Why I Hate the Liberal Party

OMIGOD!! The politics of hate! Don't be a hater! You're blinded by your hate. Hate is a crude, dangerous emotion.

Anyway, ... I do hate the Liberal Party. And I need to write a post for today, and my deep hatred for the Liberal Party is always coming to the forefront when I'm trying to think of what to type.

I hate them because they obfuscate Canadians' political choices. In the first half of the 20th century, Liberals were better able to articulate their awareness of the changing needs of Canadian society as it transformed from rural-agricultural to urban-industrial. (That having been said, it was the Conservative Party that did most to create this urban-industrial society, and that at both levels of government created many noteworthy institutions such as Workers' Compensation, Ontario-Hydro, and others.)

But as the more forward thinking of the two main parties, the Liberals were better placed to learn the lessons of the Great Depression than the Conservatives, and were therefore more able to recognize the worth of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation's ideas, ... and, yes, ... steal many of them.

And you could get a lot done for the average Canadian by being a Liberal, voting Liberal, or working for the Liberals up until the 1970s when the economy was expanding and laisse-faire was greatly discredited. But they were always, first and foremost, a liberal-capitalist party, and when the chips came down in the late-1970s, this capitalist element made itself apparent.

But to this day, the Liberals continue to trade-off this illusion that they're the party of the welfare state. Chretien's claim that "Liberal times are good times," (as he said after his 1993 victory) was meant to harken back to the days of the Liberals in the 1970s, after two terms of the Mulroney Progressive Conservatives. But what did Chretien do? Together with Paul Martin, they dismantled federal housing, slashed financial assistance to the provinces for healthcare and education, signed NAFTA, destroyed Haitian democracy, took us into Afghanistan, and gave tax-cut after tax-cut, mainly to corporations and the wealthy, in order to whittle-away at the surpluses (always hidden until the last minute) in order to bring government's contribution to the economy down to 1950s levels.

That's why the NDP will spend at least as much time attacking the Liberals. Because while the Conservatives are now comprised of the most nauseating stew of blatant corporate con-men and thieves, and a hard-core base of fundamentalist whack-jobs and closet-cases, the Liberals don't present much different so far as ordinary Canadians' standards of living go. And it's the Canadians tempted to vote Liberal out of a lingering delusion that the Liberal Party will genuinely help them, who are the people who might vote NDP were their eyes truly open to the way things work in Canada and the world. The Conservative voting base isn't going to be persuaded to vote NDP as a result of being convinced by stinging critiques of the Harper government on the part of Jack Layton. (For the most part, they'll hear the critique and come up with a lame-ass response that will be incomprehensible to ordinary, sane people.)

The Liberal Party should die. It should get out of the way. There's a battle to be fought, and one-side is slavering with bloodlust (the Conservative Party of Canada/SDA crowd) and the other is being duped and deluded by these corporate Quislings standing between the bloodthirsty and the virtuous.

[I'm sure everyone will like my Manichean depiction of the situation!! :) ]