From The Loonatic Left

An Important Day

Her dark eyes still sparkle...

Happy Anniversary Mrs. Mahatma!  After 50 years you are still as wonderful as on the day I met you!

All You Need To Know About The Illegal Wire Taps

Let me get two things out of the way right now...first, George W. Bush appears to have broken the law by authorizing an NSA program which permitted listening in on conversations of American citizens without first obtaining a warrant; second, someone else has clearly broken the law by leaking this information to the press.  I will await the outrage over this leak by all of those liberals who are outraged over the leaking of Valerie Plame's name.  I think I will be waiting quite a while.

Now that we have established the basic facts of this case, lets look at the details...because sure as ever the devil is in the details.  As all good conspiracy theorists will explain to you...two events that happen somewhat near to each other are clearly related.  Therefore the entire reason we are finding out today about this program is because the Senate was debating making the Patriot Act permanent or extending the act with modifications.  If you buy into this world view, there are many other coincidences that must torment you constantly.  Take for example the New York Transit Strike happening around the holidays...just when Jewish and Christian (hell even the pagans) spend tons of money boosting the economy.  Who would benefit from a weaker economy...RIGHT...Hillary Clinton is clearly behind the strike!

Now that we have established the outer reaches of my snarkiness, lets consider what the hell Bush must have been thinking to approve a program which is clearly illegal and doesn't seem to provide anything that he couldn't have had anyway.  To do that we need to describe the legal process for obtaining a wiretap versus what the New York Times (and now others) have described as the process Bush approved.

There is a top secret court...not really top secret, it is more like the way the Maxwell Smart offices were always top secret.  You remember those right?  Maxwell Smart gets in a taxi and asks the driver to take him to CONTROL's Top Secret Headquarters.  The driver invariably says "Yeah...I know where that is."  At any rate to listen to some of the news coverage you might think this court was.  I heard the court described as a shadowy secret court which met in a secret area of the Justice Department secretly.  I began to imagine a hall way like what Maxwell Smart entered on his way in to CONTROL.

Actually if you want to know about this shadowy secret organization it's not hard...it is however well protected but by nothing more deadly than terminal boredom.  That is you can read 50 U.S.C. § 1801et. seq. and, if you can remain alert, learn all that you could ever wish to know about the secret court.  Hell they even keep government statistics on the Court's wiretap approval rate (More about that later).  Sadly the number of people who have actually read those statutes increased by at least one this past week as I dragged myself through the dull process of understanding the workings of this super-secret operation.  Now since I have suffered, I intend to pass this suffering on to you!

The Court was established by FISA...the acronym stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which created FISC.  Clearly creativity is at a premium in legal circles since that acronym stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.  This court is empowered to hear top secret evidence of probable cause for the approval of wiretaps and eavesdropping by NSA and other shadowy secret organizations.  The government has a success rate with this court, a success rate which might prompt a snarky person to quip that the court was manned by marsupials from down under.  I believe the stat that was quoted to me was that the court had rejected 5 government requests in the court's history.  That is not a typo...that is the number five.  Of course if the court had heard only 50 cases that might be understandable but in reality the court has heard thousands of requests since 9/11...and approved every one.

Apparently either the Bush administration didn't like their odds...or they were wanting to do something that they were pretty certain was going to increase that number from 5 to a higher number.  When Bush authorized this program, he basically by-passed the entire legal process created by the constitution of the United States.  You remember the constitution, don't you?  I have heard many impassioned pleas by the strict constructionists about the way liberals ignore the constitution when it suits them!  I think I can sum up the conservatives' latest constitutional arguments...the constitution is incredibly necessary and must be strictly construed when we want to prevent abortion but can be such an unnecessary burden when the Government wants to listen in on phone calls.  I'm having some trouble reconciling these views...

Now I am not at all comfortable with those 'legal scholars' capable of finding all kinds of 'rights' within the language of the constitution but I'm pretty sure that even Thomas Jefferson had not envisioned e-mail when the document was drafted.  At some point we have to recognize that someone has to decide if our phone calls, e-mails and letters are a personal item or a joint venture with the federal government, or at least those parts of the federal government who are empowered to read them.  If the U.S. Constitution is the document they must use to do it, then a judge is the one who has to decide how communication media not invented when the document was drafted, are protected by that document.

Based upon that rationale the system which exists requires that the government bring evidence to this court, which can be convened quickly (no dockets slowing things down), and tries to show probable cause for the court to approve a wiretap.  This burden is easily met when the party is a 'foreign power' or an 'agent of a foreign power' but requires evidence that the party is 'about to engage in criminal conduct' if they are a U.S. citizen.

Given the absurd ease with which the court has approved wiretaps in the past, care to guess what probably was the sticking point for the NSA?  No really...    OK I'll help.  What is likely is that President Bush approved a 'program' of listening and eavesdropping on U.S. citizens conversations when there was no evidence that those citizens were about to engage in criminal conduct.  Not to put too fine a point on it but...that was a really stupid decision.

However, a very strange phenomenon has been occurring.  Look here...Bush's approval rate has gone up again!  You know every time liberal lefty loudmouthed Democrats attack Bush by claiming that he is mean to terrorists who want to kill us, his approval rate goes up!  I'm sure they can't understand why that is.  Based upon this unique phenomenon, and based upon my aforementioned thinking on conspiracy theories, I will hereafter assume all future leaks of this sort are being planted by Karl Rove in an effort to boost Bush's popularity.

Democrat's Appear to be Out of Touch

Here is an interesting poll: (hat tip to Weapons of Mass Discussion) Here is the BBC take on the numbers.  Good luck finding the poll results in a U.S. media outlet.

A huge majority of Iraqis think that things are going pretty good for them and they are optimistic about the future.  Only 10% of Iraqis want their new government to make us leave.  For me the most interesting question was this:

"The top 3 things Iraqis thought would be the best thing that could happen to Iraq would be:

1. Security
2. Peace and Stability

3. A better life

   The fourth choice was American forces leaving Iraq, but that was only 5.7% of the count (more people answered “not sure”). An Islamic government was .1% with only 2 people choosing that. Of the things people chose from their list, over 90% of them expected that “best thing” to happen would happen in the next year. "

Opinionated Bastard has graphically represented the poll making it easier to digest.  Have you seen any coverage of this poll?  Not much if any...but you have been able to watch the Democrats come unhinged!

If you watch the mainstream media outlets or read the big newspapers you probably got an earful of Representative Murtha, Howard Dean, Senator Kerry and Representative Pelosi describing how the U.S. military is the problem in Iraq.  Here is Murtha in his own words: (primary source)

"Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists and foreign jihadists."

After every two-bit liberal in the media began dancing with glee over a Democrat who had prior military service...criticizing the Bush administration...reality began to slowly descend as the meaning of the moron's words began to sink in.  This guy was advocating immediate surrender!

Howard Dean is never one to let anyone out stupid him...here he is on a San Antonio radio station trying to out-do Murtha:

"the idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong."

Howard Dean demonstrates his political stupidity by staking his entire party's future on the bold new political philosophy of defeatism!  He has been trying to backpedal from this stroke of idiocy ever since.

Sensing blood in the water...John Kerry's brain pan reverted to form and he began slandering the troops.  I figure he must have had a Vietnam era flashback:

"There is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the--of--the historical customs, religious customs."

He went on to add that it was reminicient of Jenjis Khan...just kidding.  He actually supports the troops, even when he accuses them of committing war crimes by "terrorizing kids and children."  Hey this worked for him politically early on in his carreer, why stop smearing U.S. soldiers now?

Let me summarize how out of touch the Democratic leadership appears by pointing out another poll.  Why are some people acting surprised about the results of the Iraq poll when it actually reflects the same thing as the poll in Afghanistan!  ABC News carries this poll...but still must get in their digs:

"Four years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghans express both vast support for the changes that have shaken their country and remarkable optimism for the future, despite the deep challenges they face in economic opportunity, security and basic services alike."

After getting their digs in...you can almost sense the disbelief at the poll's findings:

"Yet despite these and other deprivations, 77 percent of Afghans say their country is headed in the right direction — compared with 30 percent in the vastly better-off United States. Ninety-one percent prefer the current Afghan government to the Taliban regime, and 87 percent call the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban good for their country. Osama bin Laden, for his part, is as unpopular as the Taliban; nine in 10 view him unfavorably."

ABC News goes on to say that this poll result is impossible...the U.S. imperialist armies are occupiers and occupiers are never successful.  This is clearly a plot by Halliburton who bribed the poll takers and Karl Rove must have hatched this conspiracy...oh wait...a professional media organization won't write things like that...they'll just think it.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Here is a direct quote from this news article:

"Montreal — Tens of thousands of people ignored frigid temperatures Saturday to lead a worldwide day of protest against global warming.

Bundled-up protesters converged on a downtown square after marching from two separate starting points to listen to speakers and musicians in a rock concert atmosphere.

The demonstration coincided with the 10-day UN Climate Change Conference underway in Montreal, where officials are reviewing and updating the Kyoto protocol on lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

"This is protest is important because time is running out to deal with climate change," said Steven Guilbeault, the director of the Greenpeace movement for Quebec."

This is hysterical!  Only a completely ignorant moron would stage a protest against global warming in sub-zero temperatures and not see the irony in it. 

We are off to one of the coldest winters on record in Europe and in North America, of course the same slimey scientists wrangling for government grants to 'study' global warming explain it this way...the colder than normal temperatures are all an understandable part of global warming.  You think I'm kidding?  Here is a direct quote:

"Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that's what we're dealing with," he said.

Hell, they deserve the grant money just for keeping a straight face when they say it.

Terrific Comic Strip

Sometimes a comic strip so perfectly and succinctly skewers that nothing can be added to improve it.

This the comic strip Day-by-Day.

This is exactly what the liberal Democratic leaders on the left appear to be thinking.  That assumes that you can credit their position with any type of strategic thinking at all.

A Day Which Shall Live In Infamy

On this...Pearl Harbor Day...I'd like to wish my mother a Happy Birthday!

The Real Issue in the Tom DeLay Case

Nobody can have a higher opinion of Tom DeLay that I do, I believe he is a dirty little gutter-snipe.

Even if you believe as I do that Representative Tom DeLay is a dirty little gutter-snipe, the prosecution of Tom DeLay by a partisan district attorney is one of the most disturbing events that I have ever witnessed.  The naked power play of Ronnie Earle is so shockingly obvious that under most standards, Earle would be impeached.  This behavior is something you would expect to be attributed to Nixon's CREEP organization (the Committee to Re-Elect the President).

Here is the REAL history of the events in the DeLay case: (from the National Review media blog)

"On Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2005 — after six months of hearing Travis County district attorney Ronnie Earle present evidence that Tom DeLay conspired with others to violate the Texas Election Code in the fall of 2002 — a Texas grand jury indicted DeLay for conspiracy to violate the election code. Shortly thereafter, DeLay’s legal team filed a motion to dismiss the indictment, on the grounds that the Texas conspiracy statute did not apply to the election code in 2002.

Panicked, Ronnie Earle’s team convened a second grand jury. This time, Earle’s team presented the case that Tom DeLay committed money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering – both felonies under the Texas criminal code. Friday, Sept. 30, that grand jury refused to indict DeLay based on the evidence presented.

Facing a crisis, Earle’s team convened a third grand jury the following Monday, Oct. 3. According to the Austin American-Statesman, that grand jury listened to Earle present the same case – that DeLay committed money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering – and within four hours, gave Earle the indictments he wanted on both charges.

DeLay’s lawyers filed motions to dismiss the money laundering charges also, citing prosecutorial misconduct (Earle went grand-jury shopping and allegedly committed other irregularities during those frantic seven days) and the lack of an underlying crime (for money laundering to be money laundering, the proceeds of a criminal activity must be involved)." (emphasis added)

The first indictment was dismissed yesterday because the behavior was not a crime in 2002.  Frankly the behavior appears to have been fairly common.  The law making the behavior a crime did not go into affect until 2003.  This is not hard to comprehend.  I'm sure that Ronnie Earle does in fact comprehend this.

The smoking gun in this case is the attempt to use a second grand jury to obtain an indictment...having that fail...and then trying to use a third grand jury to get an indictment.  If that is not prosecutorial misconduct on its face, try this on for size...Ronnie Earle has also claimed to have written evidence that he has been unable to produce.  Now I'm not jumping to any conclusions here but this is such an obvious political power play that we need some legal recourse.  Ronnie Earle needs to be held accountable for his outrageous behavior.

It might come to that before this is done.  I would like to see Tom DeLay pursue Ronnie Earle in a civil court and obtain a judgment against him.  Earle needs to be held accountable and with a rat like this personal financial pain is about all that this rube is going to understand.

In the meantime DeLay has been forced out of his position in the House for behavior which will be found perfectly legal.  That is only a part of what is bothering me about this case.

What the Tom DeLay case is about is a partisan district attorney is trying to make a name for himself by abusing his position.  With the exception of some honest local coverage, the national media has been misleading readers/viewers again.  We can no longer rely upon the national media outlets to accurately portray events, we must wait for the judge to rule on the case.  Sadly the damage to DeLay is happening on the national stage and not as much on the local stage (I don't believe the CNN poll numbers which show DeLay 'weak' in his home district).

Because of the partisan media and the partisan district attorney, the United States of America can no longer be described as a free an open country...we are behaving in the Tom DeLay case like a typical police state.  Am I being too harsh?

Consider what the media would be saying if the person being prosecuted was Hillary Clinton...would the media be willing to allow a partisan prosecutor to try three times to find a grand jury willing to indict and still refuse to critique the process?  The howls of media outrage would shake the entire east coast.  It isn't happening now because we have a state run media (or at least party run media) and the district attorney is from the same party.  There is no real check on his abuse of power.  To the media right now, party is everything.  When this indictment is dismissed, which it will be eventually, what will prevent Ronnie Earle from manufacturing another one, and another one, and another one...nothing at all.  The media cover-up will continue.

Welcome to the new police state in Austin, Texas...power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely...especially when aided by a corrupt national media.

UPDATE:

I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that Tom DeLay will likely be faced with real legal issues from the Abramoff lobbying case.  He looks to be very close to the case as some of his former aids have been indicted.  That, of course, has nothing at all to do with the criminal behavior of Ronnie Earle and his national media partners acting as accessories after the fact.

Contemptible - The Democrat Iraq Strategy

Finally someone has explained it...

"The Democratic Party position on Iraq:

Our position has been consistent: we have CONSISTENTLY OPPOSED the use of military force to effect regime change in Iraq, except in two special circumstances:
a) When it was official US policy during the Clinton administration, and;
b) When we were asked to vote on the question with an election upcoming.

Thus, our recent position that the US should immediately leave Iraq was driven by our unshakable conviction that:
a) We no longer have a Democrat in the White House, and;
b) The public was finally responding to our efforts, aided by the media, to portray Iraq as a disaster.

Recent opinion poll developments indicate that the public may not yet have responded sufficiently, however. Thus our unshakable patriotism may require that we join in supporting the current administration’s position until it can be discredited, hopefully at some time prior to it succeeding."

This was a comment made by DaveR at Captains Quarters to this post.  It summarizes the Democrat quandry about as well as is possible.

The snarkiness of the comment masks the fact that some of those who oppose the war are far less opportunistic.  It is possible for an honest disagreement about the Iraq policy.  What irritates me is the entirely dishonest political opportunism.  If you thought the war was a good thing based upon the intelligence that you were provided, changing your mind today when you think you can obtain a political advantage is...wait for it...unpatriotic.

These are strong words...

but not strong enough...

let me really say what I mean...

::releasing the chain::

Yes I am willing to call some of these soulest pigf**ers unpatriotic.  They have earned that moniker and I hope they wear it with all of the feeble minded pride I'm sure the Move-On crowd is willing to lavish upon them.  Those who are willing to oppose the completion of what they started need to head on out to Iraq and join Saddam Hussein in the courtroom.  They can sit there with him and listen to the evidence.  They are the moral equivalent of Nazi sympathizers with one BIG exception...not even the Nazi sympathizers defended Hitler after seeing the ovens...only the swinish lefty barfing pig stickers could try to score political points using Saddam Hussein as their commrade!

Hey Rep. Murtha...you wanted to leave these guys in power...

"A woman testified in the trial of Saddam Hussein and his seven lieutenants Tuesday that she was assaulted and tortured with beatings and electric shocks by the former president's agents...

"I was forced to take off my clothes, and he raised my legs up and tied up my hands. He continued administering electric shocks and whipping me and telling me to speak,"...

Several times, the woman, hidden behind a light blue curtain, broke down. "God is great. Oh, my Lord!" she moaned...

The witness, who was 16 at the time of her arrest, repeated that she had been ordered to undress.

"They made me put my legs up. There were more than one of them, as if I were their banquet, maybe more than five people, all of them officers," she said." (source)

Rep. Murtha...is letting this lady be tortured again worth the calculated political advantage you are obviously trying to obtain?  How about you Rep. Pelosi?  I'm sure this applies to Howard Dean too!  I'm sure you favor returning the Baathists to power...right?  I mean to hell with them, we're talking power politics here...right?

If we had an honest media...anywhere...this evidence would be blasted all over the television sets and published in every newspaper, not buried and hidden...this is above the fold stuff.  As it is you have to dig and search to find it.  Our liberal asswipes in the media are probably afraid the public might see this testimony and draw the obvious conclusion that the liberal wing of the Democratic Party needs to be horse-whipped.  They should be gutted and strung up by their entrails...

::pant::pant::pant::reattaching chain::

Well that was an interesting diversion.

Is Iraq Another Vietnam? The Democrats Had Better Hope Not

Let's say for arguments sake that some of the Democrats are right and Iraq is another Vietnam.  Do these Democrats remember clearly what happened to them as a party during the Vietnam War? 

As a student of history I have been scratching my head wondering about the Democratic Parties current fixation on the Vietnam decade.  While it is apparent that many within the party and the media have warm memories of how their feeble protests 'stuck it to the man', that is not all that accurate politically speaking.

The anti-war movement reached its crescendo in 1972...when Republican Richard Nixon won every state in the country except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.  How could this happen?  The answer is fairly simple, the anti-war movement split the Democratic Party and drove out the blue collar meat and potatoes labor movement.  But that splintering is only a part of the story, the party splintered again over numerous current issues and was incapable of unification behind any candidate.  Many talking heads refer to the 'Reagan Democrats' when looking at the demographic segmentation of the population during elections.  This segment is credited with the Reagan landslide.  The truth is the 'Reagan Democrats' existed as a powerful voting block back when Reagan was still a Governor in California.  It was those same Reagan Democrats who elected Richard Nixon in 1968 and again in 1972.

The irony is that this anti-war split was clearly foreseeable even before 1968, you can see it early in the mid-sixties when student radicals were incapable of playing nice with the other fringe liberals.  For example the outcast bikers were more likely to attack the Berkley radicals than to join them in their street protests.  The party bosses were waring with the new anti-war leadership over control of the party, the party was also divided North/South over race issues and could barely create a platform.  You had Humphrey/Jackson leadership splits over busing, and McCarthy and McGovern splitting off from the Johnson Democrats over the Vietnam War. 

Despite all of this awful leadership and policy splits, the party controlled everything - the Presidency, both houses of Congress and a liberal leaning Supreme Court.  This was the high water mark for the Democrats.  The party has been furiously destroying itself ever since.

Why?

That answer is difficult.  Many ideas suggest themselves to me.  One obvious idea is the use of these natural splits by the Republican Party...driving wedge issues between the glue that tries to hold the Democratic Party together.  You see it on abortion, gay marriage and national defense today.  You also see it most clearly on the anti-war left.  Ironically enough, the Republican Party has had to do very little actual politicking to benefit from these splits.  The Democratic candidates have been spun in circles by their own party; trying to bridge these gaps.  This has allowed the Republicans to charge every national Democratic candidate since Jimmy Carter with flip flopping on the issues or third party candidates to accuse the Democrats of being no different than Republicans.

It might surprise you who I think the biggest ally of the Republican party has been...why the media of course.  Not those few in the media who all but push the Republican talking points...they are useful to the Republicans but they can't really split the Democratic Party since most Democrats are not consumers of those news outlets; and those who are, distrust them deeply.  The Democrats are being split by the liberal leaning mainstream media.  Nothing drives wedges between a party any quicker than media reports which try to push the Democrat's agenda upon party members who feel strongly about the issues.  The agenda-based journalism, trying to push a 'story-line', has created fissures between the Democratic Party and has forced candidates to speak out of both sides of their mouth and the party to have planks in their platform that they clearly do not actually believe or worse fear to articulate.  This is the meat behind the AMMP ('American Mainstream Media Party') described by Howard Fineman when he wrote about it in January 2005.  He says the AMMP has failed...sadly I think he has picked the wrong party.  It is the Democrats who have failed, with a big assist from Howard's AMMP.

With the media whipping up partisan distress over the liberal talking points, special interest groups can force candidates to address issues directly that they otherwise might be able to avoid.  Sadly the AMMP and those special interest groups do not reflect majority opinion.  Thus do the Democrats continual dwindle in their influence.  You can see it most clearly in the disconnect between the platform statements, and the candidates.

The Democrats supported the Iraq war in the last election...according to their platform.  Today they are forced to utter the, 'I was duped defense.'  Yet the core of the party are clearly anti-war, as evidenced by Howard Dean's meteoric rise.  The candidate, John Kerry, clearly stated that he believed that marriage was between a man and a woman, that too is in the Democrat's platform.  Approximately 90% of the delegates to the Democratic Convention supported legalizing gay marriage.  The platform also supported further tax cuts, yet the candidates raged against Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%.  The candidate, John Kerry, spoke eloquently about how he believed that abortion was wrong - he just didn't want to legislate his own personal morality.  Of course the Democratic platform defended a 'woman's right to choose' and over 95% of the delegates to the convention supported abortion, indeed Kerry himself voted against a partial birth abortion ban.  All of this is great stuff...very nuanced...but it exists not because of the nuance of the issues or because candidate Kerry was somehow unable to make up his mind about anything, but because the Democratic Party has ceased to exist as a uniform entity capable of supporting a single coherent set of beliefs.  If you want unity, the beliefs have to go!  That, more than any other reason, explains why the party has failed to articulate an alternative to the Bush administration policies.

Lets face it, the Bush administration has hardly demonstrated much competence outside of efficiently running election campaigns.  In fact, if the real Democrats could not defeat Bush in 2004, their only hope is to run as maverick Republicans.  Senator Hillary Clinton appears to understand this and has staked out positions which, for Democrats anyway, are nothing short of Attila the Hun.  This is a woman who led an effort to nationalize health care, who has been emphatically pro-abortion, who has had her liberal ticket punched by anyone and everyone who could punch it.  Today she is one of the more conservative Senators, positioning herself to run for President.  Does anyone really believe she is pro-Iraq war?  That position is a political necessity for her but may actually be fatal in the Democratic primaries.  The anti-war constituents will destroy the party and in Hillary's case, perhaps their only hope for success, rather than permit any position short of immediate withdrawal and defeat and the media will see that the anti-war masses remain whipped into a fury by getting their daily fix of anti-Americanism.  Just like 1972!

You see, the roots of this problem extend back to the Vietnam War and with few exceptions (i.e. Republican self-inflicted wounds), the Democrats have never recovered.  It is ironic that some Democrats appear determined to duplicate their Vietnam era failures today.  It is almost nostalgic...even for them.

Oh Canada

After an historic vote of no confidence...the Canadian Liberal Government has crashed and burned.

Now it remains to be seen whether Canada will right the ship of state by electing a Conservative government or some type of coalition...and whether the Conservative government understands why it was elected...not for their program but in a backlash.  I think the new government will be conservative in a low turnout election.  In many ways Canada is about to get Jimmy Carter...a conservative Jimmy Carter.  Disillusioned voters will punish the corruption like they did in the U.S...the Carter Administration was the Nixon legacy.  Elect an honest decent person with integrity.  Carter may have been a flop as President, but he is a decent honest person.

That is also how England straightened themselves out.  Margaret Thatcher replaced the Liberal/Labour (Socialist really at that time) coalition of Prime Minister Callaghan.  Prime Minister Thatcher was tough, honest and unafraid.  This may not be a fair comparison to what has happened in Canada.

Canada is a unique situation in that the economy is not the cause, it is deep and well seeded corruption.  The U.S. was also dealing with a recent economic collapse when Carter was elected.  The British were dealing with an economic quagmire.  Not that the British did not have corruption problems with the Labour government, the Unions controlled who could be elected giving them veto power over the choice of party leadership and cabinet positions.  It was part of the organizing structure of the Labour Party.  Not surprisingly when the economy went south the labor leaders had no interest in making concessions for businesses.  The resulting stale mate destroyed the Labour party...Tony Blair actually had to put it back together again by first controlling the power of the labor unions.

Frankly the corruption in Canada dwarfs anything seen in this country, or England, by any administration.  President Nixon is generally held out as the gold standard of U.S. corruption.  He was a mere piker compared to Canada's Liberal party scandal.  Nixon was full of dirty tricks, con-men and privacy violations...of course Agnew was guilty of kick-backs...but the Liberal party in Canada appeared to treat the tax revenues as their private piggy bank to spend on bribes, fake contracts and lavish (probably fake) expenses.  The corruption was so much a part of the scenery that Martin's contention that he had no idea it was going on, is just not plausible.

While Martin has not been implicated in the corruption directly, he would have had to be the most clueless moronic finance minister of all time.  You may recall the see no evil, hear no evil monkeys...Martin would have had to be all three of the see, hear and speak no evil monkeys, for his ignorance to be believable.  I'm not sure it is possible to seat a Liberal party in Canada today without going way deep into the bench...it appears that everyone important is implicated in the scandal.

I would be interested to hear what Peter thinks about this corruption scandal and the likely result of this up-coming election.  I'm sure he will not defend the corruption...but this can be a bitter pill to swallow when in every other regard the Liberal party had not done all the bad a job.  I can not think of any historic precedent in any country for this historic occasion.  Every one that is close included economic issues which impacted the resulting vote...in Canada's case (despite my past ribbing) the economy is not currently a major issue.

One of the results of this historic mess, the potentially disastrous Quebec Independence Movement will probably start to pick up steam again.  In so many ways this collapse is not good news for our neighbors to the North.  I may even find myself rooting for the Liberal party!