Way back in the olden thymes, everyone and I mean everyone believed that the weird fuzzy-wuzzy fascism of the Democratic Party was settled policy. Only lunatics and fans of Hitler thought otherwise. After all, the 1964 election had proved it! We did not yet have science! but the defeat of Goldwater was the next best thing. There could be only two types politics, hard-boiled liberalism and soft-boiled liberalism.
People could be forgiven for assuming that was true. Goldwater was recklessly described as a lunatic, who wanted to blow up the world. He was not, but the press and all the beautiful people hooted and roared when LBJ sent out psychologist claiming that Goldwater was deranged. As an aside, expect this to happen with Trump and Carson, except it will be economists.
That meant the choices before the voters would be between the metastasizing welfare state of the Republicans or the metastasizing welfare state of Democrats. In other words, you could have any color car you wanted as long as it was black. There was no turning back the clock and going back to the dark days when things were better. No sirree, it was all settled. All the smart people said so and if you said otherwise, you were not smart, maybe even crazy.
The weird thing about the Reagan years is they may as well have never happened. All the good that was done in those years has been rolled back and some of it so quickly it is hard remember that was ever done. What’s crazier, is immediately after Reagan, his party went right back to believing what they believed before he won two landslide elections. That is, they had to be Democrat-lite in order to win elections.
One of the reasons the GOP is in trouble today is their insistence on being a slightly less crazy version of the Democrats. That has its appeals as there are always voters out there afraid to rock the boat. That and it promises to keep the fanatics in the liberal press corp at bay. The trouble is the bulk of the people who would like an alternative to the Liberal Democrats can’t stomach the trimmers and compromisers the GOP is offering up.
Truman said it, I think, when the people get the choice between a Democrat and a Democrat, they pick the Democrat. That’s the dilemma facing the GOP these days and it appears to be what has unmanned the Conservatives in Canada yesterday. Given the choice between something and nothing, the people chose something even though that something is as dumb as a goldfish.
The last time I had any reason to care about a Trudeau, the new Prime Minister’s mother was running around showing her beaver to the public. Margaret Trudeau was good looking piece of tail back in the day, dumb as a plank, but that’s probably why the geezerly Pierre married her. Too bad her son and Canada’s next leader got her brains and his old man’s megalomania.
“We beat fear with hope,” Trudeau said. “We beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative, divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together.”
How is it possible for a fully formed adult to say such idiotic things in public? Political speech in the mass media age is aimed at the functionally retarded, but even by that low standard this drivel is embarrassing. Worse, it’s unmanly and mean. You won. Be honorable in victory you sniveling punk. But then again, why should he? The voters just voted in an insipid punk. He’s just giving them what they want.
Nature abhors a vacuum so when the responsible people refuse to be responsible, the irresponsible get to run wild. In this case, the people claiming to represent the sane and sensible Canadian could not be bothered to take the fight to the howling crazies so the howling crazies won. Again, given the choice between something and nothing people always pick something.
This reminds me of something. A few years back I was at an event for a friend and present at the event was the wife of a Canadian official. We talked a bit about politics and she made the comment that in Canada, the conservatives were not extreme like they are in the US. I nearly bust out laughing, thinking of Mitt Romney as extreme, other than extremely dull. But, she made clear that it was very important to Canadian conservative to not be viewed as too far apart form the the rest.
The lesson that will be drawn by the Canadian Conservative party officials is that Harper was too hard edged and he was insufficiently deferential to the Left. The next time, they must beg harder. It’s the same lesson the American Right “learns” after every election, win or lose. No matter the result, they must grovel harder next time.
Today, the little mushroom people of Nova Scotia weep for their country.
It is true that Americans tend to condescend towards Canadians what with their being so much smaller and less consequential a nation in comparison and feeling somewhat guilty to acknowledge such condescension, but the canucks voted 71% for the progressives. That is a whole lot of stupidity. Even the dumb low information American voter never deviates more than a few percentages (from 50%) on which elections turn. The idiots up north deserve our scorn. I hope you suffer appropriately.
The idiot is most likely the one who thinks it amounts to a hill of beans which ever party is in power.
Say what you want but we did not elect somebody named “Hussein”!!! EVER! Or someone who as a pilot ejected and left his crewmen to die in WW II (Papa Arbusto) Political labels do not always mean everything…remember:”Watch my lips”? I was pretty horrified when a guy from Saudi Arabia was elected premier in Quebec…Actually, I am impressed by the performance…He is my MP here but is turning the economy around, encouraging even the Chinese to invest here in resources while the sector is collapsing everywhere. You may note that like Ben Carson, Dr Couillard is a brain surgeon too… Read more »
Actually, the little mushroom people voted solidly for the sniveling punk.
I just like writing “the little mushroom people of Nova Scotia.” I have no idea how they voted, but I would assume they enjoy the mushroom treatment.
The socialist pandemic continues spreading unabated. Otherwise, seemingly good, rational people are infected with this disease and at present there seems to be no effective treatment. Symptoms include but are not limited to: bankrupting one’s own economy, rewarding takers over makers, diluting one’s own nationalistic/cultural heritage, suppressing dissent, feelings of superiority/grandeur. It is advised to avoid contact with the infected and suspected carriers at all costs. Keep your powder dry.
Was in Alaska this summer and by chance was on a Brewery tour with four Canadians ranging from a water treatment engineer bureaucrat to a schoolteacher and two youngish workmen. They were all on a Holliday for a week on a ship out of Vancouver, B.C. The tour was little talk and much tasting and I had, if their measurements were correct, 42 oz of beer (7 six oz glasses). All of the Canadians had much more than I did, tasting all 13 taps. Well politics came up as we “learned about beer” and to man they all believed in… Read more »
I have relatives who reside in Canada, and from what I know of them I expect they voted for the one on the left and not the one with any sense. Well, good luck to Canada; you may need it. While it is one of the very few countries I would choose to live in were the UK not available to me (and heaven knows with our lefty-leaning politics here that may not be too far away) I expect many of the world’s less-pleasant people will all be flocking there to make a home before I get round to be… Read more »
Canada’s safety net is the weather. The third world types heading to Europe are not very good at shoveling snow. Some do it, but Canada is a lot like Finland. A place migrants consider to be punishment.
There’s guns everywhere in north Canada to shoot mud slime dead…Will Justin re-start the gun registry? Not likely, like daddy, he like to label himself as a “sportsman”…
http://thechronicleherald.ca/sites/default/files/imagecache/slideshow_image/op_image/B97359860Z.120140825170542000GRF6DIQK.11.jpg
Tangential to your main point, I realize, but I wonder why LBJ isn’t in every conservative’s Hall of Fame of Liberal Evil. His programs were atrocious — I think most of us recognize that — but his truly vicious ad hominem style is still the gold standard for Dem campaigns today. LBJ was one of the meanest, pettiest, most vindictive little shits in American political history, and the Dems learned his lessons very well. He should get more credit (if that’s the word) for that.
If you’re on “Conspiracy theories” there is a good case that LBJ killed Kennedy.
Joe DiMaggio killed JFK.
Evil he was. LBJ didn’t want to deal with the black leaders of the civil rights movement, but when he saw that he would have to, he crafted a devil’s deal with them. Afterwards, LBJ is said to have remarked to one of his staffers that, “We’ll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next 100 years.” For those of you in the Great White North, “nigger” is considered a highly offensive, derisive epithet here in the states.
Watch out for the genetics here…Pierre was a nazi during WW II, using his family’s vast fortune to support the “Blue Shirts” of Canada’s own little Hitler, Adrien Arcand…Then after the war, he got famous for fighting the “War Measures Act” used to imprison Arcand for the war times…The exact same measures he invoked later to jail thousands of separatists who rebelled against his federal government diktats…By that time, Pierre “PET”(Pierre Elliott Trudeau) was now a communist, of course(what difference does it make?) Sonny Justin seem to be a stealth muslim himself, having professed great admiration for the terrorists, a… Read more »