Stéphane Dion has beaten Michael Ignatieff to win the leadership of the Liberal Party, winning 57.4 percent of delegates’ votes to Iggy’s 45.3 percent.

Dion, a former professor of political science and Minister of the Environment under Paul Martin, has made the environment his central concern. The Tories are certainly vulnerable on the environment, which speaks in Dion’s favour, but on the other hand he has been described to me as “boring”.

Then again, Harper has the charisma of a frozen venison chop, so maybe boring and bookish stands a chance. I haven’t yet formed an opinion of him, but I’m interested in hearing yours. What is Dion all about, what does this mean for the Liberal Party, and can they take back Parliament with Dion at the helm?

[tags]Dion, liberals, Canada, politics[/tags]

The video for Bombs by UK group Faithless contains powerful, thought-provoking imagery. Which is probably why it’s been banned by MTV*.

*I have not been able to confirm the ban via any news organization, but that’s the word on the blogs and elsewhere:

They have a thing on MTV Hits where you can ask any question you like via TXT, so I asked why MTV had banned the video :-) They actually aired it and answered! Here is what MTV said: “No official statement has been made, but Faithless ‘Bombs’ has most likely been banned for being too violent, political and/or controversial !!!

[tags]music[/tags]

The folly of America’s administration and its apologists, among them the New York Times, the Washington Post, and now the “opposition” party, the Democrats, knows few bounds.

Consider Robert Fisk’s Like Hitler and Brezhnev, Bush is in denial:

More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of Mesopotamia – and still George W Bush is in denial. How does he do it? How does he persuade himself – as he apparently did in Amman yesterday – that the United States will stay in Iraq “until the job is complete”?

[…]

About the only truthful statement uttered in Amman yesterday was Bush’s remark that “there’s a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there’s going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq [but] this business about a graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all.” Indeed, it has not. There can be no graceful exit from Iraq, only a terrifying, bloody collapse of military power.

Now consider, on the other hand, the Times’ Idea of Rapid Withdrawal From Iraq Seems to Fade:

In the cacophony of competing plans about how to deal with Iraq, one reality now appears clear: despite the Democrats’ victory this month in an election viewed as a referendum on the war, the idea of a rapid American troop withdrawal is fast receding as a viable option.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff are signaling that too rapid an American pullout would open the way to all-out civil war. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group has shied away from recommending explicit timelines in favor of a vaguely timed pullback. The report that the panel will deliver to President Bush next week would, at a minimum, leave a force of 70,000 or more troops in the country for a long time to come, to train the Iraqis and to insure against collapse of a desperately weak central government.

[…]

Standing next to Mr. Maliki on Thursday in Amman, Jordan, Mr. Bush declared that Iraqis need not fear that he is looking for “some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq.” But a graceful exit – or even an awkward one – appears to be just what the Iraq Study Group, led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, tried to design in the compromise reached by Republicans and Democrats on the panel on Wednesday.

Ah, the Democrats, erstwhile friends of the anti-war movement. They stood with the majority of Americans against the war just a few weeks ago, now, they support the Bush plan for Iraq with merely a few vague adjustments.

A democracy requires opposing points of view. A democracy requires an active press that speaks truth to power. A democracy requires active public debate, not “consensus” handed down from on high.

No country should quibble and mutter and praise its own good intentions while the country it occupies burns. No opposition party should stand by and watch this happen, let alone participate in it.

Shame on you, Democrats, for turning your back on Americans, Iraqis and the rest of the world so soon after promising so much.

[tags]Democrats, Iraq[/tags]

The daily stories out of Iraq are so gruesome and brutally violent that I have, horribly, become accustomed to them. Car bombings, kidnappings, the discovery of dozens of tortured bodies dumped in a Baghdad suburb: I haven’t linked to stories like these on this blog for months now.

But last Friday a headline caught my eye: Hundreds killed, injured in Baghdad blasts, it read. “Hundreds!” I thought. In fact, it was the worst bombing in Baghdad since the American invasion of that country, with a final death toll of 215 people in a mainly Shi’ite neighbourhood.

The next day was time for revenge. Shi’ite militiamen captured six Sunni Muslims as they left Friday prayers, doused them in kerosene and burned them alive. More attacks that day killed another 19 Sunnis.

Nearby Iraqi soldiers did nothing. These are the soldiers the United States has trained, the ones that need to “stand up” before the United States “stands down”. Mostly Shi’ites themselves, they likely felt that the Sunnis got what they deserved that day.

Life in Iraq, the most dangerous country on earth, is now defined by fear. Civilians are being killed at a rate of well more than 100 per day.

Meanwhile, the American establishment frets and mutters and weighs options, slowly. “American fortunes,” moans the New York Times, “are ever more dependent on feuding Iraqis who seem, at times, almost heedless to American appeals”.

Once mighty, America is now reduced to making appeals which no one listens to. American foreign policy journals and newspaper op-ed pages are filled with new plans and proposals – the latest is to divide Iraq into three separate regions in a loose federation – but none seems to recognize that a plan without potency is no plan at all.

Reality continues to defy these thinkers and policy-makers. They don’t realize the war in Iraq is already lost. They pour ink onto paper in America while blood pours on the streets of Iraq.

The ultimate truth, that America has no right to make plans for Iraq, never occurs to them.

The pretense that America must stay in Iraq to protect the Iraqis from themselves must be dropped. Iraq’s fate is no longer in American hands. The sooner that is recognized the better off everyone will be.

[tags]Iraq, foreign policy, America[/tags]

According to the CBC, the House of Commons has passed the controversial Harper motion declaring that “the Quebecois form a nation within a united Canada”.

The word nation is typically used to describe a country: the first definition in the American Heritage Dictionary says a nation is “A relatively large group of people organized under a single, usually independent government; a country.”

Harper claims that he actually means nation in the “cultural-sociological” sense, thus claiming the third definition of nation in the American Heritage Dictionary: “A people who share common customs, origins, history, and frequently language; a nationality.”

I propose yet another definition: “A can of worms; a cat no longer confined to a bag; a wrench typically used by monkeys”.

I could be wrong about that, which is where you come in. Thoughts?

[tags]politics, quebec, canada[/tags]