Yet another idiot

Shorter Christian Conservative: "I don't understand parliamentary democracy."

Bonnus shorter Christian Conservative: "Therefore, based on that lack of understanding, Canada's electoral system is just like Zimbabwe's."

I wish I were exaggerating.

Senate reform via stacking the senate

You might remember Stephen Harper as the guy who ran on a platform of reforming the senate, then executed on that plan by appointing a senator on his first day in office. In fact, my MP, the "drama queen"*  sent me a flyer this very spring indicating how important senate reform is to the CPC party.

So obviously, the way to reform the senate is to appoint a whole bunch of new senators:

Newly re-elected Prime Minister Stephen Harper served notice Wednesday that he will stack the Senate with Tories if necessary to push through democratic reforms of the chamber.

Mr. Harper told reporters in Calgary that the Conservatives are serious about promised changes to the Senate – which include elections and eight-year fixed terms – and will fill it with new Tory appointments to push through reforms if the Liberal majority there opposes them.

“We don't believe an unelected body should in anyway be blocking an elected body,” he told a news conference in Calgary.

So Steve means to reform the senate by taking a page from Mulroney's book and stacking the senate. Even though the senators he appoints won't be subject to the new laws he enacts -- the laws won't be retroactive.

The only real way to change the senate, by the way, is through a change to the constitution. But Steve doesn't have the backbone to try a constitutional change -- it's too hard, and daring to do things when he doesn't know if they'll succeed just isn't in the Steve playbook.

So he's going to enact a bunch of laws that will be no more meaningful or binding than the fixed election dates law that he enacted in his first mandate. Accountability? No, not for him. He'll take smoke and mirrors over accountability, every time.

Steve seems to love to pass laws for other people that don't apply to him. That's because he's a weak, cowardly man who has no idea how to work with other people to make things go his way.

A weak, cowardly man.

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* The wonderful Kady O'Malley's term, not mine. Though I wish it were.

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Update: Kady is on the case, and look out, Steve, she's got math.

Great Idea for a Sketch

With that new Fox News comedy show being developed, I'm sure there are some great comedic minds working to make it the best Daily Show rip-off ever. But I've got an idea for a hilarious sketch.

The sketch opens with George Bush making an address to a large crowd. Then he starts looking for WMDs all over the stage -- under the podium, in the wings, in the first row of the audience. Hilarious! He just keeps looking and looking and can't find 'em!

And then he finds 'em under a pile of 3,000 dead US servicemen.

I think it would be awesome but I have a feeling that it's already been done. I seem to remember this being pitched to someone else, like the American people or something.

Recently, noted historian Jason Kenney likened Hezbollah to the 1930s Nazi party. This is not an uncommon tactic, but it's become current with the situation in the Middle East where Hezbollah killed fifty Israeli innocents. (That Israel killed over a thousand Lebanese innocents, I'll get to in a bit.)

My question is, how can you possibly equate a rag-tag group like Hezbolah to the government of a huge, powerful, and heavily industrialized nation? How could Hezbollah ever represent the threat to Jewish people, and to all of humanity, that the Nazis did?

The Holocaust had its roots in deep-seated, systemic, and centuries-old Christian racism, undeniably. But the horror does not stem from the fact that it happened to the Jews (more accurately, they were the single biggest group that was targeted -- I don't know but I suspect that, percentage-wise, the gypsies were devastated far more as a people).

The horror of the Holocaust was that this base human fear, xenophobia, and hatred was carried out on a monolithically industrial scale. A great portion of a nation's industry was focused on slaughter. It is the cold, inhuman possibilities that human society is capable of that makes the Holocaust unique in history.

By labelling everyone who hates Jews or Israel -- and by the way, I'm neither, and in fact I agree that Israel has the right to existence and security -- a Nazi, not only do you cheapen the incomprehensible Jewish experience in the Holocaust, you also choose to ignore the huge responsibility the Holocaust demands from us as a society.

Meanwhile, you have Hezbollah, a well-organized and well-armed group to be sure, but a group without any military or industrial power -- especially compared to Israel. In numbers, they are far inferior not only to Israel, but even to the Israel military. The idea that they could act on statements like "we will destroy Israel" is as ludicrous as the statements themselves. What does it say about those who instruct us to actually fear the people who say such things? (I'll tell you: that they are motivated by exactly the same kind of prejudice and hatred that they decry.)

So either you have to explain how Hezbollah has the potential to achieve something on the scale of the Holocaust, or you have to accept that calling people Nazis because they are against Israel is simple intellectual dishonesty.

Israel Intended to Kill Our Soldier

I've been thinking a lot about the death of Major Kruedener in Lebanon the other day. A lot of the speculation seems to revolve around the question of whether the IDF intended to actually shell the UN observation post.

I was in the Royal Canadian Artillery (as a reservist) for three years. Let me tell you what I think.

I was a signaller (that is, a radio-man) in the RCA. I was on a gun for a year, and then in the Command Post for two years. A total of maybe 12 weeks in the field on live fire exercises. And I can tell you, when you're firing live ammunition, you care passionately, all-encompassingly, that every round goes where it's supposed to. If you're even near one of the "safe boxes" around your FOOs or other friendlies, you double-check everything. I know that was the case in every box I was in. (And by double-check I mean triple-check; you normally double-check every round.)

Here's the sum total of the mistakes I saw:

1. We once fired at the wrong time. This was because the fire orders were being given from our regimental commander in a non-standard way. Our rounds went to the right place, but they went before they were supposed to. It was actually my own personal fault, because I misinterpreted the command coming over the radio.
   
2. We once missed the target by a huge margin. The command post officer failed to double-check the calculations from the technician, and sent the fire order without checking. Our observers immediately radioed in to say the rounds were off target and to check again.

We were high school kids, mostly. We trained a few weeks in the summer, a few weekends in the year, and one evening a week. We were not the professional, highly-trained units in the IDF. And our guns were Korean War relics. (Literally, the date the barrels were cast was stamped right on 'em. There wasn't a gun in our battery cast after 1954. My regiment has since updated to lighter, more accurate howitzers.)

My conclusion is that someone was ordering fire on the UN observer post. Maybe they saw it as a calculated risk, because there were Hezbollah units nearby. But that means they knew there was a chance of hitting it, and they took that chance. For ten hours. Despite repeated calls from the UN post, pleading them to stop.

On that chance, they lost, and four peacekeepers are dead. One was a Canadian.

Any reason to feel okay with that any more? Yeah, not for me either.

So when Stephen Harper waves his hand at the IDF's role in this, when Stephen Harper asks "what were they doing there?" instead of "why is our nation's son dead?" -- I refuse to accept it.

Bill Turner was a command post officer in our regiment. I worked with him many times. We filled sandbags together, for god's sake, in 30 degree weather on the Mattawa plains. He was killed in Afghanistan in April.

Al Prentice was another gunner in my regiment. We went through our basic training, artillery training, and signaller training together. We've had more beers together than I can count. We ate wings together on my nineteenth birthday. He'll be rotated to Afghanistan this September.

These lives could be tossed aside just as easily. Will Stephen Harper care?

I'm calling on Mr Harper to support our troops, first and last. To refuse to use our men and women as pieces in some game where political capital is the currency. The real currency is life, Mr Harper, human life, that you and I agree can be risked to help people, to help keep peace.

Mr Harper may be willing to sacrifice Major Kruedener and Lieutenant Turner and Sergeant Prentice in the name of political expediency. I am not. And I won't forget Mr Harper's shameful abdication of his duty to his nation, and to the men and women who fight at his command.

Mission Accomplished, Mister Prime Minister

Stephen Harper's five priorities, as he laid them out for us during the election campaign, were:

• Cleaning up government by passing the Federal Accountability Act
• Cutting the GST
• Cracking down on crime
• Increasing financial assistance for parents
• Working with the provinces to establish a wait-times guarantee for patients

Then came July, when they had mysteriously morphed into:

• cleaning up the federal government
• cutting taxes
• cracking down on crime
• supporting families
• strengthening our country at home and around the world

Now, we all know about the bait and switch Harper played this month with the five priorities. And he replaced a definite, measurable one (wait times guarantee) with a vague one (strengthen our country).

The last two weeks have made it clear, though, that Harper is incapable of strengthening our country abroad. In the Israeli conflict, he has called the bombing of civilian populations "measured"; refused to call for a cease-fire even after eight Canadian civilians were killed and 10,000 Canadians were forced to leave the country; refused to call Israel to account for killing one of our UN workers; and actually blamed the UN worker for carrying out a UN mission in the first place.

Other than the US, Israel, and the UK, we are alone in the international community in defending Israel. While we might get a little more credibility from the USA (and we know how useful credibility is with them), we have lost face at every single turn in this crisis.

All we need is an aircraft carrier and a banner.

Afghanistan: End it

You know, I was originally pro the Afghanistan mission. Then, since Canada re-upped its deployment there, I was on the fence. Now, I've moved over to the "get out now" side.

I don't know how we can extricate ourselves before our mission ends. But unless we get a clear mandate for what we're going to achieve there, and unless that mandate is consistent with actual improvements to the lives of Afghanis, we have to leave.

It comes down to what I've said about every UN mission Canada joins in on: it all depends on the mandate. If we have clear objectives and clear means of achieving them, then we can be okay with the mission. (Cyprus is a good example of that, if a little old.)

If we're to fight the insurgents in order to clear the way for a natural gas pipeline, we've gotta bring the soldiers home.