Thought for the Day

If I were a left-of-centre party desperately seeking concrete differences with the Liberals, I’d be awfully interested in the case of Omar Khadr, the former child soldier whose abuse at Guantanamo Bay has by now been amply documented.

[...]

The Liberals are, of course, making a fuss about all this. But the problem for the Liberals is that when that video footage of Khadr's Guantanamo interrogation was shot, Jean Chrétien was the prime minister of Canada. Defending the Liberals' seriously late-breaking interest in the quality of treatment accorded Guantanamo prisoners is tricky, as Megapundit points out. This should, it seems to me, present an opportunity for the NDP, who could say — truthfully — "The Liberals let this happen and the Conservatives refuse to bring it to an end."

— Paul Wells, Inkless Wells

I think every Canadian should be required to watch the Khadr video.

Telling a Book By Its Terrorist Fist Jabs

I was catching up on Paul Wells' blog this morning, and this particular bit stuck out to me. It's regarding the New Yorker/Obama cover. Wells writes:

Does anybody actually believe the above cover is the product of a New Yorker vendetta against Barack Obama and his wife? Did anybody actually look at the cover and say, "Wow, hate literature. These folks at this New Yorker publication seem to harbour many grudges against that fine upstanding Barack Obama fellow and, I would go so far as to suspect, against liberals in general and many other decent folk as well"?

Or — and this is crucial, and I see it about a hundred times a week in political circles — did more people tell themselves something that sounded a little more like, "Well, I get it — I see the joke, funny or lame — but I'm quite sure the simple folk, the ordinary voter who is far less sophisticated in these matters than I am… well, they can't be expected to understand a joke! And therefore I am outraged on their behalf, for I am ever steadfast in my solidarity with the ordinary cretin who can't be expected to reason things through for himself!"

Because you get a lot of that around here. Politics is full of people who think they're the only one to get a joke, to see through a fake candidate, to hear the lie in a disingenuous argument, to see the double agenda in a policy stance. I once wrote column about the myth of the "electable candidate" — Wesley Clark, Belinda Stronach, André Boisclair, there’s always another. The gist was that when somebody says "Well, yeah, but he's electable," what they usually mean is that while they see right through a candidate's limitations, they don't expect ordinary people to be nearly as insightful. I strongly suspect the same condescending instinct is at play in this monumentally inflated controversy...

I don't think that I agree with what Wells is saying. But it's a ponder-worthy comment.