Thursday, February 15, 2007

Bravo Liberals! Our Strongest Opposition Moment Since The Election!

Well, it's about time. We finally have mounted a successful gambit in the Opposition Benches. Nice to see our experience and intelligence taking a front seat to our lost stumblings of the past several months.

On a lot of blogs on Liblogs I see bloggers talking about how Stephen Harper is governing like a dictator, and not someone with a slim minority government. The thing that many of us forget (hopefully not most of us) is that Harp is fully aware of the fact that we can't have an election right now... that most of the opposition is not ready (whether with policy, fiscally, or just plain mentally).

The puppetmaster team (Harp's US electioneering advisors) are fully aware of current Canadian political reality. He can be aggressive in his policy because he doesn't know anyone who will oppose him. His handlers can position him as the "tough, go-getter, driven" leader who is standing alone against the opposition. Harper is very good in this "lone gun" role. For neoCons, machismo and bravado are keys to turning public opinion into the flag-waving, beer-swilling, iconographic egoism we see represented by extreme conservatism in the United States. We're talking about a brand of machismo and extremism - punctuated by anger, fear, and hatred - that we haven't seen since Europe circa 1930s. What I fear most is that some of the public may look past his extreme policy just because they feel bad for him.

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