11.09.2010 10:40 AM

Power and Politics, Nov. 8: Harper’s blame-shifting

Peggy and I listen to Monte, who has grown into a giant in the past week.

Link here, at about the 1:40 mark or so.

22 Comments

  1. WesternGrit says:

    I guess you’re seeing the “Full Monty”???

  2. Joe says:

    Hey Warren,

    Next time you’re at old Mother Corp, tell her it’s the year 2011 soon, and that even my local newspaper website offers HTML5 videos. I can’t watch this on my iPhone4 and, oh…. only several million of us use one daily! πŸ™‚

  3. J. Coates says:

    A cousin of mine just rotated back from Afghanistan. His poignant comment was “It’s better we fight them there than here.”

    • smelter rat says:

      How would the Talibs get here to fight us?

      • Ronald O'Dowd says:

        smelterrat,

        Didn’t you get the memo? They’re planning to come at us with waves and waves of jet fighters! Thank God Canada is going for the CF-35s. I feel more secure already — that is, until the bill comes in.

    • Namesake says:

      W. all due respect to your cousin, who’s gotta tell himself SOMEthing to try to make sense of what’s going on there, “It’s better we fight them there than here” does NOT fit the bill.

      For one thing, if the “them” he has in mind — if the reason we’re there — is essentially to arrest those responsible for 9/11, we’re: fighting in the wrong country, because the indications are that Bin Laden has been in Pakistan for quite some time, now, and it wasn’t the Afghani Taliban who planned & executed that attack, at all — it was mostly Saudis. And tho’ the Taliban did harbour the fugitive Bin Laden at first, they quickly offered to turn him over — IF they could be guaranteed a fair trial for him, or furnished with concrete evidence that he did it. But Bush refused both requests, which is why there’s been a largely pointless 10 year war since.

      http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5

      http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bush-rejects-taliban-offer-to-surrender-bin-laden-631436.html

      Have there been some humanitarian gains as the mission changed? Sure. But at what cost in civilian & ‘insurgent’ lives, and will they be maintained when the West withdraws? Doubtful. And as many have pointed out, even tho’ the Taliban’s rule was repressive by our standards, the War Lords who are being reinstated as the result of our intervention were even worse.

      The whole thing’s a bloody mess, and as beset by BS & after the fact rationalizations as the Iraqi invasion with its snipe hunt for WMDs.

      Granted, the ill-considered reasons for going & staying there so far may be distinct from the reasons for not leaving them in the lurch again now that we’ve buggered them up, again, but I think there needs to be a lot more examination & honesty about what we were doing there in the first place: too many of us were just led by the nose.

      • Namesake says:

        p.s., there’s also the incovenient truth that by being part of the coalition of the unwilling to distinguish the terrorists from all the rest over there, we’re lso contributing to the radicalizatiion of the new generations, thereby making it more likely that they will bring the fighting/terror back to us (than if we’d ‘just said no’ to this as well as the Iraq war).

        • Iris Mclean says:

          Holy Jumpin’, Namesake! I actually strongly agree with you on this one.
          Gotta go quell the vapours that seem to be overwhelming me.

  4. Namesake says:

    Yeah, and besides the:

    — “trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat” by patting themselves on the back for being so pro-Israeli thing, and

    — the sour-grapes love/hate tension about the ‘who needs that bunch of racist tin-pot dictator-driven UN, anyway,”

    the other narrative the PMO’s (re-)launched around this, is:

    — how the civil service (in Foreign Affairs, in this case), is a bunch of latte-sipping elitists who’ve been driving the country’s misguided policies on this type of thing (like being too willing to participate in the UN’s racist resolutions) for far too long, and how that’s going to stop, starting now.

    Solberg was chomping at the bit to make that point about the Durban conference on P&P, there, but Evan had to cut him off, so Lilley did it for them here:

    http://blogs.canoe.ca/lilleyspad/conservatives/canada-likely-to-pull-out-of-durban-iii-on-tuesday/

    h/t ‘The Jusrist,’ who predicts there’ll be a lot more of this to come

    http://accidentaldeliberations.blogspot.com/2010/11/royally-skewed.html

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durban_Review_Conference

  5. eattv says:

    I’d never realized before how almost perfectly rectangular Monte’s head is. I wonder if he gets a lot of “t

  6. nic coivert says:

    Warren is starting to look like Bill Murray. No offense.

  7. Paul R Martin says:

    Warren also has a deadpan approach to humour that is similar to Bill Murray’s.
    Back to politics. The latest Nanos Poll is interesting. C 37.1, Lib 31.6, NDP 15.4, BQ 10.8 and Green 5.2. The Conservatives are close to the magic 40% level and Green Party support seems to be down, although I was always dubious of poll results that placed Green Party support around 10%. There was little love for the NDP in those numbers.

    • Robin says:

      40% is only a magic level when it’s evenly distributed across the country. Having a runaway with the electorate in seat-poor Alberta does not make up for getting your ass handed to you in seat-rich Quebec. Come back when Harper polls above 15% in Quebec.

      • Warren says:

        Exactly.

        Which is why this may be the longest-running minority in the history of the Commonwealth.

        • nic coivert says:

          The Ekos poll out today had the libs and cons in a virtual tie at just under 30 and the dippers at 19. How reliable are these polls given the fact they only reach those with landlines? What ever the results though I’m seeing a Prime Minister who is having things stick to him lately, the teflon is gone.

          • Namesake says:

            actually, it appears Ekos has a leg up on the others now on this: they’ve

            “created a dual landline/cell phone RDD sampling frame for this research. As a result, we are able to reach those with both a landline and cell phone, as well as cell phone only households and landline only households. This dual frame yields a near perfect unweighted distribution on age group and gender, something almost never seen with traditional landline RDD sample or interviewer-administered surveys.”

            plus they use “Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) technology, which allows respondents to enter their preferences by punching the keypad on their phone, rather than telling them to an operator.”

            — which supposedly makes people more honest, or at least less likely to lie out of embarassment or perceived Political Correctness, etc.

            acc. to Graves, that’s why he was the only one who was able to accurately predict the size of Ford’s victory.

          • JenS says:

            Well since the landliners tend to actually VOTE, which seems to me to be where polls fall down — they ask which party you would support, but there’s not really any way to account for the fact that 70 per cent of the population can’t manage to get to a polling station on any given election day.

  8. Ronald O'Dowd says:

    JenS,

    “[…] but there?s not really any way to account for the fact that 70 per cent of the population can?t manage to get to a polling station on any given election day.”

    That’s because they’re too busy NOT hunting for inspiring leadership…the kind of political mojo that stands up to be counted.

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