Suspicious Amount of Angst over a "Dead" Coalition

Gratuitous use of quotation marks. Everyone's doing it.

My friend drove me to a coffee shop near my house this morning. It was just long enough to be forced to listen to Rutherford encourage and affirm phone-in lying. I thought about opening the door and bailing out into a snowbank but everything is melting here.

I'll paraphrase:

Dave: Go ahead Corky your on dumbass radio.
Corky: Yeah, Dave I went to school and what not and know a lot about government type things and what not. And I know that the Governor General can't hand over power to separatists. She's literally not allowed to.
Dave: You're right you're right. The Bloc have avowed to cut the country in half. You're so right.
Corky: I am that.

For brevity, I left out the caller's preamble about how Stephen Harper is the best Prime Minister Canada ever or will ever have.

Even a Junior High student could list off the fallacies and the lies in this all too common type of exchange.

This is getting so repetitive, but once more:

• The Bloc Quebecois is not part of the coalition. Never were never will be. They agreed not to vote non-confidence for some period of time that's it. Why can't these people follow a simple news story and get the basic facts?
  
• The Governor General can ask the opposition to form a Government and has done so in the past. Period. There is no litmus test of what the opposition parties have to believe in.
• The Bloc Quebecois is not in any position to advance the Separation of Quebec, or anything really. I call bogey-man. Referendums occur on the Provincial level. The Provincial Parti Quebecois is currently out of office. Separation, right now seems kind of low on the priority list of Quebecois.
• Dave and his friends don't care about Quebec separation one bit. They would be more concerned if their cats had anal gland problems. They only care about Stephen Harper implementing an agenda favored by only 40 some percent.
  

Fighting bullshit is hard work and mostly thankless. I'd like to thank all the progressive and liberal bloggers who spoke up on the coalition issues with far more eloquence than I have.

(Update: and thanks to blogger for stripping out my bullet points.) Please recommend this post

Creating a No-Think Zone

The shutting down of Parliament was the ultimate act of dumbing things down. The mistake of Dion and the Coalition supporters was not realizing the whole debate was emotional rather than intellectual. Dumber not smarter. Closed not curious. Mean not good-willed. The message from the minority is loud and clear: Don't you dare think about this. Harper not only retreated from Parliament he has retreated from the world of ideas and debate, which is exactly where we needed to be during these times.

Dion who is a good thinker and a decent man simply was swamped by the negative, emotional and illogical response to the coalition. Dion, unlike Harper, simply found it unnatural to wield the axe of hyperbole and untruth. Do you admire that quality? I do. The real question now is whether the Liberal Party and the broader coalition understands the playing field.

As the argument about the coalition moves forward you can guess that brilliant debaters will offer that Ignatieff, a) Went to Harvard, and b) Harvard is in the United States. As good a reason as I've ever heard to refuse to cede power to a legal coalition and the legal alternative government. Since elected socialists and separatists are now not allowed to participate in Government via Harper's divine ban, maybe we should add Harvard Grads as well. It has already started with a Calgary radio demagogue referring to Michael Ignatieff as the Harvard brainiac. This is your new cheap shot. Write it down.

In an outright attack on literacy and history, the Calgary Sun had this to say on 30 Nov 2008:

No one wants to hear another egghead tell us about the powers of the governor general and the ins and outs of the King-Byng affair, a lesson many of us slept through in high school social studies class.

That is a horrible message to send to people, especially young people who are still in school. I can't believe that a journalist would seriously argue for people to be ignorant. A newspaper that relies on promoting ignorance, hysteria and simple-mindedness to make people feel good is not acting in its readers best interests.

This version of anti-intellectualism has always been with us, but not in this saturation. It pals around with straight jacket patriotism which is not patriotism at all. It is just another form of hatred and discrimination. Please recommend this post