A fabled existence
Mark Steyn - Monday,30 January 2006
Weatern Standard
In the 2004 election, I wrote that the Liberals seemed to have adopted the pitch Jacques Chirac's cheerleaders used against Jean-Marie Le Pen: Vote for the crook, not the fascist. This time round, the Grits seem to have got the crook part a little out of whack.
It probably wasn't a good idea to launch the income trust scandal just in time for election season. All the other stuff was receding nicely into the mists of time, and the Liberals were doing a reasonably non-risible job of passing themselves off as reformed sinners. Then Ralph Goodale starts turning up on the news insisting that he's fully confident no personal wrongdoing was committed by him, and whereas the Grit corruption gala had previously played like a Rolling Stones tour--all the big numbers are from years ago--suddenly the bad boys of rock 'n' rule have a brand new hit. Message: Elect this party and they'll carry on just as before and circa 2018 the latest soi-disant blameless successor will be announcing that he's appointing an official enquiry to look into all this monkey business that was going on back in the mid-oughts on Paul Martin's watch.
Liberal behaviour is, indeed, the best indictment of Liberal crime policy. If you think setting up new after-school programs and community centres is the way to stop Jamaican gun gangs, well, it doesn't seem to work with the Grits. Give career Liberals lavishly funded federal day-care centres to romp around in and exciting skills development programs to retrain them as productive members of Quebec advertising agencies and all kinds of other fun rewarding activities, and they still carry on looting and stealing and terrorizing the neighbourhood. In the end, the only way you can deal with it is to put them away for, oh, five to ten years (minimum) on the Opposition benches.
As for the "fascist" bit, the scaremongering seems a bit vieux chapeau, frankly. They dusted off the old Stephen-Harper-will-kill-your-kids ad--this time with a very photogenic moppet and then a frame or two later the handgun that Harper's hit man will blow her away with. The Liberals, of course, are pledged to introduce gun control--or super-mega-this-time-we-mean-it gun control--so Harper won't be able to get a gun and kill your kids. He'll have to bludgeon them to death, or hire Chrétien to use the old Shawinigan handshake on 'em.
God almighty. If Ontario voters fall for that again, Stephen Harper can come round to my place and shoot me. Even crasser was the audio:
"One leader has made Canada the world's strongest economy. One leader would have sent Canadians to fight in Iraq."
And these things are connected how exactly? The economy on which Canada's economy depends has got a hundred thousand troops in Iraq and it doesn't seem to have sent America spiralling into depression. Why compare economic conditions with a foreign policy decision? Why not just say, "Under Paul Martin, Canada's economy is the greatest in global history, while Stephen Harper downloads child pornography off the Internet"?
And yet, in its very absurdity, the economy-vs.-Iraq contrast is quite revealing. The underlying message is: the Conservatives would disturb your parochial complacency. Which, if it's true, would be very heartening. Put aside the Great Satan for the moment, and compare our campaign to the most recent elections in Australia and the United Kingdom. Granted all the usual caveats, any observer would recognize that politics in those two countries is engaged with the world in a way that Canada's is not. The peaceable kingdom is so bountifully blessed that there's nothing left for the Trudeaupian state to do but introduce government day care--just for children, initially, but no doubt the Supreme Court will write the rest of us into the Charter of Nursery Rights by the 2009 election. And what will we be talking about in 2013? Plans for the Grits to introduce mandatory bedtime stories from Alfonso Gagliano? Woo-woo, here comes Thomas the Liberian-Registered Tank Engine.
Alas, the real world had the poor taste to intrude on Canada's kindergarten election. On Boxing Day, 15-year-old Jane Creba was gunned down while shopping with her mother and sister in the heart of Yonge Street, as random and innocent and blameless a victim of Toronto's gun violence as one could devise--and even so the political culture is now so degraded that all it could do is to add insults to her fatal injuries, falling back on the lamest of tropes and the emptiest of gestures. It's long been perfectly clear that when Paul Martin says he wants to make himself perfectly clear he means "perfectly clear" in the sense of transparently empty. Naturally, he now wants a "ban" on handguns, no doubt presided over by an even more multibillion-dollar gun registry.
Like most Canadians, I don't watch CBC Newsworld. But I like to tune in every couple of years just to get a head's up on who the next governor general will be. On present form, the viceregal wallah circa 2012 seems certain to be George Stroumboulopoulos. He's the fellow who's got the old 8 p.m. counterSpin slot, which went into a tailSpin when Avi Lewis was replaced by Sharon Lewis. Maybe they should have tried Jerry Lewis. Anyway, George has as many earrings as Avi, and we'll all be very excited when he's the first member of the Pierced-Canadian community in Rideau Hall. He's younger than Avi and his show is hip--or, at any rate, pseudo-hip, in the somewhat laboured way of government-funded CBC hipness. A week or so after Jane Creba's murder, George referred to Stephen Harper's post-shootout appearance in Toronto: the Tory leader had attacked the Liberal government for being soft on crime, which would seem to be an unexceptional observation. But for some reason George Stroumboulopoulos made a big show of being all outraged by Harper's remarks. Who, he demanded to know, had been running Ontario for most of the nineties, eh? Conservatives, wasn't it? And hadn't Mike Harris cut all the funding to "community activists" and "after-school centres," eh, eh, eh? And isn't that why all these nice young men grew up to be homicidal gangstas?
Come on, man, you've got sideburns, you're supposed to be iconoclastic. Even as ersatz CBC-hip, that doesn't pass muster. You could endow the "community activists" as lavishly as Quebec advertising agencies, and it would do nothing to impact Toronto gun violence. You know that, and so do most Torontonians: they know their city has changed. Paul Martin called the murder of Jane Creba the "consequence of exclusion." It would be more accurate to say it was the consequence of inclusion. The majority of T.O.'s gun crime is said to be Jamaican gang-related. Nothing unusual in that. Three years before Toronto's Boxing Day shootout, England's second city--Birmingham--had a New Year bloodbath. Also Jamaican gang-related: "Yardies," as they call themselves in Britain, with Uzis. I love Jamaica and at one point in my life was planning to settle there. But it's a melancholy fact that the island has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and that if your country has large concentrations of young Jamaican men your murder rate will go up, too. If Canada was really practising "exclusion," it would start by subjecting emigrants from that island to greater scrutiny.
But, of course, we're inclusive to a fault, so that's politically impossible. Multiculturalism obliges us to be non-judgmental: don't blame anyone--or, if you have to, blame the Americans. "The U.S. is causing violence to be exported to my city," Toronto's mayor David Miller said. It's estimated that half the guns used in Toronto murders are American. On the other hand, over 80 per cent of the fellows using those guns are Jamaican gang members. And, while it's hard to seal thousands of miles of mostly rural unmanned land border, it shouldn't be impossible to insulate yourself from the pathologies of a small distant island. Except that, just as Muslims kneel toward Mecca, Canadians only point fingers toward Washington.
The Liberals seem exhausted, barely able to keep up the pretense that they've got anything more than condescending placebo policies for the years ahead.
In recent elections, they've run on the Hilaire Belloc platform:
"Always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse."
But something worse is already here, and Platitudinous Paul has no idea what to do about it.
Mark Steyn - Monday,30 January 2006
Weatern Standard
In the 2004 election, I wrote that the Liberals seemed to have adopted the pitch Jacques Chirac's cheerleaders used against Jean-Marie Le Pen: Vote for the crook, not the fascist. This time round, the Grits seem to have got the crook part a little out of whack.
It probably wasn't a good idea to launch the income trust scandal just in time for election season. All the other stuff was receding nicely into the mists of time, and the Liberals were doing a reasonably non-risible job of passing themselves off as reformed sinners. Then Ralph Goodale starts turning up on the news insisting that he's fully confident no personal wrongdoing was committed by him, and whereas the Grit corruption gala had previously played like a Rolling Stones tour--all the big numbers are from years ago--suddenly the bad boys of rock 'n' rule have a brand new hit. Message: Elect this party and they'll carry on just as before and circa 2018 the latest soi-disant blameless successor will be announcing that he's appointing an official enquiry to look into all this monkey business that was going on back in the mid-oughts on Paul Martin's watch.
Liberal behaviour is, indeed, the best indictment of Liberal crime policy. If you think setting up new after-school programs and community centres is the way to stop Jamaican gun gangs, well, it doesn't seem to work with the Grits. Give career Liberals lavishly funded federal day-care centres to romp around in and exciting skills development programs to retrain them as productive members of Quebec advertising agencies and all kinds of other fun rewarding activities, and they still carry on looting and stealing and terrorizing the neighbourhood. In the end, the only way you can deal with it is to put them away for, oh, five to ten years (minimum) on the Opposition benches.
As for the "fascist" bit, the scaremongering seems a bit vieux chapeau, frankly. They dusted off the old Stephen-Harper-will-kill-your-kids ad--this time with a very photogenic moppet and then a frame or two later the handgun that Harper's hit man will blow her away with. The Liberals, of course, are pledged to introduce gun control--or super-mega-this-time-we-mean-it gun control--so Harper won't be able to get a gun and kill your kids. He'll have to bludgeon them to death, or hire Chrétien to use the old Shawinigan handshake on 'em.
God almighty. If Ontario voters fall for that again, Stephen Harper can come round to my place and shoot me. Even crasser was the audio:
"One leader has made Canada the world's strongest economy. One leader would have sent Canadians to fight in Iraq."
And these things are connected how exactly? The economy on which Canada's economy depends has got a hundred thousand troops in Iraq and it doesn't seem to have sent America spiralling into depression. Why compare economic conditions with a foreign policy decision? Why not just say, "Under Paul Martin, Canada's economy is the greatest in global history, while Stephen Harper downloads child pornography off the Internet"?
And yet, in its very absurdity, the economy-vs.-Iraq contrast is quite revealing. The underlying message is: the Conservatives would disturb your parochial complacency. Which, if it's true, would be very heartening. Put aside the Great Satan for the moment, and compare our campaign to the most recent elections in Australia and the United Kingdom. Granted all the usual caveats, any observer would recognize that politics in those two countries is engaged with the world in a way that Canada's is not. The peaceable kingdom is so bountifully blessed that there's nothing left for the Trudeaupian state to do but introduce government day care--just for children, initially, but no doubt the Supreme Court will write the rest of us into the Charter of Nursery Rights by the 2009 election. And what will we be talking about in 2013? Plans for the Grits to introduce mandatory bedtime stories from Alfonso Gagliano? Woo-woo, here comes Thomas the Liberian-Registered Tank Engine.
Alas, the real world had the poor taste to intrude on Canada's kindergarten election. On Boxing Day, 15-year-old Jane Creba was gunned down while shopping with her mother and sister in the heart of Yonge Street, as random and innocent and blameless a victim of Toronto's gun violence as one could devise--and even so the political culture is now so degraded that all it could do is to add insults to her fatal injuries, falling back on the lamest of tropes and the emptiest of gestures. It's long been perfectly clear that when Paul Martin says he wants to make himself perfectly clear he means "perfectly clear" in the sense of transparently empty. Naturally, he now wants a "ban" on handguns, no doubt presided over by an even more multibillion-dollar gun registry.
Like most Canadians, I don't watch CBC Newsworld. But I like to tune in every couple of years just to get a head's up on who the next governor general will be. On present form, the viceregal wallah circa 2012 seems certain to be George Stroumboulopoulos. He's the fellow who's got the old 8 p.m. counterSpin slot, which went into a tailSpin when Avi Lewis was replaced by Sharon Lewis. Maybe they should have tried Jerry Lewis. Anyway, George has as many earrings as Avi, and we'll all be very excited when he's the first member of the Pierced-Canadian community in Rideau Hall. He's younger than Avi and his show is hip--or, at any rate, pseudo-hip, in the somewhat laboured way of government-funded CBC hipness. A week or so after Jane Creba's murder, George referred to Stephen Harper's post-shootout appearance in Toronto: the Tory leader had attacked the Liberal government for being soft on crime, which would seem to be an unexceptional observation. But for some reason George Stroumboulopoulos made a big show of being all outraged by Harper's remarks. Who, he demanded to know, had been running Ontario for most of the nineties, eh? Conservatives, wasn't it? And hadn't Mike Harris cut all the funding to "community activists" and "after-school centres," eh, eh, eh? And isn't that why all these nice young men grew up to be homicidal gangstas?
Come on, man, you've got sideburns, you're supposed to be iconoclastic. Even as ersatz CBC-hip, that doesn't pass muster. You could endow the "community activists" as lavishly as Quebec advertising agencies, and it would do nothing to impact Toronto gun violence. You know that, and so do most Torontonians: they know their city has changed. Paul Martin called the murder of Jane Creba the "consequence of exclusion." It would be more accurate to say it was the consequence of inclusion. The majority of T.O.'s gun crime is said to be Jamaican gang-related. Nothing unusual in that. Three years before Toronto's Boxing Day shootout, England's second city--Birmingham--had a New Year bloodbath. Also Jamaican gang-related: "Yardies," as they call themselves in Britain, with Uzis. I love Jamaica and at one point in my life was planning to settle there. But it's a melancholy fact that the island has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and that if your country has large concentrations of young Jamaican men your murder rate will go up, too. If Canada was really practising "exclusion," it would start by subjecting emigrants from that island to greater scrutiny.
But, of course, we're inclusive to a fault, so that's politically impossible. Multiculturalism obliges us to be non-judgmental: don't blame anyone--or, if you have to, blame the Americans. "The U.S. is causing violence to be exported to my city," Toronto's mayor David Miller said. It's estimated that half the guns used in Toronto murders are American. On the other hand, over 80 per cent of the fellows using those guns are Jamaican gang members. And, while it's hard to seal thousands of miles of mostly rural unmanned land border, it shouldn't be impossible to insulate yourself from the pathologies of a small distant island. Except that, just as Muslims kneel toward Mecca, Canadians only point fingers toward Washington.
The Liberals seem exhausted, barely able to keep up the pretense that they've got anything more than condescending placebo policies for the years ahead.
In recent elections, they've run on the Hilaire Belloc platform:
"Always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse."
But something worse is already here, and Platitudinous Paul has no idea what to do about it.