Tuesday, August 4, 2009

I, Me, Stephen Harper. It's All About Me



So the 'Ignatieff Me' site has been up and running for a little while now, with very few new items added. Most of what you find there has been cut and pasted from the Conservative website. Same old, same old.

'He wants to raise your taxes ... out of the country for 34 years .... Just Visiting'.

Like we didn't hear enough of that from the TV ads and the taxpayer funded literature that they have been distributing. (Of course Kingston's own 'also ran', Brian Abrams had to have Mike Wallace and Blake Richards do his dirty work for him. I guess he's hoping to get elected so he can start abusing our tax money all by himself).

I suspect that the Harper supporters love the site, but I doubt it would change any one's mind about how to vote. In fact, if anything, it's juvenile appearance would probably turn you off the Party who feels the need to stoop to this kind of nonsense.

The only thing semi-original is a mock magazine cover and the immediate spoken words of Mr. Ignatieff, about 9 seconds from a C-Span interview, discussing Michael Igantieff's book, 'The Lesser Evil'. We don't get to hear the rest of the interview, but I'm not sure how that means he can't be our Prime Minister. He was teaching at Harvard at the time, so would have felt some kinship.

With the focus on those nine seconds and a handful of words, the message has been distorted. Ignatieff's book dealt with a post 9/11 world, and how America would have to find a balance between knee jerk revenge and justified force.

"We need calm, reasoned advice on how to balance the interests of security and liberty. We have it now in a remarkable book. Michael Ignatieff brings history, philosophy, law, and democratic morality to bear on the problem. That may sound daunting, but Ignatieff is such a forceful writer that it is a fascinating book. . . . Reading him is a bit like having a conversation with an eminently reasonable but convinced and powerfully convincing man."--Anthony Lewis, New York Review of Books

Instead the Conservatives have reduced an important message to some kind of hidden love of America, over his love for Canada. After 9/11 everyone was American for awhile. That was until George Bush made even Americans ashamed of being American.

Ironically, this interview was given about the same time that Stephen Harper and Stockwell Day were writing to American newspapers indicating that they were opposed to Chretien 's decision to keep us out of the Iraq War. And Jason Kenney: '... echoed his Canadian Alliance party's view that Canada should do more to support its Anglosphere allies. "In the last couple of weeks, for the first time I was not proud to be a Canadian."'

Now if this was used in a Conservative style attack ad, we would cut out Kenney's "not proud to be a Canadian." and repeat it over and over and over and over again. Then take the line from Harper and Day's letter: "But we will not be with the Canadian government" and do the same. I guess they forgot that as the Opposition Party they were part of the Canadian Government. So were they waging war on their own?

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