Thanks to National Newswatch for linking to this unintentionally hysterical end-of-year sympathy-cry for the hapless Leader of the Opposition, Michael Ignatieff, courtesy of the shameless Susan Delacourt of The Toronto Star.

First, the lede:

…doesn’t he just want to give up, go back to his charmed life as an international academic and writer?

“Never,” Ignatieff says. “I’m here. I’m staying. I’m not going anywhere.”

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Iggy in 2009, it’s that his tough talk is a complete sham. Why even pretend you’re an alpha-male, Iggy? Fact is, the only thing in your control is where you live (Toronto or Cambridge). He could be turfed out the back door just like his predecessor, Steffi, as soon as tomorrow for all we know. That much is up to the Liberal power brokers – not Iggy.

Next, Susan on how his ambitious turnaround plans will start:

As soon as the Liberal leader returns from an extended Christmas holiday – destination kept secret – he is headed out on the road, to connect with university students and rooms full of what he calls the “unconverted.”

Everyone can relate to those leaders who, when times get tough, go on extended vacations. And when Liberals need to convert the unconverted, of course they go straight to where a Liberal can hardly be found – the university campus! More on that:

“We’re going to universities. It’s important to preach to the unconverted. Some of what I have to do is rally the base, raise money. But the stuff I enjoy the most is going into rooms that aren’t full of Liberals – university crowds, university students are the future of Canadian politics and we have to get to them.”

A parody writer couldn’t have done a better job inventing the character, “Delusional lefty politician”.

As usual in the mainstream press, the important and valuable insight can be gleaned by reading the story bottom-up. The final paragraph contains Iggy’s depressing vision of Canada. Does he speak of freedom? Opportunity? Prosperity? Northern toughness? Achievement? How about even the basic Liberal boilerplate of Human Rights, Equality and Multiculturalism? Well, high-minded dreamers, here’s Canada in the mind of the man who wants to be your Prime Minister:

“I think it’s a small-l liberal country and I don’t want that to sound arrogant,” Ignatieff says. “I think that the country is small-l liberal in that it believes passionately in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It believes in publicly funded health care. It believes that Canadians should not be abandoned when they lose their jobs, they need help and training. It believes that anybody who has good grades to get through school should get all the education our society can provide. This stuff hasn’t moved very much.”

“It believes passionately in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms” – I don’t think so. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of Canadians could not recite a single line from the charter, and at least 50% wouldn’t even be able to tell you a single concept contained therein. Many Canadians are told that they believe passionately in the Charter; but most have no clue what that even means.

“It believes in publicly funded health care” – that’s number two on our list, how we pay our doctors? Makes us sound like a country of soulless bean-counters, not human beings.

“It believes that Canadians should not be abandoned when they lose their jobs” – amazingly, dear leader can’t even come up with a third point of vision, and reverts instinctively to petty partisanship, as if helping the unemployed is somehow an issue of controversy.

“It believes that anybody who has good grades to get through school should get all the education our society can provide” – he’s a professor, an author, a journalist, and a political leader; and yet, he can’t even compose a coherent sentence on the topic of education as a national value. Cue the parody writer again: Idiotic academic who can’t even master the art of bullshit.

The dreariness of this man! Enjoy that vacation, dear sir. For a non-entity, it can neither hurt nor help.

Next time a newspaper editorial tries to convince you that Ontario’s multi-billion-dollar HST tax grab is a good thing for the people of the province, ask the newspaper this: if it’s so great, then why did you pay the Canadian Newspaper Association to spend months lobbying (successfully) for an exemption?

The Globe and Mail really is a sad old hag of a newspaper. In 2,200 words filling 51 paragaphs of dense, unreadable tripe, “investigative journalist” Kirk Makin reveals what I could have told you in one sentence: Liberal-appointed judges, defense lawyers, and ivory-tower intellectuals don’t like the Conservative government and their tightening of the criminal justice system.

Outside of Liberal-appointed judges, defense lawyers, ivory-tower intellectuals (and their sycophants), and criminals themselves, who exactly opposes: closing the 2-for-1 loophole; making the system less arbitrary by enforcing mandatory sentences; and ending the “faint hope” clause that allows first-degree murderers a chance to earn the freedom that their innocent victims can never, ever regain? (I’d call it the “endless nightmare” clause if it was a member of my family that was murdered.)

Congratulations, Globe. You’ve once again led with “Dog Bites Man”. Now (despite David Frum), get me my Post…

Despite growing up in a largely hedonistic liberal-Jewish community and family, I never felt comfortable with left-leaning politics or the cultural mores of those around me. Although my conservative awakening started to emerge quite early (I remember feeling great sympathy for Preston Manning and his Reform movement for the snobbish bashing he was taking back in the early 1990s, when I was barely 20), it took until sometime just after 9/11/2001 for me to finally and forever consider myself “of the right”. As liberals – whose propaganda throughout my youth created the myth of “liberal compassion” versus “right-wing hate” (as in “The Holocaust is what happens when the right gains power”) – fell over themselves to make excuses for Islamic hatred, ignore the celebrations in the Arab street, promote the non-existent “anti-Muslim backlash”, and in many cases not-so-subtly imply that “America had it coming” (as if the hundreds of children whose fathers would never come home to tuck them in to bed at night ever again were somehow acceptable collateral damage in some sort of acceptable counter-attack to some sort of unacceptable American sin), I discovered the truth – that “liberal compassion” is indeed a myth, and the reality is that liberalism is cruel, selfish, and harmful. (The next major event to confirm this conclusion came a couple of years later, when liberals from Nantes to Nunavut were adamant to diagnose with certainty that a woman in a home for the disabled in Pinellas Park, Florida was brain dead, and insisted she be starved to death for the convenience and profit of her conniving husband).

For “Robin of Berkeley” (the pseudonym for a Berkeley, California based psychotherapist and former leftist who now writes for The American Thinker), the realization that liberalism really stands for cruelty came only after 30 years of hard-left activism. Probably in her 40s now, Robin abandoned liberalism and swung to the right less than two years ago, and gained affirmation that “everything I believed was wrong” in last year’s US election campaign thanks to the obscene treatment of, first, Hillary Clinton, and then Sarah Palin. I highly recommend going back and reading Robin’s earliest entries in her regular American Spectator career by browsing her columns here, particularly for her views on Clinton’s treatment; however, I insist you read her latest installment, “The Wilding of Sarah Palin”. In the column, she reveals the ugly parallels between the left’s hard-core sexualization, dehumanization, and humiliation of the Vice Presidential candidate, and the use of gang-rape as a tool of intimidation, dehumanization and humiliation in tribal war. By violating Palin and her family in the most personal way, the left seeks to both destroy Sarah Palin as a human being, and emasculate the men of the conservative movement who stand by powerless to stop the abuse.

The paradox here is that the Palin phenomenon is only gaining steam, as the former Alaska governor continues her rise to prominence and power. This is because, unlike the tribal primitivism that still dominates much of the world and still informs the sensibilities of the left, the progressive world of Sarah Palin and the American heartland does not believe that a raped woman has been shamed and must submit to a shunned second-class status or worse. Thank God, most Americans believe that a raped woman is simply a victim with the power to recover and come back stronger; in a civilized society, it is the rapist that must be shunned and must submit to a second-class status or worse.

It doesn’t take much more than a pinch of wisdom to recognize who, in any public persecution, is the rape-victim, and who is the rapist. It does, however, take great moral weakness to allow the rapists of “your team” get away with it. It takes great intellectual weakness to delude yourself into confusing which party is the victim, and which the perpetrator, or to use the “slutty dress” defense to convince yourself that “she had it coming”. And it takes a great spiritual emptiness to sit back and enjoy the wilding of an innocent woman, guffawing at the latest Palin joke as another installment of today’s soul-destroying revel-in-the-brutalizing-of-people-for-televised-amusement culture.

(h/t goes to The Tammy Bruce Show for this one. Listen to the former radical feminist Tammy for a month, and you’ll understand the left for a lifetime.)

(For more on the near-equivalence between the rape of a body and the rape of a name, read Dennis Prager’s seminal column, “The Rape of a Name is Also Rape”.)

a) Whine, complain, smoke pot and enter the cult of Ayn Rand?

b) Listen to the David Frum defeatists, ditch her principles, and tie herself into knots trying to figure out a way to make “Climate Change” a Republican issue?

c) Succumb to peer pressure, mock Sarah Palin, take a job with AmeriCorps, and fit in with the cool kids?

d) Spend her summer and her savings traveling the country dressed like a prostitute, get priceless undercover footage of crime in progress, bust corruption, and take down a major peg in the arsenal of one Barack Hussein Obama.

For doing something positive with her youth, for being David to ACORN’s Goliath, for exposing herself to law suits and leftist harassment, and for poking a huge hole in the prestige of the Marxist-Demagogue-In-Chief, Hannah Giles has earned a spot in my Hall of Fame. I’m sending $15 to her legal defense fund at http://www.defendhannah.com.

To you non-conservatives who revel in attacking Palin, Carrie Prejean, Giles, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Tammy Bruce, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and other women who refuse to submit to the tyranny of liberal orthodoxy: the jig is up, you’ve been exposed again. Because you know better than I do: there’s no bigger threat to the “progressive” cause than attractive and articulate female heretics.

Barack Obama’s 2008 voting base can be broken down into three main groups: “The Grad School Left”, who understood perfectly who the man was and what the codes he was speaking meant; “Democrat Tribalists”, who have a pathological hatred of Republicans and would have voted for the remains of Michael Jackson if that is who the Democrat Party nominated; and “Barackolytes”, the dreamy-eyed celebrity-obsessed masses who ignored content, context, and all concepts of common sense, and essentially laid supine saying “Lie to me, sexy!”

The Barackolytes who believed this oft-repeated applause line last fall:

Should watch this and finally say, “the right was right – he is what they said he is”:

John Tory, hoping to hand Toronto back to Miller again.

I am a Toronto homeowner. I am a small-c conservative and a big-C Conservative. I have seen the NDP’s union and activist-owned David Miller turn a mediocre city into a disastrous one over the past five years.

I have met John Tory. I like John Tory. I supported John Tory in 2003 when he lost to Miller, a socialist in disguise with zero public profile. I supported John Tory as leader of the Ontario PC party against Dalton “Not a Leader” McGuinty in 2007. I supported a massive failure both times, when the man snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

John Tory is a nice guy. Good businessman. Good husband and father. Good connections. Smart as a whip. Would love to play golf with him.

JOHN TORY IS A POLITICAL FAILURE. HE HAS THE POLITICAL INSTINCTS OF A ROAD PYLON. HE WILL HAND TORONTO BACK TO THE NDP AGAIN IF HE RUNS FOR MAYOR YET AGAIN.

There are two men I can see who could galvanize the public against the leftist-unionist block that is destroying this city. If you think a Mel Lastman-style unpolished firebrand is best to advance a common sense agenda, support Councillor Rob Ford, Etobicoke North Ward 2. If you think a more polished, serious, hard-working potential media superstar with less small-c conservative cred, but who came from nothing and whose thinking always seems to start with individual citizens and local neighbourhoods, support Scarborough Centre Councillor Michael Thompson.

Listen: you can make a business deal with a smile and a pat on the back. You can solve corporate problems on the golf course. But you can’t win an election against leftists without fire in the belly. You can’t win an election against leftists without the instincts of a shark. You can’t inspire the people if the people can’t identify with you. The people can’t identify with John Tory, and they never will. John, get out of the way, stop sucking the energy out of the opposition room, and let a competent politician do what it takes to bring down the blood suckers.

Much has been said about the situation in Iran over the past couple of weeks. The images of peaceful opposition demonstrators, and the thuggery displayed by the Islamic Revolutionary rulers of Iran, speak for themselves. It was absolutely clear: the demonstrations were not about vote-counting fraud, or about the non-reformist “reformer” Mousavi. The demonstrations were about freedom. Handed an opening by Mousavi and his brave wife (who seemed to be the one pushing her husband far beyond where he ever expected to go in his opposition to the Mullahs), hundreds of thousands of fed up Iranians took to the streets and shouted “Down with the Dictator”. While many in the west took this as opposition to the psychopathic lackey Ahmadinejad, Iranians know this was a chant not against the apocalyptic holocaust denier, but against the Ayatolla and the regime itself. The vast majority of Iranians are fed up with Islamic revolutionary rule. The vast majority of Iranians want a new revolution.

Now, what Western liberal wouldn’t stand with freedom-yearning demonstrators against a tyrannical theocracy? Ten years ago, you probably couldn’t find one. And yet liberals throughout the Western world followed their new messiah, Barack Obama, off an amoral cliff, ignored their own instincts, and worked overtime to justify the US administration’s official policy: do not show any support for the Iranian opposition. “Don’t meddle”…”if we speak up, they will blame us”…”we don’t want to encourage them, in case they get slaughtered”…”we still have shame because of some 1953 coup”. 

The cowardice displayed by most liberals over the past two weeks is the cost of the liberal tribalism of the past decade. Lefties everywhere spent eight years following orders: oppose, mock, and deride George W. Bush without hesitation. If it’s Republican, it’s wrong. If you’re part of the liberal tribe, you fall in line, and accept the new marching orders. Mockery of Bush’s freedom agenda, which aimed to support democracy and freedom anywhere and everywhere – a bipartisan agenda if there ever was one – was labeled “neo-con” and thus unacceptable. A principled position became Bush-bashing fodder for Democrat operatives and late-night television idealogues. Millions of Iraqis celebrating free and open elections joyously in the streets were ignored almost completely by the mainstream culture. A generation’s Berlin Wall moment was treated like it never even happened.

Liberal tribalism of this most heinous kind got Barack Obama elected. Unfortunately, it seems that the President not only accepts the anti-freedom-agenda as a tribal position, he takes it seriously. His absoulte abandonment of the young freedom protestors in the streets of Tehran led to the slaughter of many, the arresting of thousands, and the snuffing out of freedom at the hands of Islamo-fascist thugs. Would the crackdown have occurred anyway? Perhaps. But the message would have been sent: the free world supports freedom for all, and stands against thuggery everywhere. Now, we cannot say this, which is a travesty.

Now that the inconvenient little uprising is more-or-less over, Obama can return to negotiating with that “unclenched fist”. Hopefully, some of Obama’s tribal acolytes will have had their eyes opened, and understand that what has happened is an absolute moral tragedy that must never happen again. This shame cannot be washed off.

With an extremely busy and challenging few months ahead with my business, and a home life that includes raising two energetic little boys aged 1 and 3, I’m putting Flaggman’s Canada on hiatus until Summer 2009. I apologize to my loyal readers, and I look forward to returning later in the year. In the meantime, in this age of “Stimulus Spending”, read the timeless wisdom of the late, great Milton Friedman, and commit it to memory:

There are four ways in which you can spend money.

1) You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.

2) You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.

3) I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!

4) Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government.

When it comes to covering big-time political events, Winnipeg-based Charles Adler is every bit the equal to his talk radio peers in the US who command daily audiences in the millions (unfortunately, he’s not nearly as good on a day-to-day basis, but we take what we can get). Yesterday, he was at his best with this 12-minute monologue on Iggy, the Coalition, and the Conservative budget, titled “The Great Abandoner” (click on the arrow below to listen, and make sure you stick with it to the end – it gets better as it goes along). Tells you all you need to know about Michael Ignatieff, the new crown-prince-in-waiting of the Canadian media elite:

Read the text here at Fullcomment.com, and join the conversation!