, and will reflect before acting.

So, subject of a horrendous October surprise (and to some extent the economic crisis is that, and it is Obama who has looked surer, more deft, and more effective than McCain)it’s hard to see McCain squeaking past the post in this race.  The Republicans, like Canada’s Liberals, need time in opposition to think and reflect.  It hasn’t done so.  McCain is the last shot of the Republicans to retain the WhiteHouse by pure tactical exercise rather than by developing and enunciating policies that have relevance to the lives of most people.

So.  There you have it.

No brilliant gossip I fear, but I can predict that I will be very busy over the next few months.

Your turn, Dalwhinnie.

______________________________________

Dalwhinnie replies:

Well, I have had the opportunity to recover from my shock regarding your plans for Mr. Harper’s career, I find I have nothing to add except incredulity. I do not think this is going to happen, as a matter of factual prediction, and as a Conservative, I see no reason to replace him unless someone obviously better presents himself for the job. So as far as I am concerned, I consider myself to be dealing  with the domain of the real.

Further, I see no basis for your confidence that the next Liberal leader will eat Harper’s lunch. The  economic recession into which we are heading will strain everyone’s capacity to handle it, but the superiority of the next putative Liberal leader to handle the ongoing recession is not apparent, by definition.

So if you don’t mind, I will treat your perediction as an amusing jeu d’esprit  to get Dalwhinnie  off and running, which it did, in a way.

I also note that The Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin also has predicted Harper will be out before the next election, and Chantal Hebert was trying to persuade us that Harper had somehow lost by not winning enough. It may be that early predictions of the demise of Harper have become a test for detecting those who will never vote for him.
____________________________
Oban gets the last word:
The issue is not about the Liberals – it is about whether Harper can lead the Conservatives to a majority. I don’t see him being able to do so (based on the record of at least two reasonably winnable elections). Thus, he should go. To do otherwise is to put his destiny ahead of the party’s.

Oban

It is one thing to accept the inevitability of an Obama victory; then there is engaging in cyber-bootlicking.

UPDATE:

And others are beginning to take notice of this grotesque spectacle of a XXXL trying to squeeze into an XL burqa.

Dion was the victim of his own inadequacies – he is an academic with no leadership abilities and everyone knows it by now, including the wizards in the Liberal party who thought he was a wonderful ‘compromise’ candidate. For starters, Dion’s English-language deficiencies disqualify him as the Prime Minister of Canada (or even Premier of Quebec) in the 21st century. His disdainful unwillingness to give the study of English the attention that it needs are part and parcel of the man – even his academic colleagues described him as arrogant and inclined to lecture condescendingly people who don’t agree with him. I would bet his handlers tried to tell him his English needed work and he refused to believe them. That being said, Chretien mangled English frequently but still produced successive majority governments.

The centrepiece of the Liberal platform this time around was the kind of policy a friend likes to call “a big stupid idea” – a carbon tax that made no sense, would cost all taxpayers a bundle and gave no indication it would achieve its goals. No one could have sold it to voters, especially in the current economic ‘climate’, least of all the inarticulate Dion.

But in the bigger picture beyond Dion, I think the Liberals’ claim to be “the natural governing party” doesn’t resonate much outside central Toronto anymore. Furthermore, I believe the days when the Liberals could count on the ‘immigrant vote’ are fast receding. Many of them have achieved financial success through hard work and aren’t interested in seeing their gains erased by endless tax increases to fund ill-conceived, social engineering schemes intended to create equality of outcome – the holy grail of the left. They headed for the exit and as long as the Tories have someone reasonable in charge with conservative fiscal and tax policies, the party should be able to hold on to those voters in Ontario and BC.

Internet co-inventor Vint Cerf endorses Obama:

[youtube O60x75K9Fgw]

In the wake of the 2006 election I reminded my colleagues that Stephen Harper had seized a beach head and so had to undertake what that manoeuvre demands: secure the perimeter, organize supply lines and stockpile supplies for the eventual breakout. While too slow for some, his incrementalist approach realized those goals.

Today’s victory resembles the Battle of Kursk. At first glance it too may not seem so clear-cut a win but its aftermath will be as equally decisive as that earlier battle. The spine of the Liberal Party has been broken, as was that of the Heer. Their finances are depleted, their leadership demoralized and with their retreat into pockets of Metro Toronto and the Atlantic provinces, their conflation of Liberal values with Canadian values has been exposed as a myth. The Liberal national “brand” is deteriorating into a boutique label.

The sumo pundits will effuse endlessly over the missed possibilities in this campaign  but they cannot deny that Stephen Harper has made vast progress in pushing back a formidable and ruthless political apparatus. Now we must see to it that the Liberals are kept on the path to an endgame.

How the mighty have fallen!  Last year Iceland was the toast of UN.  This year one of the enlightened and sophisticated European countries, that Bush “The Idiot” should be learning from, has declared Iceland a terrorist state.

It has already been revealed that the UK Government has seized more than enough Icelandic assets to pay back British savers caught up in the country’s banking collapse.

Some £4bn is understood to have been frozen using anti-terror laws last week, compared to the estimated £3bn that UK councils, charities and hundreds of thousands of individuals could lose.

It may soon be morning again in America. And guess who will be knocking on the door at 4:30 AM? Even before entering the White House, The One is getting adept at crushing voices of dissent, according to Investor’s Business Daily, with lots more to come:

• When the National Rifle Association recently released television and radio ads in Pennsylvania targeting Obama’s history of anti-gun votes, the Obama campaign’s general counsel fired off bullying letters to stations that ran the spots, implying that they may have violated public-interest obligations.

• When the 527 group, the American Issues Project, came out with a commercial linking Obama to former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, the campaign (unsuccessfully) complained to the Department of Justice that AIP had broken campaign finance laws, and managed to spook some stations away from the ad.

• When two different conservative writers looking into Obama’s background appeared on Chicago’s WGN-AM Radio, the campaign’s “action wire” energized its activists to bombard the station with rage-filled phone calls and e-mails, making the program more difficult to conduct.

(The show, hosted by the eminently reasonable Milt Rosenberg, had on both occasions invited the Obama campaign to send a representative to respond; the campaign preferred to answer with digital brownshirts.)

From extending the Fairness Doctrine to eliminate and twisting Internet network neutrality into a similar application to the Web, the Obamistas will resort to any regulatory lever they can find to neutralize dissent.

Welcome to your Cheka years, America.

Behold the tolerant and inclusive face of One Nation, under Obama, with liberty and justice for all his supporters:

[youtube nQalRPQ8stI]

In his article ‘Failure of Nerve’, David Warren takes the Prime Minister to task for many things. ‘Glib’ and ‘gutless’, ‘craven’ and ‘abject’ are some of the words he uses to describe Mr. Harper. If only he were to do things the social conservative way, Mr. Warren argues, the Tories might even win a majority! I enjoy Mr. Warren’s writings and admire his obvious sincerity.  Elections must be a particularly trying time.  But Mr. Harper is straining to turn the course of a mighty ship that is moving at great speed.  What resources he has are precious and must find their mark.  Yes, he should do something about the human rights commissions. Yes, he is forced to play politics with the military but he is trying to influence the course of public policy in this country for years and decades to come and to do that he must advance his party in this election. Like George Washington in Thackeray’s ‘The Virginians’, Harper is in battle and he needs his friends.

“…when I am in trouble you say you will leave me. That is why I have been hurt: that is why I have been cold. I thought I might count on your friendship–and–and you can tell whether I was right or no. I relied on you as on a brother, and you come and tell me you will resign. Be it so! Being embarked in this contest, by God’s will I will see it to an end. You are not the first, Mr. Warrington, has left me on the way.’”

Democrats in Ohio are filing an appeal of a Federal Court ruling ordering them to verify the identity of newly registered voters by matching them with other government documents, as required by the Help America Vote Act, and to turn that information over to county election boards.

In related news, the New York Times reviewed state records and Social Security data, and found that tens of thousands of eligible voters have been removed from rolls or blocked from registering in at least six swing states, and for every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two. Elections officials in several states disputed that any voters were illegally removed from rolls.

Forget fatigue, hearing impairment and language difficulties.  I watched the clip. Dion could not answer the question.  It was not just easy but predictable.  You couldn’t toss a rock in Darcy’s without hitting someone who could scribble a perfectly good answer on a foot-long bar bill. Over at Maclean’s and presumably elsewhere,  the story itself is already well on its way to being the story – the local guy should never have run it; Duffy should never have run it; nice people shouldn’t watch it and draw their own conclusions. Coyne admits that the French media would savage an English-speaking politician for the same performance. Just the French media, Andre? We all know what would happen to Harper in the same circumstances.  Whining about media bias is unattractive but so is a permanent, institutional bias in favour of one’s opponents. At worst, this incident exposes some cracks in that wall. At best, it will give Mr. Harper some seats.

No effort is being spared to get Obama into the White House, including wide-spread efforts to commit voter fraud. Ultra left-wing ‘community group’ ACORN, has endorsed BHO for president and received $800,000 from his campaign to register new voters, payments the Obama campaign failed to accurately report. (They were disguised in his FEC disclosure as payments to a front group called Citizen Services Inc. for “advance work.”)

ACORN boasts they have registered 1.5 million new voters; how did they do it? Two examples: An Ohio voter estimated he’d registered to vote “10 to 15″ times after canvassers for ACORN relentlessly pursued him and others; in Florida and other battleground states they are registering convicted felons — including inmates.