Mr. Roosevelt

During our recent trip to Washington, we stopped to pay our respects to Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln. Each resides in his own temple: one, a man who helped build the machinery of democracy; the other, the man who gave the most succinct definition of it. This was the third time I have stood inside the Lincoln Memorial and read The Gettysburg Address, which is chiseled into one of the monument's walls. Its simple, direct and powerful prose always moves me.

But on this visit, even more than the Gettysburg Address, I was struck by other words on another wall -- part of a monument which did not exist the last time we were in Washington. The new memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a sprawling complex. A bronze statue of Roosevelt in his wheelchair -- his Scottish terrier Fala at his side -- is the centerpiece of the memorial. But in addition to the statue, there are several walls -- some with waterfalls cascading over them. On the rest are chiseled passages from Roosevelt's speeches, of which there were many. One wall -- and one passage -- haunts me.

In 1936 -- during a speech in Chautauqua, New York -- Roosevelt remembered his days as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson Administration. After the United States entered the war in 1917, Roosevelt -- before the onset of polio -- made a tour of the front lines. What he saw he never forgot: " I have seen war." he said in Chautauqua. "I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line, the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war."

It was ironic that we began our visit at Arlington Cemetery and ended it at Gettysburg. In between we visited the Vietnam Memorial, where we encountered a veteran -- cane in hand --who claimed he lost the index finger on his right hand during an attack which killed 27 of his fellow infantrymen. Roosevelt had seen too many men like him; and what Roosevelt saw led him to work for international institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank, which could prevent what he had seen. For, as he also said, "Unless the peace that follows recognizes that the whole world is one neighbourhood, and does justice to the whole human race, the germs of another world war will remain as a constant threat to mankind."

His vision went far beyond his own country and his fellow citizens. He saw himself as a citizen of the world. If Lincoln was the greatest American president, then surely Roosevelt ranks a very close second.

The Party of Lincoln?

From north of the 49th parallel, the debate over health care in the United States looks more and more insane. That's not to say that establishing a national medicare system is easy. When Tommy Douglas introduced medicare to Saskatchewan in 1962, the province's doctors -- with the support of the North American medical establishment -- went on strike. The strike lasted almost a month, while the province imported doctors from Britain, the United States and other provinces. But what the opponents of medicare discovered was that the plan was immensely popular -- so popular that it served as the model for the national plan which now serves all Canadian provinces.

There will always be powerful interests to oppose any national medical insurance plan. At the moment, though, it would appear that, in the United States -- in Yeats' phrase -- "the worst are full of passionate intensity." Sarah Palin claims that, "my baby with Down [sic] Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." This from the Republican candidate for vice president of the United States?

John Boehner, the Republican House Leader claims that the plan now being crafted would make it illegal for health care workers " to provide anything less than abortion on demand." And the last week has seen the spectacle of the people's representatives being shouted down at a time honoured American political institution, the town hall meeting. The goal is not to have a public debate. It is to shut down public debate. In effect, the strategy is to defeat a plan, which is still being developed, by adopting a scorched earth policy.

Next week we are travelling with our youngest son to Washington. We've only been there once before -- eighteen years ago -- with our two older sons. But you can't go to Washington without walking down the National Mall and paying Mr. Lincoln a visit. Lincoln has been a hero of mine since I was eight years old -- when my parents, in a trip to Kentucky, took us to the log cabin where he was born. Later, of course, I discovered The Gettysburg Address. But as I have grown older, I have become convinced that Lincoln's finest speech was the one he delivered at his second inaugural. The best lines Lincoln ever wrote are the last lines of that speech:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves and among all nations.

Compare those lines to Sarah Palin's or John Boehner's and you see what has become of the Republican Party. The members of that party are fond of saying that they need to return to first principles. What they really need to do is to return to their first president. His spirit lives on in the Lincoln Memorial. Unfortunately, it does not animate the modern Republican Party.

Wither the WASP?

Over the last couple of weeks, we have witnessed a strange spectacle. Despite the state of Hawaii's verification that Barack Obama was born there, people like Lou Dobbs and Liz Cheney have joined a gaggle of conspiracy theorists, who continue to question the veracity of the president's birth certificate: Barack Obama, they insist, was born in Kenya; and, therefore, he has no legitimate right to the presidency.

As Bill Maher pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, we've seen this movie before: "This flap might be a deluded right wing obsession that is a total waste of time, but so was Whitewater . . . [and] more recently we had the Swiftboat allegations against John Kerry. . ."

How does one explain this kind of zaniness? "That reaction," Frank Rich wrote in Sunday's New York Times, "is an example of how the inexorable transformation of America into a white-minority country in some 30 years -- by 2042 in the latest Census Bureau estimate -- is causing serious jitters, if not panic, in some white establishments."

Those establishments have been White, Anglo Saxon and Protestant; but they have been under siege for some time. There was the surge of immigration, beginning in the 1840's, first with the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews from Eastern Europe. They may have been white or Semitic; but Anglo Saxon and Protestant? In the twentieth century, there have been waves of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, all answering the call at the base of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

For over two centuries, the "wretched refuse" have arrived and risen to prosperity -- but there were certain barriers they were supposed to respect. Now that they outnumber those who originally occupied positions of power, the "quality" are getting anxious, even a little paranoid. That was never more apparent than when such luminaries as Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor -- President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court -- "a racist."

From time immemorial, minorities have forged political alliances to advance their agendas. But the people who refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate refuse to recognize their growing minority status. They can't beat them; and they won't join them. As Mark Twain observed, "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt."

In Praise of GBS

This past weekend we -- my wife and I and two of our sons -- travelled to Niagara-on-the-Lake, to attend a performance at the Shaw Festival. We also attended a presentation our son gave to the International Shaw Society, which convenes there during the festival.

The play we saw was The Devil's Disciple. It was the play which liberated Shaw from his usual employment as a journalist; and it allowed him to pursue his bliss in the theatre. In truth, that statement is inaccurate. Shaw was a brilliant man of many parts; and his blisses were many. Suffice it to say that the theatre made his reputation; everything else was further testament to the man's genius.

The play is about the true nature of religion and morality; about how a man of the cloth can become a man of action; and about how a man of action can become a man of the cloth. And, as always, Shaw delights in turning everything on its head. The truly religious man is the man of the title. And, through him, Shaw punctures the hot air balloons of hypocrisy and pomposity.

Like his countryman, Jonathan Swift, Shaw had no patience for hypocrisy and pomposity. But, unlike Swift, he never let those things get the best of him. His wit was a scalpel. He used it with swiftness and precision. And, despite the human frailty which Shaw found everywhere, he still saw that heroism was within man's grasp. It was not about whether Eliza Doolittle was a "squashed cabbage leaf" or a member of the aristocracy. It was about human dignity and the ability to see things as they are. When you watch a Shaw play, you come away with the distinct impression that -- for perhaps the first time -- you have seen things as they truly are.

I can only assume that the members of the International Shaw Society share some of that sentiment. There are distinguished academics in the group -- men and women who have spent their time at various universities, researching and teaching Shaw. But there are others whose professional pursuits have been outside the academy. What brings them together is their love of the man and his work. Our son loved being among them; and he marvelled that they were not competitive. They appear to be untouched by the spirit of the age just passed. For them, self interest is not what makes the world go round -- a notion which Shaw, a socialist, found appalling. They truly seem to enjoy each other's company. And their enthusiasm is infectious.

When I taught high school, we had several Shaw plays in our book room. For the most part, they collected dust and remained untouched. Once in awhile, one of us would pull Pygmalion off the shelf. Last Friday night, The Devil's Disciple played to a nearly packed house; and the audience did not need to be cued by a laugh track. Perhaps that was because, through the laughter, we saw -- in a dark time -- that, occasionally, human beings can still do the right thing. It was Shaw, after all, who proclaimed -- in Back to Methuselah -- "You see things; and you say,'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'

When Things Get Pathological

When Stephen Harper declared in an interview after the G8 summit that, "I don't believe that any taxes are good taxes," Jeffrey Simpson wrote in The Globe and Mail: "There is no 'school' . . . anywhere in economics that says 'no taxes are good taxes.'" Some economists, Simpson wrote, "like right wing politicians, might think taxes are too high, maybe way too high. They might think the private sector can do lots of things better than the public sector. They might believe taxes should be lower. But anyone who says 'no taxes are good taxes' and 'I don't believe any taxes are good taxes' is wrong economically and very, very scary socially and politically."

The response from Terrence Corcoran, in The National Post, was withering. "Rev. Simpson," Corcoran wrote, "propelled himself and his Liberal congregation into a hysterical anti- Conservative, anti-Harper orbit." While Simpson would be the first to admit that he is no fan of Mr. Harper, one can ask, "Who is truly hysterical?" Simpson long ago stopped referring to the government as "the Conservatives" and instead chose the term "Harperites," suggesting that what Harper is selling is not conservatism.

He made that distinction clear later in his column. "Only libertarian anarchists believe that all taxes are bad and that society can get along without them." Besides, Simpson asked, "Who will provide, if not the taxpayers, the revenues to pay for the two services that even the most right wing ideologues agree only public authorities can provide: the defence of the realm and law and order?"

Corcoran saw a conspiracy in the making. "What is really going on here," he claimed, "is a mounting Liberal campaign to set the state for tax increases to cover future deficits. Liberals cannot officially plant this idea, and they would much rather have Mr. Harper bear the burden by forcing him to raise taxes." No, says Mr. Corcoran, the way to solve the problem is to cut spending.

What's strange is that we've been here before, fifteen years ago, and the solution -- under the Chretien government -- was to do both: to raise taxes and cut spending. We know what we will have to do. The Harperites -- and Mr.Corcoran -- suffer from a peculiar pathology, a pathology which occasionally shows up -- as it did last November, and immediately after the G8 summit -- when Mr. Harper lashes out at the opposition in a fury of indignation, determined to crush them. He seems unable to help himself. Mr. Simpson is right to worry that the Prime Minister is pathological.

And So It Goes

The death of Robert McNamara last week generated a great deal of comment. McNamara was reviled as the architect of the Vietnam War. He was reviled when he wrote thirty years later that "we were wrong, terribly wrong;" and he was reviled by many, even in death. It was a strange fate for a man who became one of Henry Ford's "whiz kids."

"It's impossible to mention his name without starting an argument," Errol Morris wrote in The New York Times. But Morris -- whose Oscar winning film, The Fog of War, gave McNamara a platform to defend his actions -- was not without sympathy. "During his tenure as secretary of defense, there were conflicts that could have escalated into nuclear war -- the confrontation over Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis. All of this must be seen against the backdrop of the prevailing ideas of the time, the domino theory and the cold war."

McNamara consistently maintained that his prime objective was to avoid nuclear Armageddon -- and he knew that dodging it in Cuba was more luck than strategy. If fighting a conventional proxy war was a substitute for nuclear Holocaust, it was -- in McNamara's words -- a case of "doing evil to do good."

But it was precisely that twisted formulation which was his undoing. A brilliant technocrat, he could marshall a phalanx of figures to justify his policies. The problem was that men and women could not be reduced to a series of complicated equations. In the end, McNamara concluded, the most grievous error he and the other New Frontiersmen made was to not know one's enemy -- to not "empathize with him." It was the same piece of wisdom Atticus Finch gave his seven year old daughter Scout in Harper Lee's superb novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.

It was this failure, rather than any of his accomplishments -- even the avoidance of nuclear holocaust -- which followed McNamara around until the end of his life. "By then," wrote Tim Weiner in The Times, "he wore the expression of a haunted man. He could be seen in the streets of Washington -- stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind -- walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand yard stare."

McNamara was not the cold, heartless automaton of my youth. He was a man -- like George Bush Sr. -- given to weeping in public. His colleagues, especially Lyndon Johnson, took it as a sign that he had gone soft. Most of the public took the position that -- even if they were tears of remorse -- they were too late. And so it goes. Too often we recognize our follies too late.

True Patriot Love

On July 1st, the Prime Minister proclaimed, "Today we celebrate the most peaceful, prosperous and enduring democracy the world has ever known." A bit over the top, I'd say; but it's the kind of rhetoric that other politicians have used before. And, if the polls are to be believed, Mr. Harper was only voicing what the vast majority of Canadians accept as true. As Jeffrey Simpson wrote last week, "almost 90 percent of [Canadians] believe they live in 'the best country in the world.'"

The problem with this kind of boilerplate, Simpson wrote, is that Canadians begin to repeat the Chapters-Indigo slogan: the world needs more Canada. "The assumption supporting this assertion," he claimed, "is that we Canadians are so worthy, morally upright and generally well intentioned, that the world would be a better place, if it were more like, well, us. Which, in turn leads Canadians to their deadliest sin: an unsinkable moral superiority."

Then, to remind us that there are many less than superior accomplishments in this country, Simpson enumerates some of our shortcomings: we have the world's worst record for per capita green house gas emissions; Canada is "almost alone in flogging asbestos around the world;" and "the decline of manufacturing and the struggles of high technology reveal Canada for essentially being what it has always been -- a hewer of wood and drawer of water, a country excessively dependent not on brain power but on natural resources."

Some might view Simpson's comments as sour grapes -- what they claim is a national tendency Canadians have for raining on their own parade. But that claim misses Simpson's point: "There are admirable aspects of being Canadian," he writes, "and these have all been justly celebrated on Canada Day. But self satisfaction can lead to a refusal to acknowledge weaknesses, to allow patriotism to curb critical thought, to refuse to face hard choices, and to cover a slow, albeit comfortable, slide toward international marginality and domestic mediocrity."

It has always seemed to me that one of the reasons for prairie winters is to remind human beings -- who all too easily fall victim to their own delusions of grandeur -- that, in the grand scheme of things, they are less important than they perceive themselves to be. A prairie blizzard carries a simple message: humility is the handmaid of reality. We are, indeed, a country of vast and varied blessings. But smug self satisfaction isn't one of them. True patriot love recognizes that fact.

That Old Time Religion

On Saturday, Tim Hudak was elected leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. Mr. Hudak entered politics at the age of 27, as a new member of Mike Harris' government. He married one of Mr. Harris' principal advisers, Deb Hutton. And, during the leadership campaign, he advocated the kind of policies Harris championed, like abolishing the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

When the party chose his successor, Ernie Eves, Harris left the building. On Saturday, he was in the front row, where -- according to The Toronto Star -- he "beamed like a proud father during his protege's victory speech." Mr. Harris certainly liked what Hudak stood for. What government needs to do, Harris said, is "to get out of the road so that the private sector can grow the jobs and the wealth we need to run the province." It all sounded remarkably stupid, given our present predicament. The Harris prescription is precisely why we are where we are. It is the reason GM and Chrysler are doing so well.

As Jeffrey Simpson wrote in a recent column, the private sector has not been a source of wisdom or innovation: "Fifteen years ago," -- when Mr. Harris was first elected -- "Nortel Networks employed 29,000 people. It was the country's high tech leader, known here and abroad. It did more research than any company in Canada. It spawned feeder companies. There were other high tech powerhouses like JDS Uniphase and Newbridge Networks. Today many of those companies have been demolished, broken up or taken over. Even Cognos, a wonderful Canadian success story, succumbed to an IBM takeover."

The Conservative prescription used to pass in the 19th Century for Liberalism. Back then, Edmund Burke's conservatism stood for community stability and government protection from wild-eyed individualism run amok. It was with The Great Depression and the New Deal that Liberalism morphed into a different creature -- a political philosophy which saw government as the banker of last resort. New Deal Liberalism gave us Unemployment Insurance, Old Age Pensions and Medicare. Twenty-first century Liberalism seeks to set people back to work, establish a green economy and slow global warming.

On that last score, American conservatives are still in denial. John Boehner -- the Republican leader in the House of Representatives -- called the climate change bill , which passed in the House last week, "a pile of shit."

Nineteenth century conservatives would never have used such inelegant language. The fact remains, however, that twenty-first century conservatives -- like Mr. Harris, Mr.Hudak and Mr. Boehner -- are stuck in the nineteenth century. For the last thirty years they have wanted to return to a simpler time -- when the rules were clear, most of the population was caucasian, women stayed home and government stayed out of the way. Like William Jennings Bryan's supporters during the Scopes Monkey Trial, they have advocated a return to "that Old Time Religion." Unfortunately for them -- and for Mr. Bryan -- we have evolved since then.

The Burden of Neglect

The reaction last week to The Harper-Ignatieff agreement to study Employment Insurance -- and thus avoid a summer election -- has been all over the map. Norman Spector, in The Globe and Mail, cheered: ". . . we are blessed," he crowed, "in having two potential prime ministers who, at the end of the day, know how to behave as mature adults."

Tom Walkom, on the other hand, was not impressed. "Who are these ludicrous Liberals?," he asked in The Toronto Star, "And what exactly is it that they want?"

It was Susan Riley, in The Ottawa Citizen, who came closest to the truth: "As he has repeatedly shown, compromise is a strategy, not an instinct, for Harper. This time it was easy. He gave Ignatieff nothing but the time of day, staved off an election until (he hopes) the economy is improving and earned bonus points for looking accommodating. All Ignatieff did was rekindle doubts about his integrity, values and his political acumen. . ."

Riley's last comment was a little harsh, although she is voicing a commonly held belief which the Conservatives intend to exploit during the next campaign -- whenever it occurs. But the simple truth is that the uncivil war, which has consumed the Liberal Party for the better part of a decade, has left it unprepared to enter an election campaign. If Stephane Dion proved anything, it was that.

And, as I have written twice before in this space, the Liberals need time to reevaluate and rebuild policy. The EI Commission is a step in that direction. The problem is that last week's outcome offers cold comfort to the unemployed, whose numbers are growing.

The Prime Minister and his government will eventually fall, victims of their own carefully crafted inertia. However, as Jean Chretien reminded his party in 1990, there is a lot of work to do. It's time for the Liberal Party of Canada to stop blaming Mr. Harper and start proposing solutions, not strategy.

Still, at the end of the day, we get the politicians we deserve. Both Mr. Harper and Mr. Ignatieff know that Canadians do not want a summer election. We didn't want the one we got before last week's agreement. We bear the burden of our own neglect.

Naked Balderdash

Lisa Raitt's apology last week to those Canadians awaiting cancer treatment may have been heartfelt. I do not doubt the pain the disease has inflicted on the minister and her family. After all, it killed both her father and her brother.

The problem, as Lawrence Martin, wrote last week, is that the apology was "too long in the making;" and it was an abrupt about face. "You can bet," wrote Martin, "that the prime minister's office instructed Ms. Raitt to get out before the microphones yesterday. You can bet that the day before, the same operatives had instructed her not to give an inch."

The problem for the last Conservative MP from Halton was that he refused to do the PMO's bidding. Garth Turner was infected with the novel idea that he was answerable first to his constituents and then to the Prime Minister. For this heresy, he and fellow MP Bill Casey were ejected from the Conservative caucus.

As James Travers also wrote last week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is in trouble because his own caucus has been infected by the same virus. It occurs -- or should occur occasionally -- in true parliamentary democracies. In 1990, Travers reminded his readers, "Conservatvies tossed Margaret Thatcher for the very minor John Major."

For all his wonkishness, in any situation, the prime minister's first principle is crass political calculation. Is that surprising? Or new? Or limited only to the present government? No.

But what is surprising is that a minority government -- caught in the grips of the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression -- should display its ambition so nakedly. To Ms. Raitt, the shortage of medical isotopes -- caused by problems at the Chalk River nuclear reactor -- was a "sexy" chance to take control of a situation and make a name for herself. The obvious question is, "Whose interests are being served?"

The present government has operated from the beginning on the logical contradiction that self interest is in the public interest. That contradiction is at the heart of the financial meltdown and the devastation of Canada's manufacturing industries.

The real question is how long will the victims of this quackery tolerate such balderdash? Today Mr. Ignatieff will provide us with an answer.

Sixty-Five Years Later

This past Saturday marked the 65th anniversary of the Invasion of Normandy. It was a long time coming; and there were those who felt that the Allied Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had spent too much time cooling his heels in Britain. But Eisenhower was a shrewd judge of battlefields; and -- as later conflicts in Vietnam and the Suez Canal would prove -- when it came to going to war, he did not believe in rolling the dice. Moreover, the shear size of the operation -- 160,000 troops and 5,000 ships landed and anchored along a fifty mile stretch of French beachfront -- was staggering.

Despite the force which the allies brought to bear, they faced no easy task. The weather proved to be an obstacle; and the Germans -- who had been preparing for such an event for four years -- were ensconced in heavily fortified positions.

As Barack Obama reminded his audience this weekend, "It was unknowable then, but so much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide."

It was an immense task; and it needs to be remembered by each succeeding generation. For, as Obama also told his audience, "As we face down the hardships and struggles of our time, and arrive at that hour for which we were born, we cannot help but draw strength from those moments in history when the best among us were somehow able to swallow their fears and secure a beachhead on an unforgiving shore."



It is also important to remember that "the best among us" were ordinary people -- from all over the world, from city and farm, from a plethora of backgrounds -- who worked together for a good that was more important than their own self interest.

Most of the soldiers who landed that day -- including those who did not come home -- achieved no notoriety. They have been lost to the culture of celebrity. And, as their dwindling numbers attest, there is a danger that what they did will be forgotten with their passing. We must not let that happen. For their sake and for our own.

"I Have the Tapes"

When the opposition demanded the Finance Minister's resignation last week, the prime minister had a curious response. "I cannot fire the Leader of the Opposition," he opined, "and with all the tapes I have on him, I do not want to." When under pressure, Mr. Harper displays his dark side. He is a man who sees enemies on all sides -- a man who likes to portray himself as a victim -- a mean spirited man, who has always had a chip on his shoulder.

Given the job the Conservative War Room did on Stephane Dion, the current round of attack ads -- which rely heavily on clips of Ignatieff functioning outside Canada -- were to be expected. What they reveal, however, is not an arrogant Leader of the Opposition, but a government which is intellectually bankrupt. Like the Fathers of the Church, when presented with Galileo's evidence that the universe did not operate on the rules they assumed were self evident, the Conservatives have retreated into noisy denial and attacked the man, instead of rethinking their theology.

For the real issue, as Lawrence Martin wrote last week in The Globe and Mail, is credibility. "In the case of the Finance Minister," he declared, "it's hardly in abundant supply." One only needs to add that Mr. Flaherty has been absolutely true to form. As Ontario's Minister of Finance -- despite his assurances to the contrary -- he left the province with a $5.5 billion deficit.

It's true that making predictions in a recession is difficult. As Bob Rae has testified, the numbers at least at the beginning -- keep getting worse. The problem has been that Flaherty refuses to acknowledge that fact. During the election campaign, and immediately after it, he refused to acknowledge that there even was a recession.

The truth, of course, is that Flaherty is a front man. It is Harper who considers himself the government's economic guru. And it is Harper who has failed to understand what is happening. So there will be no resignations. Faced with immediate execution, the Prime Minister might change course. But his behaviour in November suggests that he would rather prorogue Parliament than face it. Until then, his defense will be to call Mr. Ignatieff names -- the same technique he used against Mr. Dion.

Mr. Harper, according to some, is a very smart man. Unfortunately, his education has been very narrow and not very deep. He is not a man given to critical self examination. He embodies Franklin Roosevelt's definition of a conservative -- someone, "with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward."

Such Men Are Dangerous

In the wake of the debate last week between President Barack Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney, what was remarkable was not the reaction from the left -- which was predictable -- but the reaction from folks on the right, who used to be ardent supporters of both Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney.

In the New York Times, David Brooks wrote, "But the bottom line is that Obama has taken a series of moderate and time-tested policy compromises. He has preserved and reformed them intelligently. He has fit them into a persuasive framework. By doing that, he has not made us less safe. He has made us more secure."

While Brooks praised Obama, Andrew Sullivan -- in The Atlantic -- lambasted Cheney. Cheney's speech, he wrote, was ". . . not a patriotic defence of what he thinks is best for the country; it was a vile and deliberately divisive attempt to use the politics of fear and false machismo against the stability of the American polity."

Most damning of all was Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson's take on Cheney. Wilkerson is a former assistant to Colin Powell. After the shabby treatment Powell endured at the hands of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, Wilkerson, in the Washington Note, came out swinging. "When will someone of stature tell Dick Cheney that enough is enough? Go home. Spend your 70 million. Luxuriate in your Eastern Shore mansion. Shoot quail with your friends -- and your friends. Stay out of our way as we try to repair the extensive damage you've done -- to the country and to its Republican Party."

For even more abhorrent than Cheney's defense of water boarding is his assertion that, in the present circumstances, those in charge can throw the checks and balances in a democracy out the window. Cheney maintained throughout the time he spent in his "secret, undisclosed location" that the president need not be bound by the messy business of oversight. All he needed was a legal opinion that "enhanced interrogation techniques" were acceptable. Likewise, the FISA court could be bypassed when wire tapping was required.

In the end, it is Cheney's contempt for democracy which historians will remember. Unlike Cassius, he is not noted for his "lean and hungry look." But the second part of Caesar's admonition to Mark Antony bears repeating: "Such men are dangerous."

Oh, What a Tangled Web

I stopped feeling angry about Brian Mulroney a long time ago. I should note at the outset that I never voted for him, so I never felt a sense of betrayal. But, because he came to office with the greatest parliamentary majority in Canadian history, I can understand why he infuriated so many of his supporters.

In fairness, Mr. Mulroney did a number of things which stood him and his country in good stead. Last week, CBC journalist Brian Stewart -- who spent most of the Mulroney years in Europe -- recalled how in 1984, after consulting his UN ambassador Stephen Lewis, Mulroney helped mobilize relief for victims of the Ethiopian famine. He asked Lewis if the UN planned to do anything about the disaster. When Lewis replied that, thus far, nothing was on the horizon, "there was a pause and a quick lets-do-it commitment from the prime minister that would launch both men onto the world stage."

Likewise,when Ronald Reagan -- fearing Communist agitation in South Africa -- refused to condemn apartheid, Mulroney spoke unequivocally against it. He stood firmly against capital puishment. And, as others have noted elsewhere, he did more for the environment than any of his predecessors.

Still, there was something unsettling about the man. He was always trying too hard to please -- like the rising young man trying to impress the boss. He was given too often to hyperbole and self promotion. And he wore the signs of his success a little too conspicuously. In the end, it was Mulroney's talent for exaggeration and self aggrandizement which did him in. Canadians always suspected that, behind the good deeds, he was looking out for his own interests and the interests of a select group of supporters, who the late Dalton Camp referred to vaguely as "offshore money."

Appearing before the Oliphant Commission last week, Mulroney dredged up all of that. Oliphant will probably agree with his claim that he has done nothing illegal. And, in the end, Mr. Schreiber will probably be extradited to Germany. But, as Jeffrey Simpson wrote in The Globe and Mail, "There is the law and there is ethics. What might be legal sometimes is not ethical. What might be legally defensible, in a hair splitting or tightly defined way, does not pass a reasonable smell test of proper ethical conduct."

And that is how the public will remember Mr. Mulroney -- as a gifted but ethically challenged prime minister. The Schreiber affair has eclipsed the times he stood for compassion and justice. He will be remembered for the three envelopes which Schreiber stuffed with cash and handed him. It's a tragic tale, ending not with a bang but a whimper.

Eye Candy or Education?

Appearing before a convention of electronic journalists in 1958, Edward R. Morrow said, "Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved for one week the kinescopes of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues," Murrow added, "we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER."

If recent events prove anything, we are now paying for what we have refused to watch for a long time. It is true that there are more networks than there were in Murrow's time. But they operate on the same principle: television's prime directive is to sell. This is particularly true with over the air broadcasting, which now largely distributes infomercials, a plethora of television justices, and Jerry Springer-like freak shows. The so called "quality" programing has migrated to cable or satellite, where viewers pay for what they watch.

Recently, Canadian broadcasters have complained that the old "free" model of television broadcasting is broken. They claim that some kind of pay as you go system is the only viable broadcasting model. This is a curious argument, given that the medium itself -- the airwaves they rely on to make their profits -- are owned by the public.

Digital television promises many more channels. But more channels -- like more networks -- do not guarantee better quality. And, if people want to pay for schlock, I have no desire to prohibit their choices. However, it is worth remembering that Murrow's appearance before his fellow journalists was the opening salvo in the battle to establish the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.

American public broadcasting chose the BBC as a template for its operations. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was originally founded on the same British model. But, over the last forty years, it has increasingly looked to William Paley (who founded CBS) and David Sarnoff (who founded NBC) for inspiration. And, as Canadian governments of all stripes have cut funding for the corporation, the CBC has increasingly relied on cheap, commercial American programs to fill its time slots.

If government can find money to bail out banks and the automobile companies, it should be able to find money for public broadcasting. Public broadcasting is also an investment in the future, because it is an investment in education. As James Travers wrote last week in The Toronto Star, "Education isn't just a competitive fix; it's the only available magic elixer. Among so many other things, it lets us wisely weigh the safety of what we eat, the wisdom of corporate investments, and the profound implications of sending Canadians abroad to serve and die. Education not only helps makes sense of testing times and a chaotic world order, it puffs up every part of life."

Over two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson warned that democracies which lack a passionate commitment to public education will wither. In recent years, public schools have suffered the whips and slings of government neglect. If private broadcasters have their way, public broadcasting will suffer the same fate. Both institutions deserve better.

As Murrow said, "This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is only wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference."

That battle continues. It will not be won without a strong, unwavering commitment to public broadcasting.

Starting at the Bottom

The Liberals have left Vancouver, with instructions from their leader to sell the party to the country. In the words of Jean Chretien -- almost twenty years ago -- they "have a lot of work to do." The most important work they have before them is to review and rebuild their policy platform.

For the last thirty years, the conventional way of doing that has been for a leader to gather a brain trust around him or herself, and -- after solving the problems of the world (as they perceive them) -- to issue marching orders to the rank and file. In Canada, this has resulted in the concentration of power in the Prime Minister's Office, where a handful of unelected bureaucrats dictate policy.

The result, as Toronto Star columnist James Travers has noted on several occasions, has been that, "Prime Ministers now rule between elections with the near absolute authority of monarchs." Our salvation does not rest in the hands of a benevolent dictator. For, we face more than a financial crisis. At the heart of the economic meltdown is a crisis of democracy.

Power and wealth are inextricably linked. And, as wealth has increasingly been concentrated at the top of the social pyramid, so has power. That was crystal clear when Detroit's auto executives flew to Washington in corporate jets to beg for public assistance; it was clear as bonuses were handed out to AIG executives; it is clear in the present torture debate in the United States. The powers that be want to avoid prosecutions, because they will inevitably lead back to Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney.

Until very recently every policy announcement in Canada was made by the prime minister, while members of his cabinet nodded approvingly in the background. It is only as the economy has gotten worse that Mr. Harper has allowed his ministers to tout government largesse. Power enjoys the spotlight, until the refuse of bad policy decisions -- the decisions made by that small, self assured phalanx of "smart" folks -- hits the fan.

In truth, the policies were bad because they were made by a small group of technocrats. Democracy -- true democracy -- is a self cleansing and self correcting mechanism. That is why any true democracy has a set of checks and balances -- opposition parties, government committees, and regular communication channels between the people and their representatives -- to test and reformulate policy before it is given the force of law. The problem is that these processes take time; and they are messy -- some would say inefficient -- two phenomena which are supposedly roadblocks to true happiness.

There was talk at the end of the Liberal convention of an imminent election. That would be a mistake. What the Liberals need now is time to formulate policy -- not by turning to a small band of experts, but by heading down the pyramid and consulting ordinary Canadians. In the process, they can advocate for changes in Employment Insurance -- for those changes are sorely needed. But, until they have a plan to deal with the world as it is, they are not ready to return to power.

Such a plan needs to move wealth -- and power -- down the pyramid to those at the bottom. That will necessitate a whole series of carefully thought out policy changes.

Mr. Ignatieff likes to refer to himself as "a Roosevelt Liberal." If he is who he says he is, his policies will move wealth and power into the hands of ordinary folks. Like Roosevelt, he may draw the ire of his own social class. But things will not change unless -- and until -- that happens.

The Liberals made a step in that direction this weekend when they moved to a one person one vote system, which gives every member of the party a say in choosing their leader. It was a good beginning. But, as Mr. Chretien said, there is still "a lot of work to do."

Torture and Obsession

President Obama found himself in the middle of a crossfire last week, when his administration released four memos written by Bush administration lawyers, in support of what Dick Cheney has called "enhanced interrogation techniques."

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman insisted that "the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how [torture] happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible." Meanwhile, in The Washington Post, David Broder wrote that, while Krugman's argument is "a plausible sounding rationale, . . . it cloaks an unworthy desire for vengeance."

And, as the week went on, the rationale for using such techniques became increasingly clear. As Frank Rich reported in Sunday's Times, " . . . Major Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantanamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: 'A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.'"

The Bush White House was certain there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden -- they sold the invasion of Iraq on that claim -- and they were convinced that, if they simply kept applying the appropriate pressure, that link would become clear. They needed that link to justify what they planned to do, something former Secretary of Commerce Paul O'Neil confirmed was part of Bush's first cabinet meeting, eight months before September 11th. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney entered office obsessed with the idea that there was unfinished business in Iraq and -- come hell or high water, or "enhanced interrogation techniques," -- they were going to arrange a do-over.

The job of administration lawyers was to provide a legal rationale for those interrogation techniques. With law degrees from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Michigan, they could be counted on to deliver. And, as the memos make clear, they did. Their defense now is, essentially, "it seemed like a good idea at the time;" and, anyway, they did not torture; they were merely offering policy options. Countless policies have been abandoned in the light of history and experience.

The problem is that others have been prosecuted and vilified for implementing those policies. Ordinary enlisted soldiers like Lynddie England and Charles Graner found their names placed in the docket. They were then court martialed, imprisoned and labelled "just a few bad apples." What is required is not vengeance, but justice.

The torture debate reveals a recurring pattern -- whether on Wall Street, in Washington or -- for that matter, as the Omar Khadr case make clear, in Ottawa. The folks at the bottom pay for the misjudgments and mistakes of those in authority. And the advantage of authority is that it buys immunity. Mr. Obama -- and Mr Harper -- have been confronted by a call for justice. They may not wish to respond. But the longer justice is denied, the angrier the reckoning will be.

Patrician Patriotism

During the past week, Michael Ignatieff was all over the newspapers and the air waves, promoting his new book, True Patriot Love. It's a catchy title; and it will probably top the Canadian bestseller lists. It is sure to be reviewed in the New York Times. In a difficult period for publishers, it should make money.

But there is more at stake than money. The leadership convention for the Liberal Party of Canada is just around the corner, and -- even though the outcome has already been decided -- Ignatieff is using the book as a means to breathe life into his party and into his bid for the brass ring.

As he told Michael Valpe in the Globe and Mail last week, what he is trying to do is offer his country a vision for the 21st century. And part of that vision is based upon the idea of a National Dream -- in the sense that John A. MacDonald's transcontinental railway or Pierre Trudeau's Just Society were national dreams.

For Ignatieff, it is a shared dream which holds a country together. And it is the reason the federal government exits. "The job description of a federal government," he told Valpe, "is just one job -- hold the country together, make it stronger." To do that, Ignatieff said, "we need a public life in common, some set of reference points and allegiances to give us a way to relate to the strangers among whom we live." Those common allegiances find expression in common projects -- the railway, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, National Health Insurance.

The problem for the present government, says Ignatieff, is that it has no common project. I has nothing big that has yet to be accomplished. "The fatal flaw" of Stephen Harper's government is that it "fits a country that is finished, but it doesn't fit a country that is not yet done."

The problem for Ignatieff is that many Canadians fear that he himself is not yet done.There is much about him we still need to discover. He is no common man. His father's family were members of the Russian nobility. His mother's family are members of what passes, in this country, for nobility -- Ontario's Family Compact. And Ignatieff has spent his whole life coming to terms with that legacy.

Now that he is a potential prime minister, Canadians need time to come to terms with that legacy, too. Most of all, Ignatieff needs to convince Canadians that his patrician patriotism is as unshakable as the patriotism of the common man. And that his return to Canada was not just a career move -- that it was, instead, an act of true patriot love.

Looking for the Exit

Last week, National Post columnist Don Martin suggested that the prime minister might be "polishing his resume." Whether or not that's true, as Tom Walkom wrote in the Toronto Star last Tuesday, "there is a quiet air of desperation around Stephen Harper."

For, essentially, the economic axioms upon which Mr. Harper built his academic and political career have crumbled. In 1991, the year he completed his Master's thesis in Economics, he wrote, "The record indicates that particularly activist Keynesian policy has been rare in the post war period. The results indicated that it should remain so." In the last six months, the prime minister has tried to throw that conclusion down the memory hole. The problem is that this is Canada, not Oceania.

Mr. Harper is certainly not the first politician whose words have come back to bite him. His real problem, though, is that his actions -- more than his words -- have done him in.

Like Richard Nixon, he is his own worst enemy. Taking his cue from Canada's last Conservative prime minister, Brian Mulroney, Harper planned to achieve power by building crucial support in Quebec. But, in the last election, his failure to understand the importance of cultural issues in that province spelled the difference between a majority and a minority government. Then, in November, desperately trying to save his government from defeat, he took direct aim at the Parti Quebecois, who represent the vast majority of Quebec voters. The result was that his support in that province evaporated.

Finally, in an effort to distance Harper from Mulroney -- who is presently in his own pot of boiling water -- the prime minister's office leaked the news that Mulroney had asked that his name be removed from all party lists. Mulroney exploded and called the perpetrators of that information liars. The feud with Mulroney has opened up the old divide between the two wings of the prime minister's party -- the Progressive Conservatives and the hard right Reform Party members.

It comes as no surprise that a man with a talent for wounding himself should be giving interviews to American and international media, singing the praises of Canada's banks -- which the previous Liberal government refused to cater to when they suggested mergers to help them bulk up and play in the same league as their international competitors. These are the same competitors that have received large bundles of taxpayer money, because they have been deemed too big to fail.

Mr. Harper has conceded that, like many of his fellow citizens, he "may eventually lose" his own job. Like any man with a wife and young children, he is looking around for something else before the axe falls. And, not a man to go backwards, Harper is fishing in international waters -- for "something like a lofty academic position at the London School of Economics," Martin suggests,"or a United Nations gig. In other words, he might have to follow Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff's career path in reverse."

As countless party leaders could tell the prime minister, there is life after politics. The trick is finding your way to the exit.

Remember the Studebaker?

The man who taught me high school Physics drove a 1958 Studebaker Golden Hawk, like the car in the picture. It sat in the parking lot, a kind of elegant dinosaur, an emblem of the man himself. To his students, the car was the source of both humour and admiration. It couldn't match the Mercedes 300 SL, driven by another teacher, who was independently wealthy. But it did suggest a kind of dated opulence.

I thought of high school physics, and the chariot which carried my teacher to work, when Barack Obama removed Rick Waggoner from the chairmanship of General Motors last week. Like the Golden Hawk of another time, General Motors has become a symbol of dated opulence -- and, in some ways, GM's demise is emblematic of an age of, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks, "greed and stupidity."

Studebaker is just one of many automotive nameplates which have disappeared over the years. Its sister car, the Packard, died before the Studebaker. My youth was littered with automotive eulogies -- for cars like the Nash, the Hudson and the DeSoto. If memory serves, one of the first automatic transmissions arrived on the 1949 DeSoto. That innovation could not save a car which people did not wish to buy.

Most of these cars died because they could not weather various recessions -- and because the luxury they represented was incongruent with the times. As Frank Rich reminded his readers in Sunday's New York Times, as a culture we have been comfortably deluded, driving "self indulgent, wealth depleting gas guzzlers." And the management of GM drank the Kool Aid. But that delusion, like the economic bubble, has burst. "Any citizen or business that overspent or overborrowed in the bubble, subscribed to its reckless culture," Rich wrote. "That culture has crumbled everywhere now, and a new economic order will have to rise from its ruins."

What is truly sad is that the lives of millions of people have been shattered by the hubris and the stupidity of those in charge. Mr. Waggoner will go into retirement with a pension of $23 million. Like Charles Prince and Robert Rubin of Citi Bank, Angelo Mozello of Countrywide Financial, and Stanley O'Neil of Merrill-Lynch, his empire has crumbled. But, also like them, he rides off into the sunset, with more than enough money to pay the bills. That is how trickle down economics works.

And -- what is even more tragic -- this train wreck could have been avoided. Those who crafted the economic models which underpinned this economy were mesmerized by their own creations, assuming that human beings always make rational decisions. A little knowledge of history and the Greek and Roman classics would have relieved them of that notion. But, like the previous American administration, they considered those deposits of wisdom -- like the Geneva Conventions -- "quaint."

That Golden Hawk struck us as quaint, too. We were comfortable in our ignorance.