Oy vey.....

Whining is tedious. Believe me, I've done enough of it in my time.


When I cruised some of my favorite blogs to survey the results of the Canadian election, it was easy enough to shrug off the gloating of the right. It's a good sign, since pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit presages destruction. Humility after victory is not only good taste but good sense, since victory often lays the foundation for a later defeat. Let them nag Harper all the way to the right edge of sanity, and over it. They'll kill him if he lets them, and if he fails to play the game their way, they'll be at his throat. That's popcorn time for progressives.


The plain fact is that although this is a majority fair and square by the rules everyone was using, it is also a government that has minority support among the Canadian people as a whole. Some of Harper's "friends" seem to think that a majority of seats means the "silent majority" of citizens have spoken. With friends like that, Harper's not going to need enemies. The people did speak, and they said Harper sucks, although they did not speak with the united voice the rules of the game require to remove him. Fair enough. Still, if the Conservative Party insists on behaving as if a 40% level of support is 60 or 70 per cent, they will kill themselves, no ifs, ands, or buts. 


No, the nattering of the tighty righties is music to my ears. They're no more than the liveliest maggots in the animated corpse that is Canadian conservatism today. It's my friends that annoy me.


You know? The ones who are sure everything is over because one election was narrowly lost. Oy vey. What if Harper had won a real majority, sixty or seventy per cent of the vote? What would they do then? Move to Antarctica? 


No. Even if Harper had won with 90 per cent, he would still be a petty, vindictive piece of work motivated by the obscure fermentation of a set of private hatreds and fears that would fascinate a psychiatrist. He would still be wrong. And he would still deserve to be opposed. It would be more difficult, but it would still be the right thing to do.


Of course it would have been better to win, but we didn't. Live with it. 


And now, if he cannot rigidly control the lunatics in his ranks, Harper is going to begin to win the next election for us. I think he will try, being an excellent politician, but I also think he will fail. They're out and howling at the moon already. I don't envy him.


The task immediately before us is to make the next four years the longest and most miserable, harried four years of Harper's life. He lied his way through the election, but now reality will be calling in the checks he wrote on it, and there isn't enough in the bank to cover them. Take the F-35 fighter project.  What happens when people fully realize that this is going to cost us over four hundred million dollars a plane rather than seventy-five million? (The $400 million is the price the Danish government has budgeted for.) How does he explain that one? 


Oh, some will complain, people didn't listen to that before. Well, people need a lot of reminding sometimes. It is our job to make sure they get it. Don't bother complaining that they're stupid. Stupid or not, they still vote, and most of them can count well enough. If Harper continues to waste their money chasing his phantoms, sooner or later they will become aware of it.