The ‘Coup’ Changes Faces
The CBC is now reporting Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion will step down on Monday. This is to apparently allow a new leader to take over the Liberal Party and be in place when the parliament reconvenes in January.
The comments on the article are getting a little extreme. One person actually suggested that Canada move to the same system that the US has. “My friends”, look at the last 8 years and tell me: do you really want this system in Canada? Trust me, the ability to get rid of an unpopular government with a minimum of effort is a right to be cherished.
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i used to think that having a conservative government — conservative with a small c, as in one that doesn’t change much over the years — was a good thing. this was back in the early 80s, a year or two after reagan took office, and i remember thinking even if we’re stuck with 8 years of this, there’s no way he can *permanently* derail the government.
ah well, you’re only young and stupid once, and if you’re fortunate you outgrow both of those.
meanwhile, this is a bad thing for a treehugger to say, but i sooooo want global warming to hurry up and get here and make it warm enough for me to move to canada.
The thing to remember about Canada is that the Conservative Party would be considered to the left of the US Democratic Party in most of the world, although they are actually quite similar to the DLC, except for the support of the Canadian Single-Payer system.
Moscow has been running about 7° C about normal for a while this winter, so the time is coming.
well, my original plan was for the bushies to antagonize the canucks enough that they’d get mad and invade us, bringing us their healthcare and gasoline from their tar sands, and employing our migrant workers. then they could take on mexico as a protectorate and we’d be all set.
oh well, best-laid plans of mice, men, and bloggers gang aft agley. otoh, if their govt stays dlc-ish enough, maybe they’ll be able to convince obama of the merits of single payer. that only seems like a fair exchange in return for austan goolsbee, dlc economist and obama advisor, earlier assuring canada that we didn’t really mean it about nafta.
I’m not sure that the Obama administration “means” anything, until some actual action. If they introduce any health care plan that includes the insurance companies, it will be a failure, as anyone who has studied the problem knows.
I thought for a while the Hedgemony was going to actually start a war with Canada over lumber, but that seems to have calmed down.
Apparently we aren’t supposed to be negative until we can prove in court that the next administration will be a center right government.
oh, i’ve been very positive in all my suggestions so far.
not that anybody there seems to be listening, but that’s never been enough to stop me from sharing my opinions before.
“people hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest…”
I don’t expect anything from these people, so I won’t be disappointed. I didn’t vote for them because they aren’t progressive, so all I can do is watch all those who deceived themselves figure it out.
Does this conversation represent “the ‘oh, dash it all’ of hope”?
I am unsurprised by Obama’s announcements to this point. I did not expect a liberal administration, and we’re not getting one. So be it. IMHO, a competent Chicago machine politician like Obama is so highly likely to be vastly preferable to the Bush clown act that I cheerfully voted for Obama, eyes wide open. (Badtux describes the phenomenon well in a thread downstream.)
I didn’t believe, so I had no hopes to be dashed. I’m waiting to see if we can return to Constitution. If that doesn’t happen, it may be time to move beyond blogging, or perhaps out of the US.
well, i voted for obama in the spirit of tony soprano, or perhaps tony rezko — i’ve given obama something, now i’ll be asking for a few things in return….
i still think obama would truly like to go down in history as the next fdr, and i’m positive that his ego is big enough that this could be a good leverage point. getting my lefty hands on the other end of that lever is going to be hard part.
I wish you luck, Hipparchia, but I heard more Reagan than Roosevelt – FDR or TR.
yep, lots of reagan. i’ve been reading about jon ‘favs’ favreau now that the photo has hit the fan — he’s been quoted as saying that his favorite speechwriters are peggy noonan and michael gerson.
among other things of course, i have to hope that adam frankel [another of obama’s speechwriters] is wrong about the 20-somethings.
given the speechwriting team that obama ended up with, it’s easy to see why he appealed so strongly to the demographic he did [young, male, too kewl to belong to any party], but i’m cynical enough to believe he’s just as likely to throw them under the bus as any of his other supporters.
his track record is that of someone who will give lip service to the little people while actually siding with the corporations, and i don’t expect him to move to the left of that, certainly not on his own. but if there’s any way to push/pull/jerk/shove him to the left at all, i think that’s the chink in the armor to go after.
plan b, runnung concurrently with plan a as outlined above, is to keep driving my elderly clunker, spewing plenty of carbon dioxide into the air in an effort to raise canada’s temperatures enough so i can stand to live there.
With snow today in NOLA and the way weather is changing, we may yet swap climates with Ontario. The key is to live on the North or West of the lakes to avoid the really troublesome snow.
He has record, and there’s nothing to indicate he will take on the corporations, but we’ll, unfortunately, have to wait and see what happens.
Yeah, his creative team is not exactly a “next of liberals and anarchists”, but thinking Peggy Noonan can write is a bit extreme.