The Tragedy of Dana

Now, here's the thing: The Mound of Sound has every right to be horrified at the significance of global warming. He knows more than I do about it. According to David Suzuki, only the Green Party platform appears to take the problem as seriously as it deserves to be. That's why MoS is voting Green. And good for him.

I first took issue with him though, when he decided to pompously and self-righteously accuse anyone thinking of voting for any other non-harper party as being complete moral failures, and, in fact, immoral monsters. People who couldn't make themselves believe that Green Party support in their area would quintuple and make negligible the difficulties of our first-past-the-post electoral system, and who therefore thought they'd vote for the most likely anti-harper contender were evil people, condemning the MoS's grandchildren to blah, blah, blah.

Thankfully, thanks to the spanking I administered to him, he's stopped that nonsense.

But then, sadly, having abandoned his "all or nothing" mentality, he's decided to (as an ex-Liberal) lecture all the "dippers" about how "GASP!" the NDP has abandoned principles for power! It's attacking the Liberals instead of harper! Mulcair is angry and has a beard!! Mulcair is a dictator!!!

When all of these accusations (aside from the beard, and maybe the angry thing) could apply to Trudeau as well. I mean, if he really doesn't give a shit who wins, why should he revel in the evil that is the NDP and its tyrannical despotic leader Angry Tom With the Beard (SUPER GASP! HE SAYS HE'LL TRY TO ABOLISH THE SENATE!!!! Wait, ... what???) ? If he's truly indifferent, why reduce himself to being a lying, hypocritical partisan hack? I don't know. Maybe because he's a stupid asshole?

Now, from time-to-time I've complained here about the tiresome "Scotian." His mind went off the rails years ago and he's just positively swoonful over the dreamy Liberal Party of Canada because don't you know he was called a "Cassandra" when he predicted blah, blah, blah. And his wife used to be a hard-boiled dipper but now she boils over with anger when you mention blah, blah, blah. And (like the MoS) Scotian believes in the lie that if it weren't for the saintly Paul Martin, Canada would be run by the IMF today. All of this delivered in densely-packed, multi-paragraph tirades. (Oh yeah! One example of the depths of his fanaticism; stephen harper once blathered that the Japanese tsunami tragedy was a sign that we have to keep his steady hand on Canada's economic tiller. People were trashing harper for that bit of nauseating self-serving drivel, but somehow Scotian took it as an opportunity to bash Tom Mulcair, for reasons that escape me.)

I've given Scotian the challenge of addressing any of my criticisms here, with the proviso that he take no more than four sentences to actually get to the fucking point and then stay on the points and argue with them. I notice he hasn't. Instead he's back at MoS's place lying about my ad hominem attacks.

Which brings me to MoS & Scotian's partner in crime, Dana. And Dana's case is particularly serious and I want to address it seriously. (I've actually been treating ALL of this seriously. MoS's self-righteous hypocrisy and his FUCKING LYING, Scotian's inability to do anything but interminable whining pomposity. But Dana I'll treat at length here. In the comments of the MoS piece that was, for me, the straw that broke the camel's back, and where my criticisms have been mucked about by Scotian, Dana says the following:

In 2006 both The Kelowna Accord and the National Early Childhood Education Program had been successfully negotiated and were being finalized. 
At that time the NDP had a choice. They could have supported both of these worthy endeavours, which were long held and articulated NDP priorities, and assisted the Martin minority government in bringing them to fruition. 
Or they could have supported the Harper Conservatives who they knew full well were deeply opposed to both and would immediately destroy both programs should they gain the opportunity. 
The NDP chose to align themselves with the party they knew would destroy the programs. 
That was unforgivable then and it remains so now. 
And it's become worse since. The NDP now supports arms sales to repressive regimes, for just one example. 
I used to be the pre-rally protest and labour song guy on the stage at the old Trianon Ballroom in Regina back in the day. I've been a party supporter since my teens and I'm 67 now. 
I'll have nothing to do with them anymore.

Now then, the Kelowna Accord and the National Childcare program, ... yes. Apparently good things from "Mr. Dithers." The latter one had been promised in 19-fucking and-93, but better late than never I suppose. Especially in the third year of a minority government. The Kelowna Accord? A (too late) death-bed conversion for the Liberal Party that had happily presided over DECADES of neglect and poverty on First Nations reserves, together with the [Progressive] Conservatives. I suppose that was going to have been a good thing too.

But I don't see this as the good work of a good man brought down by the vile, self-serving Jack Layton. I see these things as two means whereby the greatest enemy of the welfare-state to date was seeking to do something to reverse the ten years of austerity, rising inequality, devastation to health care, wholesale looting of the Unemployment Insurance fund, insane imperialism and enabling of right-wing provincial premiers to themselves attack medicare and education, that preceded these two programs.

I have to tell you, by 2003, I was heartily sick of the Liberals and their right-wing bullshit. Paul Martin bragged about reducing the federal state's economic contributions to 1950's levels. Fact.

Layton had a choice? Why, yes he did! AND SO DID PAUL MARTIN! In a goddamned minority-government situation, Paul "Austerity" Martin could have bit the bullet and agreed with Layton's request that he stop the creeping privatization of our health care system. Do you grasp this? Layton was asking Martin that if he were serious about these two proposals and wanted to see them implemented; if he wanted to preserve his government and win the chance to amend his track record of abusive austerity, that he had to do one more thing.

And Martin consciously and deliberately refused.

What do Liberals want? Praise to the skies for some progressive legislation while they commit to wholesale neo-liberalism everywhere else? Like Kathleen Wynne with her "progressive budget" campaign which is followed by selling Ontario Hydro, declaring war on the teacher's unions, and continued abuses of the First Nations. According to Liberals, we're supposed to be grateful for the occasional crumbs that fall out of their pockets (whereas billions fall out of their pockets for the wealthy and the well-connected).

Then, Dana tries to make opposition to Paul Martin's destruction of medicare as somehow being alignment with the Conservatives. The sheer idiocy of it. The NDP believes that the difference between the Liberals and the Conservatives is negligible. Therefore, voting down a Liberal fuckwad like Paul Martin, who deliberately refused to stop de-funding Canada's national health insurance program, is simply that: Voting down a Liberal fuckwad. The goal was to weaken the Liberals and give the NDP more power, not to elevate stephen harper to the PM.

Dana should remember that the NDP has always been opposed to the Liberals. For decades before 2003. It was in all the newspapers.

But, finally, Dana gets around to the NDP's lurch to the centre, Mulcair's dreadful foreign policy thinking, and I agree with him. Search this blog. I'm not a fan of Mulcair. I despise the lurch to the centre as misguided, self-destructive and stupid. But let's continue:

I used to be the pre-rally protest and labour song guy on the stage at the old Trianon Ballroom in Regina back in the day. I've been a party supporter since my teens and I'm 67 now. I'll have nothing to do with them anymore.

And here we come to something very serious. Dana was a long-time social democrat, labour song guy. He's disgusted with the rightward turn of the NDP. So what does he do? Aligns himself with a former Liberal hack, who obviously still carries a torch for the Liberal Party. Because the Liberal Party never attacks the NDP. The Liberal Party never puts power before principles. The Liberal Party never voted for rotten Conservative Party legislation. The truest champion of the anti-harper team is the Liberal Party of Canada.  [Puke.]

But both of these guys have decided to throw their main support behind the Green Party of Canada. Because in maybe 50 years (if our democracy, or even our civilization last that long), then the Greens can become successful enough that they care about pissing-off an entire province because it might be the difference between power and irrelevance. But while both these guys are still alive they can bathe in the soothing waters of moral purity.

Here's the thing. I'm on record as stating I don't care who beats harper. So long as we beat harper. A small part of me would prefer an NDP-led minority, because I think it would mean a lot of people were voting for the idea of what the NDP used to mean, and have been entirely oblivious to its recent history. (Just like that recent video where people in Toronto told an interviewer they didn't know who their prime minister was or what party was in power over them.) And that would have been nice.

Our political culture in this country is at stinking garbage levels of putrescence. harper is a leap backwards. A rot. To rebuild this country, we need to get rid of harper and the toxic levels of racism, ignorance, Paul Calandra/Rob Ford-ism that this country has sunk to.

And then we, the left, have to re-think our own failures. We have to deeply challenge our stupid beliefs that petitions and rallies and chanting really, deeply impacts things. Because they don't. And so-called "progressives" who can still get enthused by scum like Paul Martin or Barack Obama or Dalton McGuinty need to be educated and educate themselves. And support for clear atrocities such as Israel's carpet-bombings and mass-murder has to excised from the body politic.

Our political system does reflect our society. The power of business and money. The prevalence of white, male privilege. The conflicts papered-over with empty rhetoric and delusion. The racism. The contempt for the environment. The ignorance and the laziness.

And all that reflects on OUR failures as progressives, to change things.

The corporate media??? Okay. The corporate media exists. We've known this for decades. What real steps have we taken to deal with this?

We need to work harder and smarter.

Not engage in outright lies and hackery and stupidity such as MoS and the gang are engaged in.