"... Condemned to Repeat It:" The Cuban Missile Crisis in Perspective

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

- George Santayana

History is important, but what people do with that history is more important. To mythologize history is to make it important and, worse, may cause it's worst mistakes to be repeated.

For a president who didn't do all that much, the mythologising of John F. Kennedy is a little odd and a lot terrifying. Most people, when pressed, can't name three things that he did in office and several of them count his assassination twice.

The assassination perverted the history of a man who shouldn't have been president at all. He was a liar and a thief. The evidence strongly suggests, although doesn't definitively prove, that the 1960 election was stolen through wholesale vote-rigging in Cook County, Illinois and South Texas, where Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson stole his Senate seat twelve years earlier.

It wasn't known at the time, but when Kennedy commenced his campaign for the Democratic nomination, he had been administered the last rites of the Catholic Church four times. We also now now that the 35th president of the United States and Commander-In-Chief was regularly dosing himself with a combination of steroids and amphetamine. This was not yet twenty years after another president who hid the perilous state of his health from the American people, Franklin D. Roosevelt, died suddenly as the country was preparing to use nuclear weapons for the first time.

The American people seem to know none of this, or not care if they do. Poll after poll of non-historians regularly puts JFK in the top four chief executives, above George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. Given the paucity of Kennedy's accomplishments, it represents the triumph of style over substance more than anything else in modern history.

Other than his murder in Dallas, the event most often associated with JFK is the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Benjamin Schwarz writes about in great detail in this month's Atlantic.

On October 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. With these offensive weapons, which represented a new and existential threat to America, Moscow significantly raised the ante in the nuclear rivalry between the superpowers—a gambit that forced the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. On October 22, the president, with no other recourse, proclaimed in a televised address that his administration knew of the illegal missiles, and delivered an ultimatum insisting on their removal, announcing an American “quarantine” of Cuba to force compliance with his demands. While carefully avoiding provocative action and coolly calibrating each Soviet countermeasure, Kennedy and his lieutenants brooked no compromise; they held firm, despite Moscow’s efforts to link a resolution to extrinsic issues and despite predictable Soviet blustering about American aggression and violation of international law. In the tense 13‑day crisis, the Americans and Soviets went eyeball-to-eyeball. Thanks to the Kennedy administration’s placid resolve and prudent crisis management—thanks to what Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. characterized as the president’s “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that [it] dazzled the world”—the Soviet leadership blinked: Moscow dismantled the missiles, and a cataclysm was averted.

Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested.

The first time I had seen the official mediation of the Missile Crisis challenged was in Gary Wills' The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Mediation on Power, which was first published in 1982. Since then, more and better literature has come out, including Kennedy's own secret presidential recordings. But the narrative remains mostly intact, due largely to a continuing flood of adoring Kennedy biographies and a singular unwillingness of Americans to study their own history.

Very few American non-scholars have bothered asking even the most basic questions about the Missile Crisis. "What's behind the half-century long obsession with a piss-ant country like Cuba?" "Why would Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev place the missiles there?" "Could the United States have resolved the crisis in a way that didn't risk a nuclear holocaust?" "What were the long-term consequences of it?"

Richard Nixon was remembered as a world-class red-baiter. In his first political campaign, Nixon tied his opponent, Representative Jerry Voorhis to the suspected Communist infiltrated Congress of Industrial Organizations' Political Action Committee (PAC,) although Voorhis refused to accept their endorsement. In his 1950 campaign for the Senate, Nixon called Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas "pink right down to her underwear" and compared her voting record to that of the avowed Socialist New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio.

In 1960, it was NIxon's turn to be red-baited in a particularly insidious way. From roughly 1948 onward, the GOP enjoyed an edge on national security issues, due largely to the "loss" of China, the successful testing of a nuclear bomb by the Soviets and the stalemate of the Korean War.

During President Eisenhower's second term, the Democrats invented a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union out of whole cloth. Had they bothered to ask the Pentagon or the CIA, they would have learned that the United States had a vast ICBM superiority that would last, ironically, into the presidency of Richard Nixon. But the news media and the public believed it.

Kennedy sought to capitalize on the missile gap by making Cuba an issue. He insisted during the presidential debates that he would do more to roll back communism in Cuba than would Nixon. Kennedy was the first presidential candidate to receive classified CIA briefings. He knew that the Agency under Eisenhower was planning just that. Determined not to reveal that, Vice President Nixon publicly argued against Cuban intervention, even though he was its strongest advocate in the government.

Once he was sworn in as president, Kennedy was stuck with, and haunted by, the issues of the missile gap and Cuba. JFK immediately began the largest peacetime defense build-up in American history up to that time. He also dramatically increased the nuclear arsenal, despite the U.S having as many as nine times the warheads the U.S.S.R had. In what was perhaps the most fateful decision of his presidency, he ordered Jupiter missiles deployed to Turkey, near the Soviet border.

The Jupiter missiles were an exceptionally vexing component of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Because they sat above ground, were immobile, and required a long time to prepare for launch, they were extremely vulnerable. Of no value as a deterrent, they appeared to be weapons meant for a disarming first strike—and thus greatly undermined deterrence, because they encouraged a preemptive Soviet strike against them. The Jupiters’ destabilizing effect was widely recognized among defense experts within and outside the U.S. government and even by congressional leaders. For instance, Senator Albert Gore Sr., an ally of the administration, told Secretary of State Dean Rusk that they were a “provocation” in a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1961 (more than a year and a half before the missile crisis), adding, “I wonder what our attitude would be” if the Soviets deployed nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba. Senator Claiborne Pell raised an identical argument in a memo passed on to Kennedy in May 1961.

Given America’s powerful nuclear superiority, as well as the deployment of the Jupiter missiles, Moscow suspected that Washington viewed a nuclear first strike as an attractive option. They were right to be suspicious. The archives reveal that in fact the Kennedy administration had strongly considered this option during the Berlin crisis in 1961.

It’s little wonder, then, that, as Stern asserts—drawing on a plethora of scholarship including, most convincingly, the historian Philip Nash’s elegant 1997 study, The Other Missiles of October—Kennedy’s deployment of the Jupiter missiles “was a key reason for Khrushchev’s decision to send nuclear missiles to Cuba.” Khrushchev reportedly made that decision in May 1962, declaring to a confidant that the Americans “have surrounded us with bases on all sides” and that missiles in Cuba would help to counter an “intolerable provocation.” Keeping the deployment secret in order to present the U.S. with a fait accompli, Khrushchev may very well have assumed America’s response would be similar to his reaction to the Jupiter missiles—rhetorical denouncement but no threat or action to thwart the deployment with a military attack, nuclear or otherwise. (In retirement, Khrushchev explained his reasoning to the American journalist Strobe Talbott: Americans “would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.”)

At about the same time that Kennedy deployed the Jupiters, he ordered the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation, thereby giving Khrushchev the predicate he needed to give the Americans " a little of their own medicine" by moving their own missiles into Cuba.

As for Castro, he would have been crazy to refuse the missiles after after the Bay of Pigs and the numerous subsequent assassination attempts by the CIA known as Operation Mongoose. When he learned about it after becoming president, Lyndon Johnson said "We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc., in the Caribbean." Needless to say, a foreign plot - let alone several attempts - to assassinate a sitting American president would be seen as an act of war and responded to forcefully. That they didn't see their attempts on Castro's life similarly is but one of America's interesting post-war double standards.

Moreover, as Schwarz reports, the Cuban missiles didn't change the strategic balance a bit and Kennedy's Executive Committee (ExComm) knew it.

Kennedy and his civilian advisers understood that the missiles in Cuba did not alter the strategic nuclear balance. Although Kennedy asserted in his October 22 televised address that the missiles were “an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas,” he in fact appreciated, as he told the ExComm on the first day of the crisis, that “it doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was 90 miles away. Geography doesn’t mean that much.” America’s European allies, Kennedy continued, “will argue that taken at its worst the presence of these missiles really doesn’t change” the nuclear balance.

That the missiles were close to the United States was, as the president conceded, immaterial: the negligible difference in flight times between Soviet Union–based ICBMs and Cuba-based missiles wouldn’t change the consequences when the missiles hit their targets, and in any event, the flight times of Soviet SLBMs were already as short as or shorter than the flight times of the missiles in Cuba would be, because those weapons already lurked in submarines off the American coast (as of course did American SLBMs off the Soviet coast). Moreover, unlike Soviet ICBMs, the missiles in Cuba required several hours to be prepared for launch. Given the effectiveness of America’s aerial and satellite reconnaissance (amply demonstrated by the images of missiles in the U.S.S.R. and Cuba that they yielded), the U.S. almost certainly would have had far more time to detect and respond to an imminent Soviet missile strike from Cuba than to attacks from Soviet bombers, ICBMs, or SLBMs.

“A missile is a missile,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asserted. “It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile from the Soviet Union or Cuba.” On that first day of the ExComm meetings, Bundy asked directly, “What is the strategic impact on the position of the United States of MRBMs in Cuba? How gravely does this change the strategic balance?” McNamara answered, “Not at all”—a verdict that Bundy then said he fully supported. The following day, Special Counsel Theodore Sorensen summarized the views of the ExComm in a memorandum to Kennedy. “It is generally agreed,” he noted, “that these missiles, even when fully operational, do not significantly alter the balance of power—i.e., they do not significantly increase the potential megatonnage capable of being unleashed on American soil, even after a surprise American nuclear strike.”

Sorensen’s comment about a surprise attack reminds us that while the missiles in Cuba did not add appreciably to the nuclear menace, they could have somewhat complicated America’s planning for a successful first strike—which may well have been part of Khrushchev’s rationale for deploying them. If so, the missiles paradoxically could have enhanced deterrence between the superpowers, and thereby reduced the risk of nuclear war.

It stands to reason that the whole matter could have been dealt with through quiet diplomacy. Kennedy wanted the Soviet missiles out of Cuba and Khrushchev wanted to be rid of the provocative  Jupiters on his doorstep. In fact, that was the deal they ultimately reached, but only after the world was taken to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Moscow was unaware that the missiles had been discovered until Kennedy announced it to the world in a televised address to the nation on October 22, 1962 and announced a naval blockade of Cuba. Knowing that the blockade was an act of war and that the missiles were legal under international law, the United States referred to it as a "quarantine," instead.

Wouldn't it have been easier (to say nothing of less dangerous) to have sent a back-channel message to the Kremlin that the Cuban installations were unacceptable to the United States? Nikita Krushchev himself offered to trade the Cuban missiles for the Jupiters in Turkey in the wake of Kennedy's October 22 address.

But Kennedy had cynically used both the missile gap and Cuba as wedge issues in the 1960 election and he was going to be publicly seen as having solved them, even after he knew just how catastrophic the slightest miscalculation might have been.

And it was nothing short of a miracle that there wasn't a miscalculation because JFK's negotiating posture seemed to be designed to humiliate the Soviets. Even when the trade of the Cuban missiles for the Jupiters was agreed to secretly, through Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the Kennedy brothers insisted that the Jupiter part of the agreement not be announced publicly, fearing that such an agreement would politically damage the president.

Amazingly, Krushchev agreed to it. And he was removed from power less than 18 months later, becoming the first (and until Gorbachev, the only)  Soviet leader to leave office alive. It isn't a stretch to assume that sent a powerful message to Nikita Krushchev's successors. They would not be played by the Americans. Superpower relations went into a deep-freeze for a decade afterward.

Prior to Kruschev's March, 1964 removal, the Soviets were basically conservative in the conduct of foreign policy. Yes, they sponsored revolutionary movements; most notably in China, Korea and Vietnam, but the only used their own military within what they considered their traditional sphere of influence to put down uprisings. Beginning with Brezhnev, the Soviets become much more aggressive and far more intractable.

Would that have been the case absent the missile crisis? There's no reason to believe so.

As Schwarz points out in the Atlantic, the missile crisis had even greater consequences on the conduct of U.S foreign policy.

Although Kennedy in fact agreed to the missile swap and, with Khrushchev, helped settle the confrontation maturely, the legacy of that confrontation was nonetheless pernicious. By successfully hiding the deal from the vice president, from a generation of foreign-policy makers and strategists, and from the American public, Kennedy and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, and the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, makes for a successful national-security strategy—really, all but defines it.

The president and his advisers also reinforced the concomitant view that America should define a threat not merely as circumstances and forces that directly jeopardize the safety of the country, but as circumstances and forces that might indirectly compel potential allies or enemies to question America’s resolve. This recondite calculation led to the American disaster in Vietnam: in attempting to explain how the loss of the strategically inconsequential country of South Vietnam might weaken American credibility and thereby threaten the country’s security, one of McNamara’s closest aides, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, allowed that “it takes some sophistication to see how Vietnam automatically involves” our vital interests. Kennedy said in his address to the nation during the missile crisis that “aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” He explained that “if our courage and our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe,” then the United States could not tolerate such conduct by the Soviets—even though, again, he had privately acknowledged that the deployment of the missiles did not change the nuclear balance.

This notion that standing up to aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) will deter future aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) fails to weather historical scrutiny. After all, America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq didn’t deter Muammar Qaddafi; America’s war against Yugoslavia didn’t deter Saddam Hussein in 2003; America’s liberation of Kuwait did not deter Slobodan Milošević; America’s intervention in Panama did not deter Saddam Hussein in 1991; America’s intervention in Grenada did not deter Manuel Noriega; America’s war against North Vietnam did not deter Grenada’s strongman, Hudson Austin; and JFK’s confrontation with Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba certainly did not deter Ho Chi Minh.

How many American troops would have been spared in the last half century were it not for Kennedy's duplicity before, during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis? U.S policymakers learned exactly the wrong lesson from the October crisis. And the brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis is almost exactly what we're seeing today in relation to Iran's nuclear program, albeit in slow motion.

The United States has had bad presidents both before and after John Kennedy, but none nearly ended life on earth as a result of his own deliberate and cynical machinations. In that, he might be the most dangerous man ever to have lived.

Yet he remains a hero to tens of millions of Americans and a worldwide icon, due largely to the machinations of his own lies and the personality cult developed over several decades by his palace guard.

Unless the real history of the Cuban Missile Crisis is more widely known, there's a very real chance that there will someday be another president as reckless as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The next time we might not be so lucky.


Benjamin Schwarz's piece in the Atlantic is actually a book review of The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality by Sheldon Stern, which I very much look forward to reading. However, Schwarz's article is impressive on its own and can be read for free here, which I encourage you all to do.

Praying for the Apocalypse: Dispatches From the GOP's Last Stand

One of the great joys of this past week has been watching the Tea Party-Republican reaction to the fiscal cliff deal reached on Tuesday morning. I wrote about my displeasure with it here and I have many of the same grievances with the bargain that hardcore Teapublicans do. The only difference is that I'm telling the truth and they aren't.

Most of the commentary that I've seen railed against the tax increase and the $4 trillion in new debt. The only problem with this critique is that if the GOP got it's way, the debt would have been much worse.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that almost all of the $4 trillion comes from the expansion of the Bush tax cuts for those making under $400, 000 and the permanent patch to the alternative minimum tax. The "new spending" (and that term requires that you believe that tax cuts that aren't paid for aren't spending, which they are) equals about $300 billion.

But Republicans generally, and the Tea Party in particular, wanted all of the Bush tax cuts made permanent, plus the patch of AMT, which would have made CBO's deficit projections larger still. That's the math, folks. Arguing with it doesn't change it.

That would have been fine if Republicans had a plausible way of paying for it. Luckily for them, Republican dogma dictates that tax cuts aren't spending, so the deficits that result from them, in the immortal words of Dick Cheney, "don't matter."

Of course, that brings us to loophole reductions highlighted in the various Ryan plans and the Romney campaign. These of course were nothing short of blatant lies, which we know because no one ever presented a list of deductions to be eliminated or the math behind them. The only reason to leave that information out is because you know that it would be politically impossible to pass. Romney and Ryan would have gotten their tax cuts, to be sure. But they either wouldn't have been paid for or the burden of doing so would have fallen squarely on the middle class.

And if deductions and loopholes are such a wonderful way of paying for tax cuts, why wasn't the idea explored in 2001 and '03? It had been done rather successfully in 1986 and there was certainly no shortage of economists in the Bush White House. My guess is - and this is only a guess because I'm not aware of anyone else asking the question - is that they either knew that the math didn't work or the optics of having the middle class pay for it would be politically worse than the deficits themselves.

But you can cut spending to pay for tax cuts, right?

Yes, that's theoretically possible. But Republicans have never actually tried it before. Neither Reagan or the second Bush tried cutting spending anywhere close to the costs of their tax cuts. In fact, both dramatically ramped up defense spending, which obliterated the savings from domestic spending cuts. But that too was okay because the GOP doesn't believe that defense spending is "spending," either. Indeed, Mitt Romney promised a third surge in security spending without bothering to figure out how he was going to pay for it.

Nor has anyone complaining about Obama's budgeting bothered to come up with anything close to $4 trillion in domestic cuts over a decade. They've promised a lot of reforms, but none of those take effect for a decade after enactment and are guaranteed to have monstrous transition costs. President Bush's 2005 Social Security plan was estimated to cost a trillion dollars in the first ten years, and I expect that Medicare reform based on personal plans would cost at least that much, and probably much, much more.

If the Grover Norquists and Erick Ericksons of the world had their way and everyone in the U.S government was suddenly a Republican, the projected deficits over the next 10 years would grow faster and larger than those currently on the table. Though they like pretending otherwise, their policies have costs, too. Both history and simple arithmetic teach us that.

As I've said before, I was fine with the sequester with its brutal, wide-ranging and immediate cuts. It was the GOP who objected to it most strongly because half of those cuts came directly from the Pentagon's hide, and the Republican platform calls for a dramatic increase in military spending. Another ideological perversion of the Republican Party is their failure to understand that defense spending, being wholly dependent on foreign policy, is the most discretionary spending of all. And at over $600 billion a year, it's the biggest discretionary program of all.

So when Republicans refuse to pay for their tax cuts or cut spending in a serious or timely way, they're left with one fallback position - shut down the government and possibly default on the debt.

You get a good idea of how unserious these people are when you read something like this;  "Specifically,( Pennsylvania Senator Pat)  Toomey tells Joe Scarborough, “We Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary partial government shutdown, which is what that could mean, and insist that we get off the road to Greece because that’s the road we’re on now.”

Excuse me, but what in the fuck is a "temporary partial government shutdown?"

My guess is that it means that the parts of the government (which also happen to be the biggest parts of it) that Republicans like, such as the military and the CIA, continue conducting business as usual. The GOP might be stupid, but it isn't as suicidal as you might think, so Social Security checks will continue to go out and doctors will keep getting paid under Medicare and Medicaid. All "a temporary partial government shutdown" means is that there's no urgency to reach a deal.

Not being a real government shutdown, that allows people like Erickson to think that Republicans have room to maneuver. This is because people like Erickson don't know how life works outside of their silly ideological bubbles.

Friends, this isn't going to be a replay of 2011. Back then, both sides were negotiating before the government hit the debt ceiling and continued as Treasury was juggling existing money to pay the bills. In this case, the ceiling was reached on Tuesday morning, Obama is on the record as saying that he isn't going to negotiate serious spending cuts and Boehner has said that he isn't going to negotiate with Obama at all. In addition to that, I expect the intellectual misfits in the Tea Party to start calling for a default by the end of next week.

The timing of this suggests to me that a default is a serious possibility this time. In fact, I think it's probable.

The markets freaked out in 2011 just because the GOP talked about defaulting and America's credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history. Can you imagine what will happen if those crazy bastards actually do cause a default?

Remember the meltdown following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy? This will be much worse. At least the government had access to $1.6 trillion for TARP and the Recovery Act then, which it won't this spring because no one will lend America money at anything less than ruinous interest rates. The economy won't "slow down," it'll come to a screeching halt and the United States could start losing a million jobs a month immediately.

By the way, do you know how hard killing terrorists will be when Congress doesn't even have change for the bus? China might also use the opportunity to ramp up its ambitions in the South Pacific, and God only knows what signals Iran will read into a U.S default and Depression.

And all of it will happen at the insistence of alleged "fiscal conservatives."

It's time to finally, finally admit that these people are fiscal conservatives the same way that Lindsay Lohan is sober and chaste. They are to sound economic policy what snake handling is to modern spirituality.

These people are willing to usher in Armageddon based solely on the factually unsupportable belief that Jesus will be waiting at the other side.

If you live outside America, you would be wise to get whatever money you have there out soonest. And if you live in the United States, know that Glenn Beck is probably right and you should start stockpiling gold, canned goods, firearms and explosives forthwith

The Republican Party is going down and they're fixing to take America down with it.

The National Rifle Association Isn't Helping

The most predictable thing happened in the immediate aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Everybody got dogmatic, stupid, and frequently both. The reaction to the massacre managed to reaffirm my contempt for the human spirit more than the massacre itself, which is saying something since we are talking about 20 dead first graders.

As I've said repeatedly over the last week, if I thought gun control would be even remotely helpful, I might find it in myself to support it, the obvious constitutional problems aside. But that train left the station well over a century ago. Even if you could stop the production of all American guns tomorrow, there would still be as many as 300 million of them floating around out there. Liberals understand this, they just refuse to be honest about it.

Conservatives (or more exactly, Republicans) have been even worse over the last seven days. They're going out of their way to blame everything but guns and looking for liberal solutions that limit free speech rights and accomplish nothing. It's repugnant and all the proof you need that you shouldn't trust those assholes any more than you trust liberals. At the end of the day, their solutions require just as much big government and primacy of the state over the individual.

Over the last week, I've seen far too many conservatives blame TV, movies, video games, the Internet and even the news media itself. That kind of stupidity and brazen dishonesty is even more dangerous than the most powerful of assault weapons. Don't get me wrong, they still want their guns. In fact, they want more guns out there. The Second Amendment must be protected, even at the expense of the First.

It's also important to remember that most of the outraged voices this week are the same people that believe corporations are people for the purpose of election spending. If that's true (and I don't have any serious philospohical problems with it) it therefore stands to reason that they enjoy the full spectrum of First Amendment rights, including producing brutally graphic movies and video games.

If the sharp curbing of free expression rights,combined with the wholesale arming of the populace produces anything other than Yemen, I'm at a loss to explain what it would be. The American left and right seem to be in agreement that personal freedom has to take it in the nuts and are only arguing over whose will go.

Perhaps the most offensive notion out there is that this is all the fault of the news media. If I understand this assertion properly, it goes as follows: If the news media stops reporting the news, then nobody will get the idea to shoot a whole bunch of folks. The idea is that the desperate, sad and ill among us are looking for some manner of immortality. If they happen to attain that through a measure of infamy, so be it. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?

Boiled down, the logic seems to be that if we ignore them, they'll just go away. And if you're a simpleton, you might very well agree.

But why then don't we apply that standard to all bad actors in the world? Wasn't Osama bin Laden granted a measure of fame in the wake of 9/11? Would there have been attempted copycat attacks if we all just agreed not to talk about the big hole in Lower Manhattan? Would rockets stop falling in the suburbs of Tel Aviv if the Israeli media stopped making such a big deal about Hezbollah and Hamas?

The idea that crazy people often do weird shit seems to have escaped everyone. It seems self-evident that they do weird shit precisely because they're crazy, and guns or media have little, if anything, to do with it. But it seems that mine is an increasingly lonely voice. Everybody wants the government to do something, even people who don't naturally trust it to do much at all.

I was actually impressed with the National Rifle Association's ability to keep its mouth shut in the days after Sandy Hook. Not only did they show admirable restraint, it was savvy public relations, which they're not often famous for. For example, the NRA's mouthpiece in chief, Wayne LaPierre responded to the sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco by calling government agents "jackbooted thugs," causing lifelong member George H.W Bush to resign in protest.

In keeping a respectful silence, the NRA very well could have gained some goodwill. And they couldn't have that, so they yesterday sent LaPierre out to piss it all away with a presentation so brazenly dishonest and chock full of stupidity that it couldn't possibly be ignored.



Actually, that's not true. Fox News bailed as soon as they understood just how badly Wayne was fucking up the narrative.

That LaPierre believes that the solution to a problem with guns is more guns should surprise no one. After all, the proliferation of weapons is the NRA's raison d'etre, their very bread and butter. But it is just a little counter-intuitive. As the always amazing Michele Catalano said "Next we'll combat the heroin problem in my town by providing the kids with more heroin!" I actually don't agree with that, but it's a great rejoinder.

According to the new official position of the NRA, guns aren't the problem, the media is. And only the government can address that. If the First Amendment has to go to protect the Second, by God, the NRA will be first one to pull the trigger.

In calling for armed cops in every school, LaPierre seems to be calling for a dramatic expansion of the federal government. Most of the examples he cited - airports, the president and Congress - are all protected by federal employees and paid for by Washington.

Let's not pretend that the NRA is a kumbaya, "Up with People" wing of the Democratic Party, okay? These are self-described conservatives. And they're basically proposing the federalization of the school security without a plausible way of paying for it and in direct opposition to decades conservative dogma about the federal role in education.

In fairness, that idea isn't half as fucking dumb as the wholesale arming of teachers. I could be wrong, but I suspect that giving glocks to a bunch of liberal arts majors won't end as well as some folks seem to think it will. Even if it did, it doesn't address the expanding use of body armor in mass shooting incidents since the 1997 North Hollywood Bank of America shootout. If it's hard for the cops to take these psychos out, there's no reason to believe that your kid's guidance counsellor is going to have better luck.

This expansion of government also flies in the face of the paranoid and constitutionally unsupported idea that the Second Amendment is necessary because Americans might have to rise up against their government that the NRA is generally supportive of.

Look, you're not rising up against shit, okay? Even the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 was unequal to federal might, and the United States didn't have a standing army at the time, let alone drones, Apache helicopters and Ticonderoga class cruisers with Aegis combat systems that can destroy a basketball with a Tomahawk missile from 500 miles away. For all the lunatic romantic remembrances of Ruby Ridge and Waco, it's sort of important to remember which side won those confrontations. If the next 25 most powerful nations can't defeat American military might, why does anyone think that some pissed-off hillbillies and blogger shitheads can?

That's not to suggest that I'm against guns. I'm not. But I'm also not going to look at you with a straight face and suggest that your right to bear arms is more important than anyone else's free speech rights.

Not only does LaPierre say exactly that, he will fight to death for the right of people on terrorist watch lists to buy firearms but he wants Grand Theft Auto and a twenty year old Oliver Stone movie made verboten, pronto. There is no other reason to devote that many paragraphs to scapegoating the culture if you don't want action on it. If, as some suggest, that he's only calling for "public shaming," we should take a good long look at how effective that's been against the NRA. Some people are simply biologically without shame.

Here's an interesting test I use to determine if someone is being honest with me. I take note of whether someone holds up individual amendments over the Bill of Rights as a whole. For example, the Second Amendment is pretty meaningless without the Fourth keeping the government from coming to take your guns away. The rest of the document is little more than quaint without the First Amendment.

That's a test that LaPierre and the NRA routinely fails. In a mad and desperate effort to deflect even the tiniest amount of responsibility for gun violence from guns, he throws other freedoms over the side.

Yes, I know that ol' Wayne didn't explicitly call for the censorship or regulation of media. But I can't overlook the fact that he didn't have to. He has no shortage of stooges in Congress and the conservative media that will do it for him. In fact, they've already started.

Always remember that Wayne LaPierre isn't a symbol of freedom; he's a lobbyist. As such, he'll say anything you wind him up to, provided you dangle enough money in front of his snout first. And anyone who doesn't get that is probably too dumb to own a gun in the first place.

Bill O'Reilly: The Gold Standard of Stupid

If you haven't noticed this already, I'm a weird kind of conservative. I actually believe in giving the maximum amount of practical freedom to the people, even if it's at the expense of the government, especially the federal government.

For example, if you believe that the federal government has the duty to "protect the family" from anything other than armed foreigners I respectfully submit that your family just isn't worth saving. Something is eventually going to get them, and it's very likely going to be their own idiocy. Try as you might, there's just way to legislate against ignorance and superstition.

There's a cost-benefit ratio inherent in conservatism that most conservatives seem to have forgotten about, particularly where federal power is concerned. .

Here's how I feel. If I don't give a shit about something, I'm pretty sure that there's no reason for the government to give a shit. At best, such issues are best left to more local levels of government. Ideally, they should be left to the people.

There are already more than enough meaningless laws that are never enforced. I would argue that most of them are passed for no other reason than for stupid people to feel good about themselves. Look at the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004. Murdering a woman is, contrary to popular opinion, not a federal crime in the United States. But four states out fifty didn't make killing the fetus of a pregnant woman a crime, so Congress stepped in. So far as I know, there has never been a case prosecuted under the UVVA, but it sure makes idiots feel good about themselves.

And that brings me to Bill O'Reilly. He'd never describe himself as a conservative (he prefers "traditional American"instead,) which is good because he's an idiot that wants a small federal government that does fantastically huge and stupidly intrusive things.

I'm sure that you've all heard about the Kansas City football player that killed his girlfriend and himself last weekend. It was tragic and sad, but more tragic still was the opportunity it gave idiots to be idiotic.

 

Bob Costas made a remarkably stupid argument. That's because football and baseball aren't "America's pastime;" killing one another is. Lots of countries, from Somalia to Switzerland, have an excess of guns. But no other country sees its citizens killing each other for no reason quite like the United States. Not only are they good at it, they enjoy it. Anyone who has watched MSNBC on the weekend knows that.

The available evidence suggests that Jovan Belcher really wanted himself and Kasandra Perkins dead. If he didn't have a gun, he probably would have used a knife or even a really big stick. One way or another, those folks were gonna get dead.

It's important to note that Costas works for NBC. That's because Bill O'Reilly might be the only living person left watching NBC. If anyone on NBC says anything at all, there's a better than even chance that O'Reilly will feature it on his insipid "Talking Points Memo."

And guess what Bill's topic has been this week!


Wow. So much stupid. Can barely breathe. It burns, I tell you! It burns!

Let's take this point by point, shall we?

Well, even if you believe what Costas and Whitlock are putting out there, what's the solution? The Constitution gives Americans the right to protect themselves, that's clear. In many parts of the country people need hand guns in order to feel secure against criminals who might harm them.

Actually, the Constitution does no such thing. Here is the Second Amendment in full.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Look at the language of the amendment. Nowhere in it is the right to "feel secure against criminals who might harm them." That's just not what the Constitution says.

If you read the Federalist Papers, there is only one thing (other than that the English monarchy eats ass) that the Founders agreed upon - that there should be no standing army. A standing army is an invitation to constant foreign war, which is something that the years from 1989 through, well, now, sort of prove.

But European conquest of the New World was still rather a fad in 1789. The Spanish had Mexico and Florida, and the British had Canada. The United States had to defend itself somehow, right? That's where "A well regulated Militia" comes in.

Militias weren't necessary to secure a free state from criminals back then, since there were already police. The Second Amendment was created to defend against foreign invasion without putting together a standing army.

That might sound to you like a wildly liberal reading of the Amendment, but it's what it actually says. If you don't read so good, I'll print it again.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

See? The language really isn't that complicated.

On the other hand, if gun ownership is a constitutional right, I can't see any language barring carrying by convicted felons, the mentally ill or near federal buildings and schools. That's not there, either. But there is no literal reading of the language that gives you the right to blow a hole in Treyvon Martin's chest. Just sayin'.

Look, I don't care if you have a gun or not. Accordingly, that's something I'd leave to the people, just as a matter of common sense. Shooting people is, more often than not, already a crime. But the idea that's it's an individual right, absent national defence, is an incredibly expansive and hardly literal reading of what the Second Amendment actually says.

O'Reilly continues bringing the stupid.

"Talking Points" has long felt that criminals who use handguns should be punished more harshly than they are now. In fact, all gun crimes in America should be federalized and that includes illegal possession. The level of aggression that a criminal brings is far greater when that criminal uses a gun. A lethal weapon is just that... lethal.

And so there should be mandatory federal prison time for any person convicted of having a gun illegally and if you commit a crime with a gun that mandatory should be 10 years.

I hate to be a know-it-all, but is there is a single state in the Union where "having a gun illegally" is anything other than, well, illegal? Logic would also instruct me to believe that committing a crime with a gun is already a crime.

Keep in mind, this is a "traditional, small government guy," who just happens to want expansive federal laws that infringe on state jurisdiction.

And the past 10 years there has been an increase in the number of handguns in America. There may be 100 million of them in circulation right now. But there has been a decrease in handgun crime. 10 years ago there are about 7,000 handgun murders. Last year the number was about 6,000 it is quite understandable that people are reacting emotionally to this terrible crime in Kansas City.

But the problem America has is not law abiding citizens possessing weapons. That's not damaging the nation. Crimes committed with handguns and out-of-control people -- that's what's hurting the USA. You'll never stop crimes of madness, you're never going to stop them like the Kansas City situation.

But you can put violent criminals away for a long time if they use a gun during the commission of a crime. And that should be done.

You know how Bill O'Reilly's right? Because federal drug laws have worked so swimmingly! Notice how no one is getting high anymore?

If you want to point to a decrease in American handgun deaths in the last decade, have I got a statistic for you!

About the same number of  Americans were killed by other Americans with handguns in the United States in the last twelve months than were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last ten years.

In that spirit, here cometh the Great Battle of the Morons.



Oh God, it burns. It burns so bad!

"BEARS AND INDIANS!"

Nothing beats the Aurora "Dark Knight Rises" argument, though. That is classical stupidity of the sort that I'm sure will one day be taught in classrooms.

So let's say you're in a really dark room that's suddenly filled with tear gas and gun fire. Do you really think that shooting wildly and blindly into the darkness is going to end well? Really? Because pretty much anyone who knows anything about guns will tell you not to shoot at something you can't see, especially with at least hundred people around you.

Here's what I've learned. The problem isn't with people having guns, it's with idiots having guns.

Unfortunately, almost everybody is an idiot.

And that's why I watch the O'Reilly Factor. So you don't have to.

Christie Blatchford, Rob Ford & How Conservatism Destroyed Itself

For the record, I think that Rob Ford should ideally be removed from office in an election. However, if Justice Charles Harkland decides Monday that the mayor's violation of the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act (and no one now seriously argues that he didn't violate it) was so egregious as to warrant removal from office, I'll take it.

I don't think that's going to happen, and neither do most of the lawyers who have been asked about it.

First, the dollar amount was so small, especially given Ford's personal wealth. I can just as easily see Justice Harkland concluding that this violation is more a reflection of Hizzoner's fantastic hubris and remarkable stupidity than actual corruption, at least as corruption is traditionally defined.

Second, appointed judges are properly highly reluctant to remove elected officials from office. The optics of that are horrible. In a perfect world,  the removal of an elected politician would be accompanied with a criminal conviction and possible jail time. And it should be rare. I oppose recalls, in every instance, for the same reason. If you're dumb enough to vote somebody into office, you should suffer the consequences of it until the next election. Not only should politicians take some responsibility, so too should voters.

If I were to bet actual money on what happens Monday afternoon, it would be on Ford surviving in office. But I'm just as sure that he'll take a bad situation and make it infinitely worse, further tarnishing himself.

Etobicoke Slim is singularly incapable of humility. I guarantee you that he'll be on the courthouse steps declare some kind of bizarre "victory," despite his having just been found to have broken the law. I'm pretty confident that he'll include in his remarks moronic references to an "activist judiciary."

In short, Rob Ford will do everything in his power to arrogantly make himself as unelectable as he possibly can.

If it seemed as if Ford was capable of actually understanding that he has brought all of his troubles on himself and modifying the way he deals with people and carries out his duties, it might be possible to rehabilitate himself. But he isn't. He's every bit as haughty and self-entitled as he says his opponents are.

How do I know this? Well, I've been following his testimony in his current libel trial, for one. Just as in his MCIA trial, his testimony in the Madger libel action is evasive, mealy-mouthed and an almost Clintonian exercise in parsing words. If nothing else, it undercuts his self-proclaimed "No bull" style to the point of silliness.

Even after his humiliating court experiences, the mayor took two city buses out of service to drive his dopey football team home from a game. And I should add that it was a game that he left a City Council meeting to coach in the middle of a business day.

Everyday people who couldn't bail on their jobs for a child's sport were left standing around at bus stops for no other reason than their mayor's breathtaking sense of entitlement.

Ford sees some kind of victory in his own repeated disgraces and the demeaning of his own office. The idea of amending the City of Toronto Act to give the mayor greater executive powers is a dead letter so long as people like Rob Ford occupy the office. He can barely get through the day without abusing the little power he has in the most embarrassing way. Why would the province respond to that by granting him more power?

Ever since he declared himself a candidate for the mayor's chair, I wondered why any self-respecting conservative would support an oaf like Ford. It's not as though his incredibly damaged and self-aggrandizing personality was a secret during the campaign.

In today's National Post, Christie Blatchford gives the most predictable and disappointing answer of all.

That week in court refreshed my memory, as the lawyers say. It was never that I loved Mr. Ford, either the detail of his politics or who he is particularly.
Rather, I liked who he wasn’t.

He wasn’t David Miller, his pretty-boy predecessor. He wasn’t the late Jack Layton. He wasn’t Sandra Bussin, the former councillor. He wasn’t Olivia Chow, another former councillor, Mr. Layton’s widow, who may yet return to run for the mayoralty (but only, of course, if “the people” demand it).

Mr. Ford wasn’t a part of that soft-left ruling class which, during my time at City Hall in the mid-1990s, ran the show, and appears to still. He wasn’t an earnest subscriber to the conventions of downtown city politics, with its sure convictions about What We Believe In.

I remember that so vividly, the smugness, the preening disdain for outsiders, even if, sometimes especially if, they were actual citizens.

As Mr. Ford’s lawyer at the libel trial, Gavin Tighe, said rather forcefully in his closing argument, institutional corruption “isn’t done with packets of cash anymore,” but through lobbying, campaign donations, the crass horse-trading of votes and backroom deals, and, Mr. Tighe didn’t mention this, a collective sort of moral superiority.

Mr. Ford is surely deeply flawed. Well, so are most of us, me anyway. But, to use a modern term, he is also authentic.

Watching him being cross-examined by Messrs. Shiller and Caplan – who once used the word “lacuna” in his closing submission, then, for the rest of us not so smart as he is, added helpfully, “that gap” — was a brilliant reminder of why once upon a time, I marked an X by Rob Ford’s name.

I'd love to believe that Ms. Blatchford is kidding. But given her widely known stands - cops, hockey players and the Conservative parties of Ontario and Canada good, everything else bad - I doubt that she is.

This something that warned about repeatedly during the campaign two years ago. I said at the time, and subsequent events has demonstrated, that Rob Ford is a menace to conservatism in this city.

The Harper Tories didn't win the federal seats that they in 416 because of Ford's support, or even because Harper himself is supposedly so awesome. Those seats went to them because the Liberal Party was in a state of national collapse. No fewer than four former Grit leadership candidates (Ken Dryden, Martha Hall Findley, Joe Volpe and Gerard Kennedy) and the leader himself lost their Toronto seats last year. Who else was realistically going to pick up those seats?

Ford's close association with the Hudak Ontario Tories was probably a factor in the party failing to win a single seat in Toronto last fall against an immensely unpopular McGuinty government. Not one. I'll grant you that Tim Hudak might be the only person alive more intellectually challenged than Ford himself, but if the people of Toronto so love the supposed "Ford Nation," it stands to reason that they'd want more of it at the provincial level. They chose otherwise.  Hudak's one saving grace was that he didn't have Toronto seats to lose because he almost certainly would have.

Blatchford's column is a representation of what supposedly intellectual conservatives think, which is truly horrifying.

There was a time when conservatives could proudly stand on what we are and what we believe. We honestly thought that we had ideas that could make people's lives better. Conservative intellectuals for decades insisted that we were more than capable of standing on our own in the forum of ideas and argument. We were right and the left was, well, "misguided." We might not win the battle of elections all the time, but we would win the battle of ideas.

And you know what? We did! Look how far the left has moved to the right in the last three decades. Even when we lose, our ideas are largely adopted and legislated. No honest adult that knows anything at all about the issues can say that Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Jean Chretien were traditionally leftist leaders. The history doesn't support it. Looking at his pre-2006 positions on almost everything, Michael Ignatieff likely would have been a pretty sucessful Conservative leader.

If Christie Blatchford's opinion is widespread among the movement - and everything I've read in the last twenty years tells me it is - that's no longer true. We're surrending in the battle of ideas in not pointing out that the left has moved right.

According to Blatchford, the standard by which conservatives are to be judged is by what we aren't, which is the other guys. That school of thinking suggests that we exist only to win when the other side makes such a godawful mess of everything that they can't possibly continue in office. It suggests that we can't win on our own.

The fact is that we moved the needle. We moved the left to the center. It's what happened afterward that doomed us.

Yes, we can occasionally win by pointing out that we aren't paleolithic cartoon liberals like David Miller, Jack Layton, Olivia Chow or Sandra Bussin, but so what? What does that gives us other than a populist retard that promises to spend untold billions on subways to everywhere with no plausible way of paying for it?

What do you suppose Ford's supporters would say if Mayor Miller disappeared from Council in the middle of the day to teach advanced crotchet to disadvantaged trans-gender youth and, better still, re-routed TTC buses to move them about without creasing their pretty new tube-tops? I can't imagine that it would be anything good. But we're spposed to forgive Ford for taking the afternoon off to coach football? Is there really a paucity of football coaches with less important jobs out there?

Ford differs from Miller, Layton, Chow and Bussin only in his rhetoric. His sense of entitlement is arguably worse than theirs because it's personal, rather than political. Ford can hit lobbyists up for money because it's for his stupid football team, rather than for him personally. Ford can libel business owners out of some idiotic idea that he's "protecting the taxpayer." And conservatives never call him on it.

Perhaps the worst thing about modern movement conservatism is the trait that Rob Ford personally embodies. The idea that nothing is ever our fault. No matter how grievous the sin, no matter how outlandish and contrary to common sense the conduct, it's always somebody else's fault. Always!

When was the last time you heard a conservative say "Boy, that was stupid! I wish I hadn't done that?" No, the first instinct is to attack a malign the press (which we hilariously say is also impotent) and play the victim. Not only has blaming the press replaced the liberal defense of "racism and sexism!," we all too frequently combine racism and sexism with attacks on the press to defend our own monstrous self-entitlement, stupidity and hubris.

Worse still, this is from a moveent who's entire raison d'etre is supposed to be personal responsibility. We're our own bete noire and virtually no one out there is willing to point it out. If we're not better than liberals in our conduct, we're worse, if only because we're supposed to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

Rob Ford is hardly the only example of conservatism destroying itself, but he's easily the most cartoonish and self-destructive. The Harper Conservatives made a conscious political decision in becoming the Trudeau Liberals, but Ford is stupid for stupid's sake. And no one should spend an ounce of their energy or a minute of their time defending him.

If Rob Ford is still mayor by this time Monday, he has exactly one way of surviving the next election. There's always going to a core vote of about 20% that supports him no matter what he does. But the left is so utterly undisciplined and given to hating one another than us that it's hard to imagine them putting up one candidate that would easily beat him. That means that Ford would go through a campaign with a 20 point advantage over anyone else, maybe even 30%.

The only way that we can take him out ourselves is by convincing John Tory into declaring at the earliest possible date and hoping it forces the mayor into retirement. Otherwise, we're done.

Rob Ford is our Nixon figure. Even with a huge mandate, he can't win all of the conservatives on Council, let alone the moderates. And that's not going to get better in a second term, it's going to get worse. There's a very possibility that the Ford allies who rode his coattails in 2010 are going to lose their seats, and a mayor that didn't have a serious agenda in the first place is going to wind up with even less support at City Hall.

Ford's freshman allies are in a predicament. They can either abandon him and maybe survive, or stick with him and lose. Either way, Council is almost certain to be more left wing that it is today. And there's nothing in Ford's biography that suggests that he'll be in a compromising mood, even though his second term will be the result of the left's inability to do anything right.

Hoping that he changes his attitude is a fool's errand. Rob Ford's entire life is a textbook exercise in entitlement. Since he inherited his money and his political career, there's no reason to believe that he's going to re-evaluate his character at this late date. After his near-constant, self-inflicted humiliations, he still blames everyone but himself. We're even seeing that in his libel trial, where he's throwing his most steadfast (and only) media allies under the bus.

In the summer of 1974, defending Richard Nixon had finally become a bridge too far for all but a minuscule number of Republicans. Yes, they lost the '74 congressional and '76 presidential elections. But the losses likely would've been much worse if Nixon barely survived and still controlled the agenda and the party machinery. Had a disgraced and thoroughly discredited Nixon handed off the nomination to a successor, the stench of Watergate might have stuck to the party - and the movement - for a generation. And it may never have gone away.

But just six years after the GOP repudiated Nixon themselves, they made impressive gains in Congress in '78 and began 12 years in the White House in 1980. The same is true of Rob Ford.

The longer Ford stays in office, the more damaging he is to conservatism in this city. In the long run, it's far better for conservatives that Toronto have a Trotskyite mayor than Rob Ford slowly destroying everything that we're supposed to believe in, thereby making it impossible for us to elect another, more sensible conservative for a generation.

He has to be beaten. Although I think that it would be wrong to judicially remove him from office for what he's done, the longer he stays, the harder it's going to be to further our agenda for decades to come.

Although I don't think that removing him from office is legally justified, it might just be the greatest political favour the Court can do for us.



Link ruthlessly stolen from Dawg's Blawg. Gif ruthlessly stolen from Lisa Kirbie.

Let's Talk About Bain: Capitalism, Private Equity and Leveraged Buyouts

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Too Late, Dumb and Dead: More Thoughts on the NDP-Liberal "Merger"

I've been saying for years that the Liberal Party of Canada is on a rapid slide into obsolescence. However, even I didn't think it would happen as rapidly as it did. I thought it would take the Grits a decade to wind up where they are, although I did say that their ending up as the third party in Parliament was well within the realm of possibility during last year's campaign. I was still kind of shocked when it actually happened.

To understand how the Liberals got to the depths they're in now, one should understand how they reached the heights they enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, I've found Peter C. Newman's When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada a remarkable resource in this regard. Newman is also the author of one of my all-time favorite hate-screeds, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: The Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister. I'm seriously considering having all of my future lovers read The Secret Mulroney Tapes before I embed myself within them, so beautifully angry is that book. It's almost as balls-out pissed off as Mulroney's own memoirs, but only a quarter the length!

Anyhow, without actually coming right and saying so, Newman makes the case that the Liberals became the "Natural Government Party" through good timing and breath-taking corruption. Fantastically, I was unaware of this theorem before reading When the Gods Changed because no Liberal actually contested it. There was no shortage of material in Newman's book that various and sundry Grits protested, but that wasn't among them.

The LPoC had the good fortune of governing during the Second World War, when Canada finally became a fully industrialized society. As was true in the United States later, Ottawa was besieged with "dollar a year men," business leaders who worked for the government to further the war effort. In Canada, they answered to Prime Minister King's "Minister of Everything," C.D Howe.

Besides being mostly responsible for the war effort, Howe was also the Liberal party's chief fundraiser. However, he never bothered building any kind of a wall being his two functions. When a business wanted a lucrative "cost-plus" war contract, Howe's functionaries reminded them that a political donation would grease the wheels somewhat. That this also essentially froze money from going to the Conservatives or the CCF (which is now the NDP) was likely something that didn't escape ol' C.D's notice.

Often times, a company would overbid for a contract and then kick back as much as 10% of it to the party. Most modern observers believe that Jean Chretien's sponsorship scandal came out of nowhere, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Peter Newman spends the better part of three chapters describing how corruption is part of the Liberal DNA, again, without actually saying so. But it is impossible to read the history in When the Gods Changed without coming to that conclusion.

The Grits also mightily relied on the federal civil service to build it's infrastructure and as a training ground for their candidates, particularly during the King, St. Laurent and Pearson years. What was created was an unstoppable marriage between politics, business and the public service that was unparalleled in most of the democratic world. Indeed, it was a phenomenon more more common to totalitarian societies.

But the Liberals were often brought down by their own unparalleled arrogance. At various points(specifically, 1957, '84 and 2006) the public would grow disgusted with their hubris and throw them out, giving the Conservatives the odd chance at government, which they would promptly fuck up.

But after '57 - with the very notable exception of Pierre Trudeau's win in 1968 - the Liberals only won because the Conservatives were so bad at politics. Trudeau never won back-to-back majority governments and Jean Chretien only won at all because the Conservative party fractured three ways during the latter Mulroney years.

When the Tories reunified in 2003, the Grits were first reduced to a bare minority, then thrown out of government altogether, probably never to return. In the 2006, '08 and '11 elections, the Liberal seats from Paul Martn's last government have been cut by more than two-thirds.  Only three Liberal leaders since 1867 have never been prime minister. Two of them were leader in the last six years.

Of course the Liberals should have reached some accommodation with the NDP. In fact, even Jean Chretien now recognizes that he should have done it years ago, when he was prime minister. The Dippers were almost as thoroughly wiped out as the Conservatives were in 1993. Had Chretien absorbed the New Democratic Party under the most generous terms possible back then, I believe that they'd still be in power today. There would have been an almost unstoppable left-wing party in a centre-left-leaning country, which even the unified Conservatives probably wouldn't have defeated.

But the Liberals couldn't stop being Liberals for 20 minutes and think about their electoral future. They had their strength in Quebec cut in half after 1984 and spent the better part of the 70s guaranteeing that they'd never again win significant numbers of seats in Western Canada. They thought that the Tory fracture was forever and that they could continue to win majorities with all of the seats in Ontario, slightly less than half of Quebec's and a plurality in Atlantic Canada until they end of time.

The only problem was that they didn't see the end of time coming until it was too late to stop it, which was in 2010, if you believe some commentators. It was only then that some Grit functionaries - very probably without telling their leader, Micheal Ignatieff - started "negotiating" a merger with the NDP under Jack Layton.

Even at that incredibly late date, the overwhelming hubris of the Liberals was on full display. The "deal" was essentially this: "Stop being the NDP and we'll let you become Liberals. But before you get too excited, we're not going to give you commie assholes any Cabinet seats that have anything to do with money. How's that grab you?"

Within a year, the Grits would have fewer seats than the Dippers did when those "negotiations" were ongoing.

Now comes the new book by  Paul Adams, an associate professor of journalism at Ottawa’s Carleton University, Power Trap: How fear and loathing between New Democrats and Liberals keep Stephen Harper in power--and what can be done about it.

I haven't yet read Power Trap, but Professor Adams' thesis is, to put it lightly, silly.

A new book that advocates a Liberal-NDP merger blames partisan pettiness and personal rivalries for the two parties’ refusal to play footsie.

“New Democrats and Liberals are caught in a power trap in which they seek to reach government, not by defeating the Conservatives, but by destroying their progressive rival,” writes Paul Adams, an associate professor of journalism at Ottawa’s Carleton University.

In Power Trap: How Fear and Loathing Between the Liberals and NDP Keep Harper in Power, he predicts the two parties will keep duelling for at least another three elections before one or the other establishes supremacy.

In other words, opposition stubbornness will enable Stephen Harper to join the five-member club of Canadian prime ministers who’ve each ruled for a decade or more.

This, argues the veteran journalist, will be disastrous for Canada.

(...)

He believes a victory by co-operating progressives would be fairly certain, noting the three parties won 53 per cent of the vote in 2011.

And that was with a no-show from a large chunk of a voting constituency — youth — that the progressive parties potentially are best positioned to win over. If the three parties were to undertake a campaign of outreach, using social media as Barack Obama did in his 2008 “Yes We Can” presidential campaign, young people who previously haven’t voted could help put a merged Opposition force over the top in a vote expected in 2015.

While it’s true some right-leaning Liberals likely go over to the Conservatives in such a scenario, “blue Liberals” probably already have left the party, Adams writes.

At the moment, however, so-called progressives have “no agreed-upon platform or unifying vision, no leader who can claim undisputed primacy in the fight to dislodge the Conservatives.”

There's absolutely no evidence to support Adams' assertions.

The Liberals have already spent the better part of four decades narrowing their geographic and political appeal to the point that it barely exists at all. If the Conservatives were even halfway smart, John Turner would have been the Last Liberal Prime Minister instead of Paul Martin.

The NDP has already established "supremacy" over the Liberals, as any fair reading of the last twenty years of elections results amply demonstrates.

In 1993, the Dippers were reduced to 9 seats from 44, losing party status along with the Progressive Conservatives. The Liberals went from 88 to 177, and Chretien likely wouldn't have won half that many were it not for vote-splitting in Ontario and Quebec, where over half of Parliament's seats are.

But in four of the five subsequent elections, 1997, 2004, '06 and '08, the New Democrats slowly gained seats as the Liberals lost them. The Grits started the 2004 election with 168 seats and ended it with 135. In 2008, they dropped to 77. Between '93 and '08, the Dippers more than quadrupled their seat count to 37.

2011 was the terminal point. The Liberals were reduced to an all-time low of 34 seats, while the NDP exploded to 103, over half of which was in Quebec.

Simply put, the Liberals have had the floor drop out of their vote in the last two elections, losing 50% of their seats in each of them. Meanwhile, the Dippers have been increasingly expanding the scope and reach of their vote in ways that no one could have anticipated.

Unless the Grits can magically start doubling and tripling their seats counts overnight, reversing a trend two decades in the making, they're done. And given the narrowing of the geographic reach of the vote that started under Trudeau, that ain't at all likely. At this point, they barely hold the majority of seats in their former stronghold of Toronto.

Liberal fortunes are further complicated by their continued reliance on fucking gimmicks. Their coming leadership race seems to be a contest for who their next "guru" is going to be; Teenage Jesus, who hasn't done anything in government, or a retired astronaut who hasn't done anything in government. Both are about as notable for their governing vision of Canada as the former goalie who previously ran for the leadership was. The Liberals haven't thought of having a serious parliamentarian as their leader since Martin.

Say what you will about Jack Layton and Thomas Muclair, but they had spent decades in municipal and provincial government between them. They both knew how the game of politics is played and how the machinery worked, as well as having a vision as to how broaden the chessboard of the electorate. The Liberals are still relying on stunts that they think will make the country fall to their knees before them. I could be very wrong about this, but I think they're insulting the public with that nonsense. I haven't hidden the fact that I think that the voting public is stupid, but I don't think we're that stupid.

Professor Adams also makes much too much about how "right-wing" the Harper Conservatives are. They responded to the 2008 financial panic by spending even more in stimulus money than Barack Obama did. Every single proposal they've ever made since 2004 has been poll-tested to the tits and is utterly bereft of anything that is recognizable as "conservative principle." let alone being "right-wing." In his six years in power, Harper has come close to surpassing even Trudeau's insane spending.

When a left-wing party finally beats the Tories, it won't be because that party is so made of awesome. It'll be because conservatives have abandoned the Conservatives.

Can we also quit comparing anything in Canadian politics to President Obama's 2008 victory? More than anything else, doing that demonstrates that people like Paul Adams don't know anything about Canadian or American politics.

There are two reasons that Barack Obama is president today, their names are George W. Bush and John McCain.

Bush had poisoned the well on all the issues that Republicans had previously been strong on, most importantly, national security and the economy. It's important to remember that the financial panic began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008 but the recession started in the spring of 2007. Iraq was a huge mess and Afghanistan was even worse without anyone noticing. Also, McCain ran a spectacularly bad campaign and thought that a semi-literate piece of ass would save him. He thought wrong.

I probably shouldn't overlook the fact that Obama wasn't even the favourite to win the Democratic nomination: Hillary Clinton was, but her campaign was  overwhelmed by stupidity, hubris and infighting, making her the ideal frontrunner to run the Liberal Party of Canada.

You can actually look at the Obama presidency and adorably say that "He didn't build that!" The GOP did it for him, and are continuing to. But there is, as yet, no evidence at all that Stephen Harper is creating similar conditions for a future

Finally, I have seen no indication at all that the Liberals have gotten over themselves enough to even think about reconsidering their previously stated terms of a merger, specifically that the NDP stop being the NDP. Even though they have well under half of the seats that the Dippers do, the Grits are still delusional enough to think that they can dictate the terms of a merger.

The Liberal Party of Canada is basically the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They've had a limb cut off in each of the last four elections, but they insist that "it's just a flesh wound" and that they remain strong enough to dictate the terms under which the New Democrats cross the bridge.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic. Okay, that's not true, It's still hilarious.

I'll probably still read  Power Trap, but that's only because I like feeling smarter than my supposed intellectual betters. Whether you buy it or not, I'll leave to you, but I can't imagine that Tories or Dippers will find a single useful thing in it.



I could go into some depth about Quebec and how the dynamics there are likely to play into the coming power shift, but I'm bored and this post is already long enough. If you want to argue, let's go to the comments. In all probability, somebody's going to bring up the Clarity Act and that'll necessitate a part two to this post.

Let's get it on.