Monday, August 17, 2009

The Old Liberal Party

Lost in the coverage of the New Democrats' uber-successful convention in HFX09, is this very strange editorial that appeared in the Toronto Star on Friday.

The most baffling part comes in these concluding lines:

"Lately, the overarching strategy of the federal NDP seems to have been to destroy the Liberal party. To that end, the New Democrats have combined with the Conservatives to defeat Paul Martin's Liberal government (thereby consigning a national daycare program and the Kelowna aboriginal accord to the trash bin) and to demonize Stephane Dion's proposed carbon tax (thereby setting back the cause of containing greenhouse gas emissions).

The chief beneficiaries of this strategy have been not the NDP but Harper's Conservatives. Time for some new thinking, not a new name."

Really? Paul Martin? Are you for real? You mean the guy who was Prime Minister for a couple of weeks four years ago? Is anyone actually lamenting the loss of a guy who spent most of his life aspiring and conspiring for a job that he couldn't make any sense of once he got it? Anyone??

How is it precisely that anyone in the New Democratic Party should be responsible for rehabilitating the tattered memory of what is universally regarded as a hapless Liberal government / leader? Liberals still have their own soul searching to do.

It's rich for Liberals and their messengers at the editorial board of the Toronto Star say others are in need of "new thinking," when it is so clearly they who are living in the past.