Monday, October 23, 2006
By Popular Request
Where by "popular request", I mean "request of a single person who is no doubt unrepresentative of the population at large". In an e-mail with the subject line "I never want to hear the words "Quebec" and "nation" in the same sentence again.", Anonymotron (whose blog is an excellent read if you can spare the five minutes per month required to read the whole thing) writes the following:
Actually, the subject about which I was actually planning on blogging was my growing disillusionment with Michael Ignatieff, for whom my feelings, as regular readers (those ever-decreasing hordes) will know, were pretty mixed to begin with. The problem is that he seems dedicated to taking everything that was on the positive side of the mixed feelings and couter-act it, not only with a negative, but with a directly contradictory negative.
For example, one thing I liked about Ignatieff is that his mind appeared to be a really great one. The he comes out and starts blithering like an idiot about Qana. I'm no expert on Qana, the Middle East, or what constitutes a war crime, but his statement that it was Hezbollah, and not Israel, that he was accusing of war crimes, coupled with his statement that he respected Susan Kadis' decision to resign from his campaign team over her objections to his accusations that Israel had committed war crimes, appear to be, I don't know, completely fucking incoherent.
And then there's Iraq - I obviously didn't support the invasion of Iraq. I knew Michael Ignatieff did. I'd read his rationale, and I didn't agree with it, but I admired his guts. Basically, he was willing to deviate from the viewpoints of almost all of his hitherto like-minded colleagues because he believed it was the right thing to do. He admitted that it could wind up making him look really stupid, and called it the "risk of his life". Unfortunately, what *actually* wound up making him look really stupid was his statement to the Globe that Bush was a disaster largely on the basis that he invaded Iraq. Not looking quite so principled and courageous anymore.
Which brings us to the post that Anonymotron requested, though it almost doesn't merit a post by virtue of having been discussed more or less continuously for the last three decades or longer.
The problem isn't that Michael Ignatieff thinks Québec is a nation - Stéphane Dion thinks so too, and so did Pierre Trudeau. The problem is not even that he wants to entrench this in the Canadian constitution (well, actually that is a problem, but it's not the biggest one). The problem is that, like Brian Mulroney, Ignatieff won't say what effect he expects constitutional entrenchment to have. And, absent any statement of what legal effect he would like to see a two-or-more-nations clause to have, we can only conclude that it is calculated primarily to bring so-called soft nationalists over to the cause of federalism.
This brings us to the greatest problem of all: Michael Ignatieff apparently believes that it is possible to please all parties with a constitutional amendment - he believes that it's possible, the lessons of history notwithstanding, to *increase* the state of Canadian unity by opening up the constitution.
The problem, apparently, is that Michael Ignatieff is an idiot.
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Where by "popular request", I mean "request of a single person who is no doubt unrepresentative of the population at large". In an e-mail with the subject line "I never want to hear the words "Quebec" and "nation" in the same sentence again.", Anonymotron (whose blog is an excellent read if you can spare the five minutes per month required to read the whole thing) writes the following:
Unless the sentence is "Who the fuck cares whether Quebec is a nation?" Although it would be kind of funny to watch Ignatieff try to "solve" the National Unity Thing.Conveniently, this was on my list of five or six topics I've been meaning to blog about (another of which - we're just rife with irony here at WitPotS - was a promise not to say anything more about the Liberal leadership contest until at least the middle of November).
(Oddly, considering the title of this email, this is actually a request for a blog post on this topic.)
Actually, the subject about which I was actually planning on blogging was my growing disillusionment with Michael Ignatieff, for whom my feelings, as regular readers (those ever-decreasing hordes) will know, were pretty mixed to begin with. The problem is that he seems dedicated to taking everything that was on the positive side of the mixed feelings and couter-act it, not only with a negative, but with a directly contradictory negative.
For example, one thing I liked about Ignatieff is that his mind appeared to be a really great one. The he comes out and starts blithering like an idiot about Qana. I'm no expert on Qana, the Middle East, or what constitutes a war crime, but his statement that it was Hezbollah, and not Israel, that he was accusing of war crimes, coupled with his statement that he respected Susan Kadis' decision to resign from his campaign team over her objections to his accusations that Israel had committed war crimes, appear to be, I don't know, completely fucking incoherent.
And then there's Iraq - I obviously didn't support the invasion of Iraq. I knew Michael Ignatieff did. I'd read his rationale, and I didn't agree with it, but I admired his guts. Basically, he was willing to deviate from the viewpoints of almost all of his hitherto like-minded colleagues because he believed it was the right thing to do. He admitted that it could wind up making him look really stupid, and called it the "risk of his life". Unfortunately, what *actually* wound up making him look really stupid was his statement to the Globe that Bush was a disaster largely on the basis that he invaded Iraq. Not looking quite so principled and courageous anymore.
Which brings us to the post that Anonymotron requested, though it almost doesn't merit a post by virtue of having been discussed more or less continuously for the last three decades or longer.
The problem isn't that Michael Ignatieff thinks Québec is a nation - Stéphane Dion thinks so too, and so did Pierre Trudeau. The problem is not even that he wants to entrench this in the Canadian constitution (well, actually that is a problem, but it's not the biggest one). The problem is that, like Brian Mulroney, Ignatieff won't say what effect he expects constitutional entrenchment to have. And, absent any statement of what legal effect he would like to see a two-or-more-nations clause to have, we can only conclude that it is calculated primarily to bring so-called soft nationalists over to the cause of federalism.
This brings us to the greatest problem of all: Michael Ignatieff apparently believes that it is possible to please all parties with a constitutional amendment - he believes that it's possible, the lessons of history notwithstanding, to *increase* the state of Canadian unity by opening up the constitution.
The problem, apparently, is that Michael Ignatieff is an idiot.
