Building On What Pogge Said:

Here:

I'm sure the Conservatives would love to see this whole issue of torture turn into a partisan free-for-all that the general public will then tune out as being simply more of the same nonsense that they've come to expect from the overgrown children in Ottawa. You're now helping them and making it appear as though the NDP is only too happy to use human rights as a partisan issue.

I commented that I understood what Layton was trying to do, but that I agreed with pogge that it might not be good optics to make this entirely partisan.

If I ever remember not to drink some spare forty bucks, I'll rejoin the NDP.

That said, I think you've got a good point there pogge. I'm not sure that I agree with you 100% but i'm not sure that I 100% agree with Layton trying to position the NDP as the party with the least baggage on this defining issue.

So I would have kept my mouth shut about Ignatieff and kept the focus on harper if i were Layton.

I'm now of the opinion that it would be tactically best if Layton and the NDP would refrain from attacking the Libs where they're weak until they've managed to bring down stephen harper and his "conservative" idiots and assorted scum-bags.

The opposition should form a united front of outrage and focused vengeance upon the harpercons. The Liberals can do a great job mustering soaring heights of moral rhetoric against the evil that the harpercons have done, and THEN, when Canadians have been instructed on the enormity of these crimes, the NDP can turn on the Liberals. If they have to they should allow the Liberals to restrict the timeline of any investigation to exclude their own culpability. In whatever follows, the rhetoric of the Liberals can be turned against them on the campaign trail.

Why am I talking about such a clear-cut moral issue along lines of partisan opportunism? Because I believe it is a moral imperative to destroy both of these mainstream parties. Both these parties dragged Canada into this mess and down into the muck. The harpercons have proven themselves absolutely evil on so many fronts (Aboriginals, Muslim-Canadians, Global Warming, poverty, the tar-sands) and the Liberals debased us in Haiti, and most of 'em would have dragged us into Iraq, and, finally, Igantieff thinks the tar-sands project is awesome. The NDP is an uncertain instrument, but they're a step in the right direction away from all of that evil and insanity. If the NDP can only help destroy one of these parties (the worst one, the most right-wing one) then that is a worthy goal.

But I believe that destroying the harpercons requires Liberal help. A united opposition against a minority government, in the face of pretty obvious committment of war-crimes by said government, can and must bring the guilty individuals to justice. harper is scared, but he might not be as scared as he should be, as he deserves to be. Because he was at the head of a government that committed war-crimes and that must mean a prison sentence.

That's what this means. That's what this HAS to mean. We have signed-on to a horrible project. We are imposing a brutal, corrupt, puppet-government on a desperately poor people. We are bombing villages from the skies because some insurgents might be sheltering among them, killing dozens of innocent civilians at a time. Because of a lack of competent translators we are handing over innocent bystanders to be raped and tortued in Karzai's prisons. We are shitting all over the values that we are supposed to represent.

Every single defender of this atrocity, every single politician who is responsible for this nightmare, ALL OF THEM must accept their responsibility with humilty and penitence. And it is long past time that we should suffer their continued ravings.