No "Knock-Out Blow" Against harper???

 I'm glad that I didn't watch that debate a few days ago. Something told me that none of harper's opponents would be able to deliver the metaphorical "knock-out blow." Even though I, personally, believe it would be amazingly easy to neutralize him. Knock him out? It would be easy to knock him down and pound him into sauce.

Remember the 2011 debates? When the wooden Ignatieff, and the gentlemanly Layton and the wily Duceppe spent more time arguing about economics with harper (which, given Ignatieff and Layton's mainstream delusions, was the equivalent of fighting with one arm tied behind one's back) rather than upon his dreadful record of abusing our system of parliamentary democracy?

There was one moment when they could have had him. harper had only recently been spewing about how the proposed Liberal-NDP coalition was an anti-democratic "coup" and this was only made worse by the participation of the evil separatist Bloc Quebecois. The trouble for harper was that he proposed the exact same thing with the NDP and the BQ against the Liberals when he was in opposition.

Well, at one of the debates, Layton (I think it was him) brought up this example of Grade AAA hypocrisy, and for a moment or two, harper was reduced to silence. Then Layton stupidly threw it all away by needlessly saying that he'd never signed-on to harper's proposal to the Governor-General. That caused Duceppe to interject that Layton had very much done so, they proceeded to bicker about that, and the moment had passed. Layton forgot that the prime enemy was harper and that the thrust of the attack should have been on harper's hypocrisy and that efforts to deny any connection between the NDP and the BQ would only confuse the issue.

We can't land a knock-out blow on harper's record?

Not on the abuse of Canadian workers and migrant workers under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program?

Not on the rise of household debt in Canada (which has been the maintenance of the construction boom that accounts for 19% of the Canadian GDP)?

Not on his abuse of veterans?

Not on his cowardice of running into the closet and abandoning his MP minions?

Not on the Lac Megantic rail disaster?

Not on the lying to Parliament about the war he was sending us into?

Not on his serial omnibus legislation?

Not on closing the B.C. Coast Guard base?

And on and on and on.

Watching his rival candidates fail to land a "knock-out blow" on harper makes me wonder if this whole process isn't a pantomime and we're all in a reality show set out to discover just how gullible and apathetic a group of people can be. But nobody is that smart or powerful. This is, apparently, the best we can do.

And why not? Radicals and Progressives imagine that milling about in the streets chanting for an hour is "power" and "transformative." Why shouldn't the professionals be similarly deluded and limited?