It looks as if Steve is going to take the walk and ask for an election.
I like elections. They clear the air. They bring issues into focus. They allow people to actually express their views.
In a technical sense this election is about 50 ridings mainly in Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia. These are the “battlegrounds” and these are where the leaders will be.
In reality this election will really be a referendum about whether or not the CPC under Harper deserves, or can be trusted, with a majority. I think they can and I think there is every reason to believe that a cross country consensus will give the CPC a thin majority.
This has, I am afraid, nothing to do with any endorsement of CPC policy; rather it is the reality that, a couple of years in, the Liberals have nothing at all on offer. The Green Shift is simply silly and a rather obvious tax grab. The idea that Harper is somehow George Bush in cunningly bad suits is a meme without wings.
To the converted, the Green Shift and Harper=Bush are truths as solid as the happy thought that 9/11 was an inside job. To the rest of us they are the last gasps of a party which has ceased to have a reason to exist.
Cynics have suggested that this election is about financially bankrupting the Liberal Party. I would not be at all surprised if they are right. It is time for the Liberal Party to end. It is time for Canada to have a left party and a right one. The Liberal Party is simply in the way.
The Liberals climbed on board the dying Green/Kyoto trope and, finally, have found the issue which could finish them. They will make assorted noises about national unity and assorted women’s issues and just how very scary Harper and the CPC are; but I suspect those noises will be their death rattle.
Canada has changed. We are no longer obsessed with a seemingly resurgent Quebec, Women are who they are and don’t need the feds to define them. Harper is rather dull; but not in the least scary.
For many of us, a confederation which allows provinces to seek their own destiny is a confederation we can support. Lock step centralism is an idea whose time has passed.
Most of all, with a bit of prudent management and a world hungry for our resources, Canada is poised to become a resource rich Switzerland. Rich, capable and very much its own nation.
The Liberal Party has, I suspect, outlived its usefulness. It is mired in identity politics, an unstoppable urge to take from the successful and give to the losers, and a belief in its own righteousness. Canada used to be a nation of losers. Now it is not. Canada used to think multicult was the Grail, now it doesn’t. Canada used to think the Liberal Party was the natural party of government, now that view is pretty much exclusive to the Toronto Star.
Harper has the shot at going to majority. The only question is whether the CPC war room has the wit top push the right buttons at the right time. Because if they do they will destroy the Liberal Party pretty much forever.
It’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.
Margaret Thatcher
Mrs. Palin has a very big pointy finger. She also has a natural politician’s gift to make a speechwriters’ speech her own. The audience tonight may have been bigger than Obama’s (if the CBC is to be believed.) And it should have been because, unlike Obama she has not been delivering essentially the same speech for 20 months while losing big state after big state.
My sense is that Mrs. Palin qualified herself tonight. She threw the Democrats onto the “well you know she didn’t write the speech” defensive. All the Dems have left is the personal smear and, as Mrs. Thatcher said, “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.” Not bad after five days.
Over at my friend Alan’s Gen-X at 4something site I posted this comment which I want to keep.
I think it is delightful that Mrs. Palin has so changed the game that her experience and speech making abilities are now being compared to the Oman’s. They are, as I recall, running for different positions. But now they are running against each other with the old silver backs relegated to the wings.
Tomorrow night McCain has to show up, say “I’m with her” and then get down to outlining a real vision for America.
Better still, Biden is looking like the spent force he is.
All that said, I suspect I agree with Mrs. Palin’s actual positions about as much as I agree with Obama’s. I am not a fan of book banning or the hard end of pro-life. But the Republican base is, the Evangelicals are and Joe and Judy Lunchbucket are. The swing vote here may well be the people who stayed home in disgust given the choice between Bush and Kerry or Bush and Gore.
Class in America is a funny thing. Nascar Dads are married to security moms and go to big churches in shorts on Sunday before settling into a day in front of the big screen and a couple of beers.
In a rather real sense, Mrs. Palin knocks on the door of Al and Peg Bundy’s house and walks right in. She is the woman who Oprah has always hoped does not exist and who Rosanne Barr has made millions pretending to be.
It should be a very interesting few months and, just for fun, we’ll squeeze in a personality free Canadian election, while the Americans march off to a full scale culture war on TV.
Apparently, if you click on the above around 5:00 Pacific and 8:00 Eastern you can hear Mike Brock and I hammer away at M. Dion, warmists, people who slag Sarah Palin and, no doubt, assorted other topics. I am sitting in for Al on the Al and Mike Show.
Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.
She could become a transformative political presence.
So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick.
And it’s going to be brutal. It’s already getting there. Peggy Noonan, WSJ via SDA
But why bother killing her, you can follow the leftie trope started at talkleft and picked up by our own Dr.Dawg: the Palin Dead Pool - when, not if, Palin is dropped, kicked, from the Republican ticket.
Seems The One cannot stand the competition from an intelligent woman who has better Executive credentials than he does and is, horrors, pretty much a regular working class person. (I am surprised to see the Dawg barking so fiercely at a working class woman aspiring to high office…ah, wrong party. Got it.)
Now, if you talk about, allude to, mention or otherwise acknowledge the existence of the Jackal’s pups he will threaten to sue you; but it is, in the Jackal’s twisted little world, totally fair ball to dis the 17 year old mum and the father of her child. What a mensch.
There is no excuse in 2008, especially when you come from a decent, educated, well-off family, and don’t have some obvious mental defect.
Sex is where babies come from. It doesn’t matter that you “didn’t mean to get pregnant” and only wanted the fun parts. An extreme skateboarder doesn’t “mean” to break a leg in eight places, but guess what?
I’m glad she’s not getting an abortion. I’m less thrilled that she’s getting married, but she probably isn’t thrilled either. If it works out, great. It’s been known to happen. But she should have planned her life better. It really isn’t that hard to do. Call it “delayed gratification.” Just control your damn self. five feet of fury
As various lefty commentators have pointed out, now that we are past the disgusting Trig inventions, socons are not down with seventeen year olds getting knocked up. Just say no and all that. My pal Kathy is leading the unreconstructed charge.
Couple of things. First, sex without contraception leads to babies as I know to my delight. Second, telling young ladies to “keep their legs closed” tends to be less effective than the Pill, condoms or, Hell, even the rhythm method.
Young women - and 17 is not 13 - have sex. Mama Palin, apparently (and I have yet to see the quote but it would make sense) is opposed to “explicit sex education” in the schools. So am I ’cause I think explicit sex education needs to happen at home. In the Palin household apparently this did not happen.
Does this make Mrs. Palin unfit to be Vice President. Hell no. It makes her far better able to understand the realities which are faced by families all over the world. It makes her capable of at least having the chance to rethink a rule against sex education in school because, let’s face it, she did not get the job done at home.
At the same time this will illustrate an essential difference between a broad spectrum of righties and lefties.
Obama stated - and I can’t be arsed to get the link - that if one of his daughters was knocked up he would not “want her punished with a baby”. Mrs. Palin has said:
“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support,” the Palins said. ann althouse
And for the lefties who are shocked or who want to cry hypocrisy one of Ann’s commentors notes:
Remember, your wonder boy Barack was born to a teen age mother who was impregnated out of wedlock by the 24 year old married black African Muslim father when she was only 17 (actually 18 ed’s note) years old. althouse
Kathy, Bristol apparently did not keep her legs closed…which means that Mrs. Palin and her family will be welcoming a grandchild about the time she takes the oath of office. It would be nice if it had worked out differently; but it didn’t. A new little person will be born. And we will all be better off for it.
A simple, “I am really, really sorry to have forgotten what deranged idiots post at Kos and I am ashamed of calling into question your integrity, the parentage of Trig, and the McCain campaign on the basis of utterly unverified speculation just because there is a little piece of Obama’s dangly bits I have not licked quite hard enough yet and I really hate George Bush and I have friends who are Kennedys and they invite me to servants’ day at Hyannisport every two years.” might go some way to repairing to poor man’s reputation.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin called Gustav “the mother of all storms,” saying its destruction could outstrip that from Katrina, which flooded much of his city.
“You need to be scared,” Nagin said of the Category 4 hurricane tearing along Cuba’s western coast. “You need to be concerned, and you need to get your butts moving out of New Orleans right now. This is the storm of the century.” cnn
Now I hate to say this, and my brother tells me he is spending Christmas in New Orleans, but has anyone thought that, perhaps, The Big Easy would make a better theme park than actual city what with the broken levees and hurricanes and all?
Of course, realistically, there are people living on the slopes of Vesuvius.
Over at Ben the Tiger there is a pretty good discussion of the fallout of the Palin pick I commented:
Pretty damn clever.
I love the talking point “She has more executive experience than the three other candidates combined.”
Locks up security moms and gets soccer moms thinking. Puts Hilly supporters in a pickle. Cements the socon base - not just pro-life, has the poor Downs baby to prove it.
Not from Washington…may never have been to Washington. Not more of the same inside the beltway routine we can expect from Biden (and Obama when someone explains to him what “inside the beltway” means.)
As meaningful a symbol as Obama except that she is a symbol for 51% of the population whereas BO is a symbol for less than 15% fo whom half are female.
Cute.
All this and it sucked the oxygen out of the Obama post convention bounce. Nice work.
Update: Hilariously, Kevin Michael Grace - back at blogging at last - disagrees.
I finally have the comments back to working....sort of. Basically I have to wade through the spam to find the nuggets. I do this a couple of times a day. Sometimes comments are lost. I am working on this. What I need is a Capcha like the coolkids have.