I am actually apolitical. Sort of. I think for the most part most politicians are good people working hard, the whole thing about Tory financial planning capacity aside. I also pretty much think that it is a difficult thing to translate the experience of people in another country and try to align it with what is going on here. The detailed ground rules are too important but practically speaking unknowable. I may be happy to watch the UK’s Question Period from Westminster on CPAC for the spectacle in lucid wit but we don’t really understand the context. Yet there is more than a moments entertainment for me when reading what Ian writes in his fuming foaming moments:
…you all got what you wanted, and in the eyes of progressives, you got what you deserved. Now your President has an approval rating of 37%, even in the usually-more-conservative Time Magazine poll. Roughly translated from the 2004 election returns, that means 14.2 MILLION people who voted for Bush now disapprove of him. Well, fourteen-point-two-million, you have nobody but yourselves to blame, you pathetic boobs.
Yes, I called you “pathetic boobs”. You deserve it. You left us with this guy and only now bother to show righteous indignation? You make me sick. You had access to the same information as the rest of us. At least real conservatives stick by their guns, but you’re the worst kind of pusillanimous, wobbling imbeciles. I hope your stomach lining eats away what’s left of your digestive tract.
Oh my. When I read or hear commentary like that I am really happy that I live in a country with more than two parties. I think that the greater complexity of us versus them helps focus on actual policy more than platform, on action more than words. So it is not without some hope that I watch this week’s return of the minority in different form to Ottawa. If you think about it, the nation has been locked in a set of facts that have been around compared to where we were about 1990 with Chretien and Martin fighting for the Liberal leadership and Reform was well on its way on its share of the plan to break up the then somewhat squalid conservative movement with the NDP and Bloq holding their own but not breaking away. Now, in a reversal of fortunes, we have conservatives actually being the ones saying they are going to clean up government and a bunch of the untested are competing for the Liberal leadership, all the while the NDP support solidifying under a more acceptable platform and leadership than has existed for decades and the Bloq actually starting to wobble as the old guard get older. In one way this is a new start but in another it will be less than a change as the ideas being shuffled are largely the same and, mortality being what it is, it is all downhill from here.