Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Harper

Canada's "new" Conservative Party -- and its Prime Minister -- were diagnosed long ago by Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson understood that even the most humane person has a dark side, which is only held in check by social convention. The problem for Conservatives -- as James Laxer recently noted -- is that they are only conservative when they are held in check by a strong opposition. And -- at least until recently -- that opposition has been pretty feeble.

The Harperites' dark souls are really libertarian; and, as libertarians, they hate conventions -- any conventions, whether they are census forms, long gun registries, or the institution of Parliament itself. Their ultimate goal is to free themselves of limits -- any limits. Their problem is that Canadians are suspicious of their intentions.

So, at election time, Mr. Harper dons a blue sweater -- the equivalent of a white lab coat -- makes his rounds, and adopts his best bedside manner. Once elected, he retreats into the basement, mixes up that potion of mean spirited policies, and attempts to accomplish by stealth what he can't accomplish in the light of day.

The problem would be difficult enough if Harper were the only Hyde in the party. But, as James Travers observes in Thursday's Toronto Star, there are other Hydes lurking in the party's basement. In the run up to the vote on the long gun registry, two lesser Hydes -- James Bezan and Garry Breitkreuz -- have found their way out of the lab. Bezan

hee-hawed his way on to You Tube -- complete with horse and cowboy hat -- and Breitkruez mused about a clandestine police scheme to wrench guns from cold Canadian hands. Along with looking and sounding foolish, the two Conservative MP's exposed the soft underbelly of a Harper strategy that once seemed bulletproof.

The problem for Dr. Jekyll the Prime Minister is that he finds it increasingly difficult to control his dark side. It shows up at very inopportune times -- during elections, for instance -- and in the lazy days of summer, when he thinks Canadians aren't paying attention. Now he finds it hard to control the lesser Hydes within his party.

We all know how the story ends.

Labour Day, 2010

Last week, as we drove into downtown Toronto, my wife spotted a fellow sleeping on a bench. He was covered with a green garbage bag. Luckily, the week had been unseasonably warm. The poignancy of his situation hit us with some force because, two hours earlier, we had watched a clip about a house which had recently come on the market in Edmonton, Alberta. It was a cavernous place, equipped with the latest technology, including a driveway complete with several drains and submerged electric cables. The owner would part with his property for a mere $5.25 million.

In Canada, there is something faintly ridiculous about owning a heated driveway. It conjures up images of pre-World War II France, sitting smugly behind the Maginot Line, certain that it could avoid invasion -- either by the Germans or the armies of Old Man Winter. In four months time, the guy on the bench will be scrambling to find whatever protection he can.

I thought of him again when we got home and I read Bob Herbert's column in Saturday's New York Times. Herbert told the story of sixteen janitors who had been laid off from their jobs at a "luxury complex" owned by J.P. Morgan Chase. The janitors had been paid the princely sum of $13.50 an hour. Herbert noted wryly that each janitor's weekly take home pay "wouldn't cover Jamie Dimon's [Morgan Chase's chief executive] dinner tab." Morgan Chase's second quarter profit was $4.8 billion.

And so, on this Labour Day -- in both Canada and the United States -- we find ourselves facing The Great Divide. The numbers of the homeless and the unemployed are growing exponentially, while the captains of the economy -- thanks to taxpayer bailouts -- continue to proper, moving from one palace to another.

In the meantime, the word "shared" -- as in "shared risk," "shared sacrifice," "shared responsibility" and (as Robert Reich has pointed out ) "shared prosperity" -- has disappeared from the public lexicon. The irony, as Reich also observes, is that the economy will never recover unless and until we rediscover a sense of shared prosperity.

Labour Day used to be about shared prosperity. Today, with only 7% of the private workforce unionized, there is little to celebrate. The fellow on the bench knows that. He is easy to ignore. But we ignore him at our peril.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

The Clocks Are Striking 13

On the same weekend that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and insisted they were "reclaiming the Civil Rights Movement," Frank Rich -- in The New York Times -- wrote about the weatlthy trinity who are giving Beck and Palin their financial mojo -- Rupert Murdoch, and the Koch brothers, David and Charles. And, wrote Rich, these three are not a new species:

You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League's crusade against the New Deal "socialism" of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our president.

Jane Mayer, in the New Yorker, recently exposed the cabal. And she reminded her readers that David and Charles' father, Fred, was one of the original Birchers -- who considered Dwight Eisenhower a Communist agent. Rather than reclaiming the Civil Rights Movement, the elder Koch claimed that the movement was part of a larger conspiracy: "The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America," he wrote.

Paranoia is nothing new in American politics. On the day following Rich's column, Paul Krugman wrote that, during the Clinton administration, Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife were funding the same army. They were on the march then, claiming that (somehow) Hilary Clinton was implicated in Vince Foster's death. The difference this time is that The Paranoid Army has more money and a bigger megaphone. "It will be an ugly scene," Krugman wrote:

and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990's were a time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular, we're still suffering from the after-effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930's, and we can't afford to have a federal government paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president govern. But that's what we're likely to get.

Facing the same kind of opposition, Franklin Roosevelt met his detractors head on."The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty," he said," is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government."

Murdoch and the Kochs would like Americans to believe that they are leading a popular revolt. Their strategy rests on the assumption that voters will forget that Beck -- who said Saturday that "we must be better than what we've allowed ourselves to become" -- also said (of President Obama) "I believe this guy is a racist [with] a deep seated hatred of white people." The trinity is also betting that Americans will forget that Sarah Palin recently defended Laura Schlessinger's use of the word "nigger" and advised her to "reload."

It's as if Martin Luther King had been a spokesman for the Klan. And that Americans -- or at least a significant number of them -- now live in an Orwellian alternative reality, where War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength -- and the clocks are striking 13.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

The Imperial Burden

Back in June, The Canadian Press revealed that, in March 2009, Stephen Harper sat down to lunch with Rupert Murdoch. Also present was the president of Fox News, Roger Ailes, who was instrumental in bringing Rush Limbaugh to television, and who has since given Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly prominent perches at Fox. The CP story leaked after Pierre Karl Peladeau hired Kory Teneycke -- who joined the Harper-Murdoch-Ailes affair -- to oversee the start up of Peladeau's Sun TV News Channel.

A coincidence? Hardly. But, Jeffrey Simpson advised his readers, there was no need to push the panic button:

Sun TV isn't going to make, break or even influence the shape of Canadian politics, whatever the ideological fervour of Kory Teneycke, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's former spokesman now in charge of assembling the Sun TV challenge.

And, besides, Simpson wrote, The Canadian Radio and Television Commission was not likely to grant Sun TV a "basic" licence -- which would require all cable systems to carry the channel. The commission has placed a moratorium on such licences.

Then, less than a week ago, Lawrence Martin reported the rumour that Mr. Harper was seeking to replace the head of the CRTC, Konrad von Finckenstein -- who would oppose Sun's application -- with someone more to the prime minister's liking. Thus, von Finckenstein would join a growing list of civil servants who Harper has removed because they have been thorns in his government's side.

The recent police response at the G20 Summit, the counter intuitive drive to dismantle the long gun registry, the attempt to shackle Statistics Canada, and now the news that Mr. Harper's former spokesman seeks to establish "Fox News North" offer proof that the Harperites are on a mission. That mission is to establish long term control of the levers of power and to remake this small corner of the world. They approach it with the same zeal nineteenth century British Imperialists displayed when they set out to "civilize" those they considered "naked savages."

Harper's vision is a 21st century version of "the white man's burden," the purpose of which is to purge his charges of what he considers dangerously radical tendencies -- and, in the process, to make true believers of us all. Applying that vision over a century and a half ago was disastrous. Colonialism's legacy was the First World War. The longer these people remain in office, the longer the trail of debris they leave in their wake. One hopes that the sun will soon set on the Harperite Empire.

The Price of Empire

Chalmers Johnson has led an interesting life. Trained as a political scientist with a special interest in Asia, he was a strong Anti-Communist, who worked as a consultant for the C.I.A. and supported the War in Vietnam. During those years, he wrote, he was

irritated by campus antiwar protesters, who seemed to me self indulgent as well as sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework [on the history of communism in East Asia] . . . . As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential about the nature of America's imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive. In retrospect I wish I had stood with the anti war movement. For all its naivete and unruliness, it was right and American policy was wrong.

It is that perspective which informs Johnson's latest book, Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope. In a recent article at TomDispatch, Chalmers reevaluates American foreign policy, almost fifty years after Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August was first published. And he asks the question which no one else dares to ask:

What harm would befall the United States if we actually decided, against all odds, to close those hundreds and hundreds of bases, large and small, that we garrison around the world? What if we actually dismantled our empire, and came home? Would Genghis Khan-like hordes descend on us?

He then answers that question: "Not likely. . . .the main fears you might hear in Washington -- if anyone bothered to wonder what would happen should we begin to dismantle our empire -- would prove but chimeras."

That is not to say that Washington would then cast aside a hornet's nest of troubles:

In fact, we would still be a large and powerful nation-state with a host of internal and external problems. An immigration and drug crisis on our southern border, soaring health-care costs, a weakening education system, an aging population, an aging infrastructure, an unending recession -- none of these are likely to go away soon, nor are any of them likely to be tackled in a serious or successful way as long as we continue to spend our wealth on armies, weapons, wars, global garrisons and bribes for petty dictators.

But there is an alternative. It is, says Chalmers, to invest in productive, not destructive, industries and to invest in America's infrastructure and its people. "Unfortunately," he writes, "I don't see that happening.

My own role these past 20 years has been that of Cassandra, whom the gods gave the gift of foreseeing the future, but also cursed because no one believed her. I wish I could be more optimistic about what's in store for the U.S. Instead there isn't a day that our own guns of August don't continue to haunt me.

Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Johnson can hope that Americans awake a sadder but a wiser people on the morrow morn -- particularly in the week after the last combat brigade has left Iraq.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Preston Manning on Stephen Harper

This week, the Harper government began walking two more civil servants -- Veterans Ombudsman Col. Pat Stogran and RCMP Chief Superintendent Marty Cheliak -- to the exits. Both men were charged with holding the government accountable for its actions -- something Mr. Harper claimed he and his party stood for, without exception.

But that was before Mr. Harper became Prime Minister. Now Stogran and Cheliak join a long list of people who were fired or let go because they did their jobs. Meanwhile, Mr. Harper has retreated to his bunker, staying out of the limelight, while other ministers -- like Tony Clement and Stockwell Day -- take the heat for his decisions.

What is interesting is that this is nothing new. In his book, Think Big: My Adventures in Life and Democracy, Preston Manning recounts how Stephen Harper simply had a hard time working with others. Manning writes, for instance, of how Harper objected to the appointment of Rick Anderson as the Reform Party's campaign director. Anderson had supported the Charlottetown Accord; and Harper simply didn't trust him. But it went beyond that. Anderson was Harper's intellectual equal. And, Manning wrote, Harper

had difficulty accepting that there might be a few other people (not many, perhaps, but a few) who were as smart as he was with respect to policy and strategy. And Stephen, at this point, was really not prepared to be a team player or team builder.

Mr. Harper has never been one to work collaboratively. Manning recounts how, in 1992, he quit as the party's Chief Policy Officer to concentrate on his own election campaign. This was "a blow to our overall campaign effort, and it put more of a burden on those who had to fill the gap left by his withdrawal." Despite his desertion, Harper was one of 52 Reformers elected to Parliament in 1993.

But, as another election approached in 1996, he began to fear that the team, which he had done so little to build, was going to lose:

Rather than pitching in to help turn things around [Manning wrote] Stephen again chose to withdraw. This was now the third time that Stephen had vacated the field prior to a battle -- the first time when he retreated from our Charlottetown Accord campaign, the second time when he withdrew from the 1993 national election campaign to concentrate solely on his own riding.

And six months prior to the election, Harper resigned his seat and went back to Calgary, to become the head of the National Citizens Coalition, where the only other person who worked in the organization's office was his secretary.

Those who know Stephen Harper best -- those who have worked with him from the beginning -- long ago reached the conclusion which Andrew Coyne voiced this week in the pages of Macleans:

And the Prime Minister? Consider how his image has changed over the years. Once he was viewed as rigid, but upright; doctrinaire, but with a certain integrity. Over time that gave way to a more Machiavellian cast. Perhaps it was true, it was said, that he would do anything and say anything to hold on to power, but you had to admire his cunning.

But now? After so many miscues, unforced errors, too clever tricks and utter botch ups, does anyone still cling to the "strategic genius" view of Stephen Harper?

Holden Caulfield had a simpler, more direct phrase to describe people like the Prime Minister. He is, to put it plainly, a "phony."

The Tipping Point

"A democracy which refuses to heed the will of the majority as routinely as it embraces the narrow interests of a vocal fringe," Alec Bruce wrote in the Times and Transcript this week, "is no democracy at all; it is, by ambition and practice, an elected oligarchy."

In the face of opposition from over 200 organizations, the Harperites can only point to three organizations -- the Fraser Institute, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and The National Citizens Coalition -- which support their decision to abandon the long census form. No matter, wrote Bruce,

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his cabinet have, for years, waged a stunningly successful campaign against the twin concepts of expertise and collaboration in political culture. Their hard line right wing mentality has extolled the virtue of certitude in all matters of state, as bias and presumption have proscribed the meritorious, once meretricious, qualifications for public office. Meanwhile, reasonable dissent has become the province of eggheads, elitists and other assorted traitors.

Add to that the confirmation -- contained in emails from Statistics Canada -- that the agency never supported the government's decision to abandon the long form -- as Tony Clement claimed -- and you have a tipping point.

"Canadians witnessed the disgusting spectacle," Jeffrey Simpson wrote in The Globe and Mail

of careerist ministers -- Industry's Tony Clement in the lead -- tap dancing to the Prime Minister's tune. Their justification for dispensing with the long form -- the best chance of getting the most accurate data -- was a melange of distortions, misrepresentations and exaggerations of so gross a kind that Canadians recoiled in indignation.

The history of the Harper government has been a series of blunders -- from sabotaging his chance at majority rule by making intemperate comments about cultural organizations, and thus alienating Quebec supporters -- to attempting to eliminate funding for opposition parties six weeks after that election and proroguing Parliament to avoid a vote of confidence -- to proroguing Parliament yet again this year when questions about how Afghan prisoners were handled by Canadian authorities made it too hot in the parliamentary kitchen. Each blunder has been an over reach -- an attempt by an oligarchical prime minister to have his way and answer to no one.

The census decision is yet another example of Harper's insistence that he does what he does because he can. Only this time it's clear that, in spinning the rationale for the decision, he and his ministers have simply not told the truth. And the public understands that destroying Statscan's data base will make it easier for them to not tell the truth.

Jeffrey Simpson is right on target: "The long form will return. Voters won't."

The Trials of Jeremiah

There must have been times over the last couple of years when Bob Herbert felt like Jeremiah -- warning that a reckoning was on the way, and being ignored by those who might be able to avoid it. His frustration was evident in Saturday's New York Times:

The country is a mess. The economy is horrendous, and millions of American families are running out of ammunition in their fight against destitution. Steadily increasing numbers of middle class families, who never thought they'd be seeking charity, have been showing up at food pantries.

Throughout the battle for health care reform and the battle for Wall Street reform, Herbert has written that the government's first priority should be job creation. While it is true -- as Peter Orzag stoutly maintained -- that the best way to control ballooning deficits is to control health care costs, it is also true that, for average Americans, the best way to pay the bills is to be employed.

Herbert is in good company. Like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, he believes that without government supported employment, the economy will not recover:

The problem with the U.S. economy today, as it was during the Great Depression, is the absence of sufficient demand for goods and services. Consumers, struggling with sky high unemployment and staggering debt loads, are tapped out. The economy cannot be made healthy again, and there is no chance of doing anything substantial about budget deficits, as long as so many millions of people are left with essentially no purchasing power. Jobs are the only real answer.

And there is plenty of work to do. Like the TVA and the Interstate Highway System -- two pertinent examples -- investments must be made in America's infrastructure, to ensure the nation's economic viability in the 21st Century. Those investments will require a staggering amount of money -- a thought which sends modern Republicans into apoplexy. But Herbert correctly quotes Franklin Roosevelt, "You cannot borrow your way out of debt, but you can invest your way into a sounder future."

Roosevelt's proposition will be tested in November. If one believes the polls, that proposition may go down to defeat. However, the very Republicans whose poll numbers have them dreaming of a return to power, may be President Obama's salvation. As Eugene Robinson reminded readers of The Washington Post and The Moderate Voice last week:

Democrats may be facing a tough fight this fall, but Republicans are giving them plenty of material to work with. In several high-profile contests, candidates who won nominations with fervent tea party support appear to be in the process of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

In Colorado, the Republican candidate for governor sees urban cyclists as part of a United Nations conspiracy. In Nevada, Sharon Angle wants the press to ask her only the questions she chooses to answer. In Connecticut, Linda McMahon, the wife of the man behind the WWE, has been known to enter the ring with other brutish bores and kick men in the crotch. And, in Kentucky, Rand Paul has expressed doubts about the wisdom of the Civil Rights Act.

Herbert's premonition that it's a hard rain's a gonna fall on Democrats may be justified. Certainly, he would say, they should have seen it coming. On the other hand, with candidates like Angle, McMahon and Paul, the tide may run the other way.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Say That Again?

As President Obama's approval numbers tanked again last week, Michael Steele donned a red hat, emblazoned with the logo "Fire Pelosi," and kicked off a six week bus tour. He was jubilant as he spoke to a crowd in Kansas City, predicting that he and the RNC would send Pelosi to "the back of the bus."

One could be forgiven for thinking that one's hearing was faulty. But a few weeks ago -- speaking about the war in Afghanistan -- Steele said, "This war was of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in."

And shortly after assuming the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, Steele claimed that Obama's election was a fluke: "The problem we have with this president," he said, "is we don't know him. He was not vetted, folks. . . . He was not vetted because the press fell in love with the black man running for office." The longest primary season in American political history somehow did not register with Mr. Steele.

Alot of history has not registered with Mr. Steele. On the subject of the stimulus package, he said, " Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job." He was, of course, conveniently forgetting that he used to be the Lt. Governor of Maryland.

His gaffes have not gone unnoticed. William Kristol has suggested that he should be guided to the door marked Exit. Steele, however, has an answer for his critics: "I'm very introspective about things. I'm a cause and effect kind of guy. So, if I do something there's a reason for it. . . It may look like a mistake, a gaffe. There is a rationale, there is a logic behind it."

Mr. Steele's logic increasingly eludes even members of his own party. Perhaps that's because he has -- in the now famous words of one of George W. Bush's advisers -- left "the reality based community." There was a time when those who checked out of that community resided in the Twilight Zone.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

The Party of the Paranoid

Errol Mendes raised hackles on the right two days ago when -- in a column in the Ottawa Citizen -- he wrote that Stephen Harper's war against the public service increasingly makes his government look like a dictatorship. "It is primarily in totalitarian regimes," Mendes wrote,

that there is little use for an independent public service, or judicial or quasi-judicial bodies that seek to promote the public interest regardless of politics. The undermining of the public service of Canada should be one of the most important ballot box issues in the coming federal election.

What prompted Mendes column was the resignation of Munir Sheikh, the Chief Statistician at Statistics Canada. Sheikh joined a growing list of public servants who Mr. Harper either fired or replaced, because they did not bow appropriately before the throne. Among the departed were:

Peter Tinley of the Military Complaints Commission, Linda Keen of the Nuclear Safety Commission, Paul Kennedy of the RCMP Public Complaints Commission, Adrian Measner of the Wheat Board, John Reid and Robert Marleau of the Information Commissioner's Office, Bernard Shapiro, the former ethics commissioner, Marc Mayrand, chief electoral officer of Canada, and, of course, at the front of the firing line is Kevin Page of the Parliamentary Budget Office.

Harper's suspicion of the public service has become pathological. That became absolutely clear, later in the week when Stockwell Day brushed aside suggestions that the new prisons the government says are a priority are not required, because the crime rate in Canada has been dropping for ten years. Those numbers, said Day, were not to be believed. The real problem is unreported crimes. In 1993, 42% of victims reported crimes. In 2004, 34% reported crimes."Those numbers are alarming," Day said, "and it shows how we can't take a liberal view of crime [or] suggest that it's barely happening at all." The numbers are vague. But the bogeyman gets bigger.

Day did not indicate how the government would find these unreported criminals. So the question of how those empty cells will be filled remains unanswered. It is worth remembering that Day's cabinet colleague, Jim Flaherty -- when he ran for the leadership of the Ontario Conservative Party -- suggested that the homeless should be swept off the streets and put in jail for their own protection.

It is also worth remembering that the driving force behind Harper's Conservatives are left overs from Mike Harris' Common Sense Revolution. Lawrence Martin wrote last week in The Globe and Mail, that the Harris stamp on policy is best symbolized by Harper's replacement of Ian Brodie with Guy Giorno, Harris' right hand man. "The changeover," Martin wrote, "may come to be seen as the turning point in Mr. Harper's governance, the moment when the die was cast, when the chance of these Conservatives ever becoming a big tent party ended."

Giorno's ascent marked the point where paranoia became the prime directive in the Prime Minister's Office. One need look no further than the police response at the recent G20 summit. It is no accident that the government's response bears striking similarities to the Ipperwash Confrontation, where Mr. Harris allegedly told the Ontario Provincial Police that he "wanted the [expletive deleted] Indians out of the park."

Americans learned during Richard Nixon's presidency that paranoia in power can shake the foundations of a democracy. A word to the wise.

Back to the Future?

Two competing narratives appear to be making the rounds these days. The first is the saga of The Failed Salesman, in which Barack Obama -- a kind of 21st century Willy Loman -- crashes and burns in the wreckage his dreams inspired. The second is a fourth installment of Back to the Future, in which the Republican Party dusts off its political flux capacitor, rides into Washington, takes back Congress, builds a national monument to Arthur Laffer and rewrites history. The first narrative leaves Democrats depressed; the second leaves Republicans energized.

Those who favour either narrative should read The Political Genius of Supply Side Economics, by Martin Wolf, which appeared last Sunday in The Financial Times. "To understand modern Republican thinking on fiscal policy," Wolf wrote

we need to go back to perhaps the most politically brilliant (albeit economically unconvincing) idea in the history of fiscal policy: "supply-side economics." Supply-side economics liberated conservatives from any need to insist on fiscal rectitude and balanced budgets, because incentive effects would generate new activity and so higher revenue.

The political genius of this idea is evident. Supply-side economics transformed Republicans from a minority party into a majority party. It allowed them to promise lower taxes, lower deficits, and, in effect, unchanged spending. Why should people not like this combination? Who does not like a free lunch?

The problem, of course, is that Americans have been running up a tab at the cafeteria for thirty years. And Mr. Obama has been stuck with the bill. In an era of low interest rates, he has tried to consolidate the debt -- and included the cost of two wars in the total. Faced for the first time in thirty years with real numbers, Americans are scared; and they blame Obama for building the mountain they must now climb.

But what is truly ironic, Wolf writes, is that if Republicans regain power, they will build a higher mountain:

This is extraordinarily dangerous. The danger does not arise from the fiscal deficits of today, but to the attitudes to fiscal policy, over the long run, of one of the two main parties. Those radical conservatives (a small minority, I hope) who want to destroy the credit of the U.S. federal government may well succeed. If so, that would be the end of the U.S. era of global dominance. The destruction of fiscal credibility could be the outcome of the policies of the party that considers itself the most patriotic.

Wolf reminds his readers that "conservative" in Britain means something very different than it does in the United States. As E.J. Dionne recently noted, David Cameron -- the new Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom -- has increased the Value Added Tax from 17.5% to 20%. And Paul Krugman, who has criticized the president's economic policy as being too little too late, warned his readers last Thursday that "Mr. Obama may not be the politician of their dreams, but his enemies are definitely the stuff of their nightmares."

The first three installments of Back to the Future were highly entertaining and made a fortune at the box office. The fourth installment would bomb. More importantly, it would bankrupt the country.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

The Big Lie

We now know how many Canadians complained about the long census form the last time it arrived on their doorsteps four years ago. Statistics Canada received a total of 166 complaints from the 12 million Canadians who received the survey. So, the Harper government says, it is simply responding to public pressure. Something doesn't add up.


And Stockwell Day says, "Do you think it is right that you can threaten your neighbour with jail time if she doesn't tell you if she has mental issues or not? Or who does what chores in the house? Or whether she is a Jew or not? Don't you find that one even a little bit chilling?" Apparently not. But remember this is the man who, as leader of the Reform Party, claimed that the St. Lawrence River flowed into the Great Lakes and not into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

And then there is Vic Teows, who plans to spend $9.5 billion over the next five years to fight a rising tide of crime -- even though the latest data from Statistics Canada confirms, James Travers writes, "a decade long trend. Overall, there is 17 percent less crime now than in 1999. Better still, most offences are minor, and heinous, violent crime has fallen so far that it's now less than one quarter of one percent of the shrinking total."

One is tempted to conclude that stupidity has gone viral. But Paul Saurette is on to something when he says that the key to understanding what is going on can be found in Tom Flanagan's book, Harper's Team:

Winning elections and controlling the government as often as possible is the most effective way of shifting the public philosophy. Who would deny that Canada's present climate of opinion has been fostered by the Liberal Party's long term dominance of federal institutions? If you control the government, you choose judges, appoint the senior civil service, fund or de-fund advocacy groups, and do many other things that gradually influence the climate of opinion.

For conservatives it has always been about control. They are threatened by facts, because facts undermine their policy prescriptions. And the best way to maintain control is to destroy the evidence. Without evidence they can have a truly Orwellian influence on Canadian society. The Ministry of Justice can morph into the Ministry of Punishment; the Ministry of Finance can morph into the Ministry of Wealth Consolidation; the PMO can morph into the Ministry of Propaganda; and the Prime Minister can morph into -- well, we already have a flood of evidence: two prorogations of Parliament, a how to guide for disrupting parliamentary committees, refusing to allow Parliamentarians to see Afghan prisoner files. We know who -- and what -- he is.

Following Joesph Goebbels strategy, the Harperites know that the most grandiose lies will be accepted as truth, if they are repeated often enough. But Goebbels did not have to do battle with Statistics Canada. And as long as Statistics Canada mines data which contradicts their public proclamations, the transformation the Conservatives seek will be beyond their reach.

Mr. Harper, Mr. Clement and their benchmates are no democrats. And they know exactly what they are doing.

The Case of Omar Khadr

Omar Khadr is the last Westerner being held at Guantanamo Bay. His story is a bit convoluted. He was born in Toronto. But his father -- who was no model citizen -- decreed that his son should travel to Afghanistan and be indoctrinated by the Taliban.

When the United States invaded that country after September 11th, Khadr was fighting alongside his tutors. During a firefight with American soldiers, he is alleged to have thrown a grenade at an American Green Beret and killed him. Khadr himself was wounded in the battle. The details are a bit sketchy. Initially, the officer in charge of the American forces wrote that the insurgent who had thrown the grenade had been killed. Later, he rewrote his report, claiming that Khadr was responsible for the soldier's death. Khadr was fifteen when he was taken to Guantanamo. He is now twenty-three.

During those eight years, all other prisoners from Western nations -- Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Britain -- have been repatriated and faced courts in their own countries. Both the Bush and the Obama administrations have asked Stephen Harper's government to bring Khadr home. The government has repeatedly said it will not take him back.

While at Guantonomo, Khadr was interrogated by agents from CSIS -- the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service -- Canada's version of the CIA. Their methods included sleep deprivation. He was also interrogated by American agents, one of whom has testified that he told Khadr there were incidents of Afghan boys being raped by "four big black guys" to extract confessions from them.

In January, 2010, Khadr's case was argued before the Supreme Court of Canada. The court ruled that Khadr's rights -- which are guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms -- had been violated. It did not recommend a specific remedy. But it did tell the government that it had to rectify the situation. The government's response was to send a diplomatic note to Washington, requesting that Canadian collected evidence not be used in Khadr's prosecution. It said nothing about the evidence collected and the methods used by his American interrogators.

Frustrated by the government's tepid response, Khadr's lawyers brought suit in a lower Canadian court, which ruled earlier this month that the government had a week to draw up a list of remedies to rectify the violation of Khadr's constitutional rights. In the meantime, Khadr went before a military tribunal and announced that he had fired his military defence attorney -- something the judge would not allow. He also revealed that he had been offered a plea bargain -- a thirty year sentence, including five of the years spent at Guantanamo, and twenty five years to be spent in a Canadian prison. He had rejected the deal, he said, because, "I have been used too many times when I was a child, and that's why I'm here -- taking the blame for things I didn't have a choice in doing, but was forced to do by elders."

The Harper government is appealing the latest court ruling. It has no intention of bringing Khadr home. It would much rather let the American justice system deal with him. It argues that the government's right to set foreign policy trumps the Charter of Rights and Freedoms -- a surprising shift for a political party which claims that government intrudes tyrannically on individual liberties, and which insists that the courts have been negligent when it comes to delivering swift and sure justice. The truth is that Mr. Harper and his colleagues believe that Canada's laws are to be obeyed when it is convenient to do so. They are shrewd folks. But they are entirely devoid of courage.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

The Kyl Doctrine

There are those who claim that racism is behind the impassioned opposition to Barack Obama. And, as the placards of Obama the Witch Doctor attest, there is some truth to that claim. But, last week, what really drives Republican opposition to the president became -- as Richard Nixon used to say -- "perfectly clear."

In an interview with Chris Wallace, Senator Jon Kyl explained why Republicans opposed aid to the unemployed but proposed making the Bush tax cuts permanent. "You do need to offset the cost of increased spending," he said. "And that's what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans."

The next day, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear that all Republicans were singing from the same hymnal: "There is no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue," he said. "They increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think that what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject."

In The Washington Post, Ezra Klein admitted to being not just angry but sad, because "it's hard to see the country prospering when one of its two major political parties is this economically illiterate." Paul Krugman, however, was grateful for Kyl and McConnell's candor. "They've now made it clear, in case anyone had doubts," he wrote in The New York Times, "that their previous posturing on the deficit was entirely hypocritical. If they really do have the kind of electoral win they're expecting, they won't try to reduce the deficit -- they'll try to make it explode by demanding even more budget busting tax cuts."

The Republican program is not new. It has been the centerpiece of the party's ideology for thirty years. And, as Naomi Klein documented so thoroughly in her book, The Shock Doctrine, it is a program which has been applied around the world with devastating results. It aims to "starve the beast" of government by, as Krugman says, "deliberately creating a fiscal crisis in the belief that the crisis can be used to push through unpopular policies, like dismantling Social Security."

What is striking is that the Republicans have learned nothing over the last two years. The crisis is upon us; and their response is to stand pat. They continue to believe -- like the ignorant islanders in King Kong -- that those who the chairman of BP recently referred to as "the little people" must be sacrificed to the Great Ape of the Markets. They have not learned the simple truth behind Franklin Roosevelt 's assertion:

We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals. We now know that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that, in the long run, economic morality pays.

The Kyl Doctrine is economically immoral. And it proves that Roosevelt got it right seventy-five years ago when he declared, "A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward."

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Republican Tragedy

Republican senators reverted to speaking in code two weeks ago at Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing. Her nomination was suspect, they suggested, because she had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Senators Hatch and Coburn said that they "weren't sure they could have voted to confirm Marshall to the court;" and Senator Kyl suggested that Marshall advanced "the agenda of certain classes of litigants." Given the fact that Marshall argued successfully for the desegregation of public schools, it was pretty clear which "litigants" Kyl had in mind.

The hearing took place in the week Senator Robert Byrd, of West Virginia, died. Byrd had once been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and had written to Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo that "I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels."

But, unlike Strom Thurmond -- who left the Democrats and joined the Republicans -- Byrd's thinking evolved over time. As Barack Obama revealed in The Audacity of Hope, Byrd knew that those words would follow him to his grave. "I only have one regret, you know," he told Obama. "The foolishness of youth." If anything, rather than evolving, the Republican Party has devolved.

Few now remember when one of the rare African Americans in Congress was a Republican from Massachusetts, Senator Edward Brooke. And fewer still remember when the man who filled President Obama's former Senate seat was a liberal Republican named Charles Percy. One wonders what they think about the transformation of their party. Indeed, one wonders what Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, would think of the modern Republican Party. If he had merely fallen asleep in April of 1865, and -- like Rip Van Winkle -- had awakened at the dawn of this new century, I suspect that his careworn face would become more haggard still.

As he traced the tragic arc of his party during the last one hundred and fifty years, he would find a kindred spirit in the governor of his neighbouring state of Wisconsin, Robert La Follette -- who was, as Jo Mari suggested in The American Radical -- "arguably the most important and recognized leader of the opposition to the growing dominance of corporations over Government." He would nod approvingly as Dwight Eisenhower declared, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

But his brow would darken as he watched Barry Goldwater carry the Party's standard in 1964. He would be infuriated by Watergate. And he would weep at the invasion of Iraq. He would conclude that his party was not ruled by its better angels, but by its darkest demons -- and that it was "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The man who signed The Emancipation Proclamation would look at at the Republican response to Kagan as a betrayal of everything the party stood for after the Civil War. And the man who wrote The Gettysburg Address would call out those who speak in code.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Canadian Custer

On the day after the leaders of the G20 nations left Toronto -- and left city workers to clean up after the weekend's mayhem -- John Ibbitson wrote that the summit was "a signal achievement for the Prime Minister, who set those targets and lobbied hard for other nations to embrace them."

On the same day, Paul Krugman looked at the targets and concluded: "We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a Third Depression.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world -- most recently at last weekend's deeply discouraging G20 meeting -- governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

Mr. Ibbitson saw Canada leading the way, showing the rest of the world how to tighten its belt:

Now Mr. Harper has succeeded in convincing his peers that the time is right for other governments to follow Canada in shifting to deficit cutting. And once again he has an internationally certified mandate to chop government programs and search for additional revenue.

It bears repeating that Mr. Harper didn't see the Great Recession coming. He refused to read the signs. The problem now, wrote Krugman in Friday's New York Times, is that

This conventional wisdom isn't based on either evidence or careful analysis. Instead, it rests on what we might charitably call sheer speculation, and less charitably call figments of the policy elite's imagination -- specifically on what I've come to think of as the invisible bond vigilante and the confidence fairy.

Krugman then went on to define "bond vigilantes" as "investors who pull the plug on governments they perceive as unable or unwilling to pay their debts." These vultures believe that all countries -- particularly the United States -- are like Greece -- and that "(a) the bond vigilantes are about to attack America and (b) spending anything more on stimulus will set them off."

But, wrote Krugman, "what we do on stimulus over the next couple of years has almost no bearing on our ability to deal with these long range problems." If inflation is indeed a tsunami which is about to sink the world's economies, there should be some upward movement in interest rates. But, after a slight uptick three months ago, interest rates have once again headed for the basement. The facts simply don't support the fears.

Mr. Harper is a very shrewd political animal. But, when it comes to factual analysis, he is not the sharpest tool in the shed. He is planning to build a series of new prisons in anticipation of a crime wave, even though crime (according to Statistics Canada) has declined year after year. The rate of violent crime has remained stable for ten years. His government offers unconditional support for Israel, ignoring the fact that the continued construction of settlements on occupied land and the blockade of Gaza contributes to the misery there.

The truth is that Mr. Harper's certitude is based on faith not fact. And he continues to believe that because he earned a Master's degree at the University of Calgary he is an economist. George Armstrong Custer graduated from West Point; but that did not make him a general. Mr. Ibbitson believes that the Prime Minister deserves kudos for leading the charge against world deficits. Historians may well look at the Toronto Summit and conclude that it was Mr. Harper's Little Big Horn.

This blog entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Learning to Live in Poverty

This past Friday, as protesters began to gather in the streets of Toronto, Anthony DiMaggio's op ed, "Gutting Public Education: Neoliberalism and the Politics of Opportunism," appeared at truthout.org. "America's political and economic elites," DiMaggio wrote, "have declared war on working, middle class and poor Americans.

Progressive critics of Republicans and Democrats have attacked the return of 'Hooverian economics' in recent years -- understood as the do nothing approach to dealing with the economic crisis and declining state budgets.

One of the most egregious examples of Hooverian economics has been the gutting of state education budgets. The problem at the state level is undoing the good accomplished by the federal stimulus package: "The American Association of School Administrators estimates that the number of jobs lost in the next school year from budget cuts (275,000) will roughly equal those originally preserved by the stimulus (300,000)." And, on Thursday, the U.S. Senate refused to extend unemployment benefits, which would create an estimated 200,000 jobs. Many who voted against the package objected to the section of the bill which offered aid to struggling state governments. The bill failed, even though it garnered the votes of 57 of the 100 senators.

But the crisis in the funding of public education goes back much further than today -- and it goes beyond K-12 schools. Public universities have been under the gun for a long time. DiMaggio offers a particularly dismal picture of employment possibilities at American universities:

For those who may reject this picture of higher ed as melodramatic or conspiratorial, one need look no further than the deteriorating state of academia today. Thirty years ago, non tenured professors accounted for 43 percent of all teachers in higher ed; that number had increased to a startling 70 percent by 2007. Most nontenured professors I've spoken to are forced to scrounge in search of course offerings at multiple institutions. When they manage to find work, they typically are paid within the range of $15,000 to $30,000 a year, despite possessing a master's degree or a PhD.

When placed beside the salaries and bonuses of the Wall Street firms which were kept afloat with taxpayer dollars, it's clear that the times -- and the system -- are out of joint. Not only are students being short changed by teacher layoffs, young teachers -- if they find work at all -- face the future as itinerant scholars.

As world leaders gather in Toronto this weekend, they will face the problem of how and when to reduce deficits. It's a problem which will not go away. But, as Paul Krugman has argued, now is not the time to end government stimulus programs: "Penny pinching at a time like this isn't just cruel; it endangers the nation's future. And it doesn't even do much to reduce our future debt burden, because stinting on spending now threatens the economic recovery, and with it the hope of rising revenues."

The protesters on the streets of Toronto are overwhelmingly young. For them, the emerging economic order is beginning to look and smell like week old fish. It's not hard to understand why they have taken to the streets. They are learning to live in poverty, while others continue to live well beyond their means.

This blog entry has been cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Lament for a Nation, Fifty Years On

"Imagine a country," James Travers wrote in Saturday's Toronto Star, "where Parliament is padlocked twice in 13 months to frustrate the democratic will of the elected majority. That country is now this country."

Travers then offered a litany of examples illustrating how the Harper government -- which rode to power insisting that it would be accountable -- has undermined democracy in Canada:

Imagine a country where the national police commissioner skews a federal election and is never forced to explain.
Imagine a country that writes a covert manual on sabotaging Commons committees.
Imagine a country where parties that win the most federal seats are dismissed as "losers."
Imagine a country where party apparatchiks decide who in a nominally free press is allowed to ask the Prime Minister questions.

What is remarkable is that all of this has been accomplished so openly -- and, as Jeffrey Simpson wrote this week -- with so little public support. The Conservatives, except for brief spikes, have consistently been able to muster the support of between 31% to 33% of the population:

The only time conservative forces were weaker than today came in the arrival of the 1993 election of the Reform Party (including Mr. Harper) a development that shattered the political right for more than a decade. Today, therefore, the Harper Conservatives are the weakest united right wing government or party the country has seen in our life time.

How does one account for this startling and sad turn of events? Certainly a divided and inept opposition has something to do with it. Mr. Layton and Mr. Ignatieff have more difficulty cooperating with each other than they do with the Prime Minister. And Mr. Duceppe has skilfully exploited both Mr. Harper's and Mr. Ignatieff's ignorance of the way Quebec works.

But underlying everything is the public's distaste for another election. And, given the pettiness of what passes for debate these days, that is -- somewhat -- understandable. Nevertheless, if the government has been allowed to subvert parliamentary democracy in Canada, it is because its citizens have chosen to look away and go back to tilling their gardens. They may soon be surprised by what they have sown.

This blog entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

The Injustice of Being President

In a recent essay, David Shribman, the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, writes that President Obama's troubles stem from "a moment of great achievement and a moment of great failure." The irony, Sbribman says, is that the achievement belongs to Obama and the failure does not. The President's situation reminds us that -- if one seeks justice, or at least a modicum of fairness -- the presidency is not the place to find it.

Obama's essential problem, Shribman says,

is not that he gets the policy wrong, as Mr. Johnson did, perhaps with the big spending Great Society, almost certainly in Vietnam. It is that in his first 17 months in office, Mr. Obama repeatedly gets the politics wrong. For if he showed anything in a bruising primary fight with Hillary Rodham Clinton and then a tough general election battle with John McCain, it was that Barack Obama had a political instinct as fine tuned as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy.

A prime example of Obama's blurred political instincts, writes Shribman, is his health care legislation. It is definitely what the nation needs. Unfortunately, "the biggest benefits of the plan will not be evident when voters go to the polls in midterm elections this November or when the President runs for re-election in 2012."

And now -- when he planned to sell his health care legislation to the American public -- the Gulf Oil Disaster has completely riveted the nation's attention. Obama didn't create the problem. He may not have understood how totally the second Bush administration had destroyed the country's regulatory infrastructure. But, as Gettysburg College's Shirley Anne Warshaw says, he and his administration "are paying the price for that right now."

The ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has become a metaphor for all that was wrong with public policy for the last thirty years. Just as the Wall Street meltdown robbed millions of ordinary folks of their livelihoods and their futures, the oil which is killing wildlife and depositing black sludge on the pristine beaches of the South is destroying a culture and a way of life.

And -- because Obama is president -- he owns the problem. With each day that the hole is not plugged, citizens lose faith in their president. Some are even suggesting that historians will compare Obama to the well meaning but ineffective Jimmy Carter.

The Carter analogy is misplaced. There is a long way to go before citizens cast their votes. Like Abraham Lincoln, Obama is enduring dark days. And, like Lincoln, Obama finds himself beset by forces which would do the nation eternal harm. The challenges he faces are most certainly tests of his intelligence and his political instincts. But, more than that, they are a test of his character.

This blog entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

A Voice in the Wilderness

In Saturday's Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson reviews Lament for America: Decline of the Superpower, Plan for Renewal, by Earl Fry of Brigham Young University. What is interesting about the book -- aside from Fry's analysis -- is that it has been published by the University of Toronto Press -- which, Simpson notes, is "hardly a household name in U.S. publishing circles."

Apparently, no American press -- university or otherwise -- has seen its way to publishing the book. And that, writes Simpson, is tragic, "because piling fact on fact, Prof. Fry outlines his country's immense and largely self inflicted problems, starting with an increasingly polarized political system lubricated by money and barnacled by lobbyists." Fry predicts that

bogged down in future years by the twin deficits (government and current account) which have required it to borrow most of the surplus savings accumulated in the rest of the world, and saddled with a weaker and more erratic currency, the United States will be hard pressed to sustain its role as the world's superpower.

We Canadians have no right to gloat. Like the previous U.S. administration, the present Canadian government blew through a $12 billion surplus in less than two years. During the last election, Mr. Harper and company claimed that there would be no recession in Canada -- in fact, he predicted, we would run a small surplus. Twelve months later we were almost $56 billion in the hole.

The Conservatives fervently believe that, ultimately, Milton Friedman will be vindicated. And that is why Mr. Harper visited European leaders this past week, arguing against a bank tax -- which the U.S., Britain and France advocate. He argues that, because Canadian banks are in better shape than most, they need no such tax to curb their speculative urges.

What he neglects to mention, of course, is that it was a previous Liberal government which left him with a surplus and a sound banking system. He also neglects to mention that his government has injected $125 billion into The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation -- the equivalent of the FHA -- thus offering Canadian banks the assurance that they will not be stuck with toxic housing assets.

Professor Fry knows that the way out of this mess is to both raise taxes and to cut spending. Ironically, Canadians have been here before -- in the early nineties. But any talk of raising taxes -- in both the U.S. and Canada -- is, at present, considered heresy. The financial crisis and the environmental crisis remind us that our so called "best and brightest" have been neither. And Simpson reminds us that those who are both best and bright have a hard time finding an audience.

A Ghost from the Past

Claiming that it was "a good day for a hanging" Jean Chretien returned to Parliament Hill last week. He proclaimed public service "a very noble life;" and, like most former politicians, he enjoyed being the centre of attention.

Of course, some in the audience were drawing lessons from his time as prime minister. Stephen Harper -- in a remark that revealed more about himself than it did about Chretien -- said, "He knew instinctively what it took to win." Perhaps the lesson Harper took from Chretien also explains why the present prime minister didn't bother to attend the ceremony in the Centre Block two years ago, when they hung Joe Clark's portrait next to Chretien's.

But the man who should really be pondering Chretien's success is Michael Ignatieff. To his credit, Ignatieff is not the dictator Chretien was. But, as Lawrence Martin wrote in The Globe and Mail last week, anyone trying to mimic "the old lion's tough ways" is taking the wrong lesson. "He was at his best," Martin wrote, "when he was the little guy from Shawinigan, when he stood his ground, at one with the values of everyday people and the country."

It was when Chretien insisted that the Clarity Bill would be passed; when he refused to join George Bush's "coalition of the willing;" and when -- with Paul Martin's help -- he destroyed the "debt wall" which Brian Mulroney and his predecessors had bequeathed to him, that Chretien earned his place in Canadian history. He could mangle both official languages; and (when the pen he gave Queen Elizabeth refused to cooperate) he could mutter "merde" -- a remark which seems to have endeared him to the monarch.

Micheal Ignatieff would do none of these things. But neither will he stand his ground. When he told Mr. Harper his time was up, he then decided to give the prime minister more time. After he said that Quebec's new health care user fee was acceptable, he backtracked and said that it could not stand. And, after saying that the Auditor General should not be allowed to scrutinize MP's expenses, he now says he will accept Ms. Fraser's oversight.

He should have accepted that oversight in the first place. But that is not the point. When Mr. Ignatieff takes a stand, Canadians have come to expect that -- like this country's climate -- it can change quickly and radically. Ignatieff's vacillation is the reason Liberal poll numbers are now in the 25% range.

Ignatieff is a very intelligent and a very articulate man -- in both English and French. But what he lacks is Chretien's political experience. When Chretien became prime minister, he had toiled in Ottawa for nearly thirty years. He had apprenticed under Pierre Trudeau and Mitchell Sharp; and he had served as the Minister of National Revenue, the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, the President of the Treasury Board, the Minister of Industry Trade and Commerce, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Justice, the Minister of Energy Mines and Resources, the Minister of External Affairs, and Deputy Prime Minister. In short, he knew how Ottawa worked.

Michael Ignatieff has had an illustrious career. And he has apprenticed under Issiah Berlin. But he lacks Chretien's experience and Chretien's common touch. Those deficits are becoming more -- not less -- apparent.

The Triumph of Cynicism

When historians tell the story of the Harper government, they will surely dwell on the fact that this prime minister was Cynicism personified. That cynicism was apparent again last week, when Mr. Harper had a supposedly freewheeling discussion with Canada's youth. When the event was over, one of the participants -- Raimey Gallant, a student at Winnipeg's Red River College -- revealed that questions had to be submitted to the Prime Minister's Office before the exchange took place.

Ms. Gallant had asked the Prime Minister,

In light of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the reluctance of the companies involved to accept responsibility, what new controls for oil drillers will the Canadian government put in place to reduce the risk of oil spills in Canadian waters and ensure the continuance of marine ecosystems and the sustainability of our fisheries?

Senator Mike Duffy -- who used to call himself a journalist before Mr. Harper appointed him to the Senate -- never asked the question. And two Quebec students, who wished to remain anonymous, insisted that, while Duffy posed the questions they had submitted, the questions themselves had been rewritten.

James Travers, a much better journalist that Duffy, noted in The Toronto Star that "keeping facts from ruining a slick story has been standard operating procedure in the four years since the Conservatives came to power promising a new era of truth and transparency. But even measured against that status quo, Harper's screening of questions from 120 university co-eds arches the eyebrows."

Mr. Harper insisted during the encounter that any concerns which were not related to the economy were, in his words, "a sideshow." Ms. Gallant was amazed at the Prime Minister's audacity. "The whole sideshow thing, I think that insulted me the most," she said. "I was really upset by that. I find it extremely insulting because we are Canadians, too, and these issues are important to us. If our Prime Minister thinks they are sideshows -- I mean this isn't a government of one."

Ah, but Ms. Gallant has hit the nail on the head. After all, this is the Prime Minister who -- when faced with a non confidence vote in the House -- and who -- when questioned about possible Canadian complicity in the torture of Afghan prisoners -- simply prorogued Parliament. Mr. Harper stands for two things: the acquisition and the exercise of power. All the rest is a sideshow.

The Libertarian Mob

In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Mark Lilla puts the Tea Party Movement in historical context. It is, he writes, the natural outgrowth of both the Counter Cultural Revolution of the 1960's and the Reagan Revolution of the 1980's. On the surface, the latter seems to be a reaction to the former. But, in reality, both are cut from the same piece of cloth:

A new form of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that.

Like Huck Finn, they wish to live on a raft and have little contact with the civilization on the shore -- which, they see as corrupt, while they are noble savages. The problem, of course, is that occasionally one has to go ashore for supplies. And occasionally -- like the two frauds with whom Huck and Jim share that raft -- civilization invades your living space.

From their imaginary raft, Lilla writes, the Partiers have conjured up a vision in which

. . . educated elites -- politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers -- are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop. They say they are tired of being told what counts as news or what they should think about global warming; tired of being told what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seat belts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink . . . the list is long.

There is something appealing about their rebellion. And so, over the years, citizens in both the United States and Canada have voted for governments which have advocated deregulation -- or, in the words of the late Pierre Elliot Trudeau, have "no place in the bedrooms of the nation." And they have approved, as governments dismantled the mechanisms which previous generations constructed to deal with disasters.

For some problems require a communitarian response -- because they are too big to be solved by individuals. The past decade has had more than its share of such problems. Hurricane Katrina, the Financial Meltdown of 2008, and the present catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico are beyond individual solution. Nonetheless, a significant number of people refuse to recognize that fact. And, when president Obama proposes a solution for a particularly big problem -- the lack of medical care for 40 million Americans -- they rise in anger, convinced that the president is a new King George, who must be deposed.

They call themselves "conservatives." But they are the diametrical opposites of Edmund Burke. Rather than preserving social institutions they are hell bent on tearing them down. Rather than standing against the mob, they are the mob -- in Lilla's phrase, "the libertarian mob." And, as such, they represent a challenge to both political parties. As a mob, they are a clear and present danger. But their anger cannot be denied. The challenge for political leaders is to direct that anger rather than -- like the Jacobins of the French Revolution -- to follow it.

For Obama, they are a conundrum. Led by Glenn Beck -- who looks at Obama and sees Hitler; and Rush Limbaugh -- who looks at the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and sees an administration conspiracy; and Pat Buchanan -- who looks at Obama's choice to replace John Paul Stevens and sees "too many Jews" -- they are Ignorance with a big megaphone.

But the solution is not a bigger megaphone. The solution will require all the rhetorical skills Obama possesses -- and the ability to think beyond the anger of today.

The Wages of Righteousness

Last week, on Fox News, Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin expounded on their conviction that "America is a Christian nation." Palin -- who Steve Benen of Washington Monthly called "the former half term governor" -- claimed that those who wrote the Constitution were "quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 commandments. It's pretty simple."

Her formulation is, indeed, pretty simple. The problem is that it is simply not true. Consider what three of the founding fathers -- all of whom eventually became president -- wrote about Christianity:

Thomas Jefferson: "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature. The greatest enemies of Jesus are the doctrines and creeds of the church."

James Madison: During almost fifteen centuries, the legal establishment known as Christianity has been on trial and what have been the fruits, more or less, in all places? These are the fruits: pride, indolence, ignorance and arrogance in the clergy. Ignorance and arrogance and servility in the laity, and in both clergy and laity superstition, bigotry and persecution."

John Adams: Nowhere in the gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find Christianity encumbered with.

None of these men raised any objection to the teachings of Christ. But experience had led them to distrust his followers. And, while they insisted that there should be no state church -- no theocracy in the United States -- they specifically made room for freedom of religion. They were emphatic, however, in their belief that religious freedom could only exist as long as the nation's affairs were free from the entrenchment of any religion.

Many on the right believe that what the United States needs is a dose of "that old time religion." It is a disposition which many in the Harper government share. It rears its head most noticeably in the government's tough on crime agenda. As Jeffrey Simpson wrote last week in The Globe and Mail, ". . . this is also a government that has scorned the expert advice of every criminologist, judge and lawyers group in Canada, even as they say how ineffective, useless and even dangerously counterproductive are most of the Conservatives' 'tough on crime' proposals." For, like the Palinites, the Harperites see themselves as the righteous. And righteousness, they believe, is fact-free -- because it is self evident.

We are free to disagree. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, we are all entitled to our own opinion; but we are not entitled to our own facts. What is most annoying with modern Conservatism is its insistence that facts can and should be ignored. How else can one explain the success of the "former half term governor," or a Canadian prime minister who claims to be an economist?

A Question of Character

The day after Peter Milliken delivered his historic ruling on the Afghan prisoner file, the Prime Minister rose in the House and declared, "The government cannot break the law, it cannot order public servants to break the law, nor can it do anything that would necessarily jeopardize the safety of Canadian troops."

That comment led Don Martin, in The National Post, to opine:

Silly people. Have they learned nothing about this prime minister in the last four years? Mr. Harper allowing Bloc Quebecois MPs access to secrets deemed a threat to Canadian security? Never happen. And even if rival MPs are granted seek and find powers, any smoking gun detainee documents would be declared a matter of national security and never see the light of parliamentary day.

And Andrew Coyne, in Macleans, was having none of the prime minister's argument. Mr. Harper, he wrote, was trying to create "total strategic confusion."

. . . the whole argument's bogus. No one is asking the prime minister to break the law. The conflict of which he complains exists only in his head. This was a key point of the speaker's ruling: a law may impose a general prohibition on the release of certain documents, but unless it expressly states that the ban applies to Parliament, it doesn't. The presumption, that is, is in favour of parliamentary privilege.

When commentators on the right see through the prime minister's posturing, it is obvious that something is seriously amiss. Mr. Coyne has been skeptical of Mr. Harper's "conservatism" for some time. The late Dalton Camp saw through the ruse early. The prime minister is a libertarian, not a conservative; and his path to power has been -- and is -- a carefully managed bait and switch campaign.

It may be that Mr. Harper will conclude, with Falstaff, that "discretion is the better part of valour." It may turn out that there is no -- as Mr. Martin suggested -- "stink bomb somewhere in the paper mountain or sitting at the bottom of a shipping container en route from Afghanistan." If there is no damning evidence in the files, then Mr. Harper's contempt for his opponents has assumed pathological proportions. If there is a stink bomb in those files, we are all besmirched. In either case, the man should be removed in office.

It seems pretty clear that, in the next election, Mr. Harper will run as a competent and patriotic manager. It is now up to the opposition to reframe the debate. It comes down to a straightforward question: Is the prime minister a democrat? Or is he the man who would be king? It's all about character.