Archive for: September 2006

Ever have one of those days when you start feeling like God’s little hackeysack? Yeah, me too. Especially these days. First, it was Joe Fontana announcing that he was going to step down from federal politics to run for mayor of London in the upcoming municipal election. Okay, fine, I could live with that. At least he’d be down at the municipal level where he can do less damage (relatively speaking).

Sure, it might suck to be in London for the next few years but, hey, sometimes you gotta take one for the team, right? Besides, if memory serves me right, he wasn’t as lousy as a Councilor as he was as a Minister. But now… THIS!!

…former Ontario education minister Gerard Kennedy says aside from him, other contenders for the top federal Liberal job may also be considering London-North-Centre. Martha Hall Findlay and former Ontario premier Bob Bob Rae are also in the leadership race, but without federal seats.

As if getting stuck with Joey Bananas for the next four years wasn’t bad enough, it gets worse. I guess it should have occurred to me that, with Joe out of the fed picture around here, somebody was bound to come along to fill the gap. But not like this (insert bigass eyeball-rolling emoticon here).

Now it’s starting to look like every god damned also-ran in the party that flunks out of the Great Grit Porkbarrel Grand Poobah Pageant is going to be descending on London North Centre in an effort to make a grab for the federal payroll teat. Gerard Kennedy, Martha Hall Findlay, even Bob F#%!ing Rae (why do I have chest pains??) fer chrissakes! We’ve been spending years cleaning up the neighbourhood, and this comes along??

Did I rape nuns in a previous life or something?

One of the problems with modern politics is that, all too often, the leaders of the world’s nations are forced to utter just about every damned syllable that they have to say from behind a podium. This has the effect of isolating them from the rest of us in many ways; we never really know if there is any real passion there or not. But every now and then, somebody forgets that the camera is still on…

What you are about to see is, shall we say, George Dubya…uncut, delivering a verbal bitchslapping to career bobblehead Matt Lauer on his opinions of what his priorities should be and are. I’ve never been much of a Bush fan (even though I do think he gets a bum rap a lot of the time) but I kinda like him here. Granted, it’s no “just watch me,” (the only time I ever took any pride in Trudeau) but it’s good and honest; a rarity in any politician these days.

And no, I have no idea what Lauer said to light Dubya’s fuse, but he sure seems to have gotten the blunt end out of it.

Well, this is an odd feeling. Reading an article in the TO (red) Star isn’t something that I do very often. Reading an article in the TO (red) Star and agreeing with the damned thing is… Well, it’s damned near unheard of. I guess all that bafflegab about truth being stranger than fiction isn’t just a bunch of hot air, after all.

The article details how a recent poll, released over the last weekend, indicates that we seem to have taken a national faceplant into the starch vat of collective consciousness. That’s right; noses are hardening and upper lips are stiffening from Cornerbrook to Comox and all places in between:

The poll showed that the attitude of Canadians toward our involvement in Afghanistan, far from becoming more and more fearful and critical as almost all commentators have so far taken for granted would happen, is, if anything hardening. …it does seem to be the case that calls for Canada to quit Afghanistan — most recently by NDP leader Jack Layton — have fallen, not on deaf ears but on ears that are tuned elsewhere.

While poking around at PTBC the other day, I came across a post that caught my eye almost immediately. Then again, anything with the tagline “[fill in the blank] that liberals will love to hate” generally gets my attention anyway…

It seems that an American website called Progress For America has produced an ad, which started running on American TV last Friday, that really sticks a pin in the touchy-feely balloon of the liberal excusemonger crowd. Check it out for yourself:

Click here to view War On Terror.

And be sure to stop by the website at www.progressforamerica.org and see what else they have to offer.

The sociological scientific community leb-left hug-a-thug academia wussocracy was turned on its head today by the stunning and absolutely unforseeable revelation that in women’s prisons, of all places, stronger prisoners bully weaker ones.

Clearly, the whole world has been rocked on its heels by this mindboggling discovery:

In its recent response and action plan, the Correctional Service of Canada said the rise in bullying is an “unintended result” of the less-restrictive design of new institutions aiming to empower women prisoners and boost personal responsibility.

Clearly, the unforseeable result of lax conditions in penal institutions leading to bad women to think they can get away with doing bad things has caught the whole world’s intelligencia utterly flat-footed.

On the other hand, those of us who don’t suffer from overeducation and therefore have our craniums well clear of our colons (EEK! conservatives!), have a much more rational response to this news: Well, DUH!

Here’s a little something that was found in Wednesday’s online edition of the Globe & Mail and written by Lewis MacKenzie, who could probably be accurately described as being the best Governor General Canada never had. Considered the most experienced peacekeeper in the world, Major-General (ret’d) Lewis MacKenzie encapsulates what being a leader truly is. He also has a bullshitometer permanently set on a hair trigger and isn’t afraid to sound off when some bonehead sets it off. Check it out:

The Afghan mission is not a failure
There’s ‘tradition’ and then there’s getting the job done, says retired major-general Lewis MacKenzie

LEWIS MACKENZIE

From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail

As the leader of a party that has little chance of governing the country, the NDP’s Jack Layton can accept the political risk of holding up a mirror to the government’s decisions and occasionally acting as our national conscience. On the subject of Canada’s role in Afghanistan, however, I fear he is dead wrong and am left to wonder if he is following the polls and playing domestic politics on the backs of our soldiers.

Mr. Layton says that he and the NDP support our soldiers but question the wisdom and achievability of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan. And, having said that, he goes on to say the mission is the wrong mission for Canada and is, at the very least, unclear. I can only assume Mr. Layton’s call for a withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2007, to pursue more traditional Canadian roles involving mediation and negotiation, is based on a widely held myth that we are better than the rest of the 192 nations in the United Nations at the dated concept of “peacekeeping.”

Peacekeeping between states that went to war and needed an excuse to stop fighting worked relatively well during the Cold War and Canada played a role in each and every mission. Mind you, at the height of our participation in UN missions during the 1970s and ’80s we had a maximum of 2,000 soldiers wearing the blue beret deployed abroad in places such as Cyprus and the Golan Heights. At the same time, we had 10,000 personnel serving with NATO on the Central Front in Germany, armed with nuclear weapons, ready and waiting for the Soviet hoards to attack across the East German border. Peacekeeping was a sideline activity. We did it well, along with others such as Sweden, India,

Norway, Brazil — but it was never even close to being our top priority.

The other Canadian myth that might have influenced Mr. Layton’s ill-timed call for our withdrawal is the oft-quoted description of Canada’s policies being “even-handed,” “neutral” or “impartial.” We never take a stand for fear of upsetting someone. But the facts surrounding even our exaggerated peacekeeping role explode this troubling myth. For example, in the approval process preceding the very first UN lightly armed peacekeeping mission — stick-handled by Lester Pearson through a hesitant Security Council in 1956 — Canada voted against the British and French and, by default, sided with Egypt. We took a stand.

To suggest, as Mr. Layton does, that we should pull out of the Afghan mission next year and return to our more “traditional” roles ignores one compelling fact. There will be no significant capability for any nation to carry out those “traditional” roles of nation-building in southern Afghanistan until those who are committed to stopping such undertakings are removed from the equation.

In other words, by leaving, we would be saying to the remaining 36 nations on the ground in Afghanistan, “Hey guys, this is getting pretty difficult. We have decided to leave and go home, but don’t worry, when the rest of you have put down this insurrection and things are peaceful, we will return and offer our vastly superior skills in putting countries back together. So please, call us as soon as the shooting stops — for good.”

For all those who, like Mr. Layton, say the mission is imprecise, unclear, without an exit strategy, etc., let me disagree and say that to a NATO military commander the mission is crystal clear.

It is to leave Afghanistan as quickly as humanly possible — having turned the security of the country over to competent Afghan military and police forces controlled in their efforts by a democratically elected national government. Sounds pretty clear to me.

(Retired major-general Lewis MacKenzie was the first commander of United Nations peacekeeping forces in Sarajevo.)