George Jonas made a brave attempt to define political terms yesterday. While he gets the base terms right, now the big sigh, he ends up confusing his own partisanship with the base philosophies correct definitions. This of course is constant in the press, so I put in my $0.02 to try to correct it. The result was edited to a fair degree, but I was surprised how much the post left in of my comments on Harper's position on the political spectrum.
Here is the original text as well as 'as published' this morning.
Here is the original text as well as 'as published' this morning.
------------
I like what George Jonas sets out to do in "I'm a liberal. Ignatieff is not". He correctly points out Iggy is no liberal, but then sadly makes the baffling pronouncement that Harper is more liberal than Iggy. Given the term liberal was classically defined by "the government that governs least governs best" and Harper has done more to increase the role of the state than any prime minister in the last 40+ years this would have to imply Ignatieff is an extremist.
In fact Iggy is still a bit of an unknown in what his actions will be, but given he has shown some recent signs of respect for what Jean Chrétien did economically and has shown none of Harper's enthusiasm for social engineering (C-15 being the most recent) he is almost certainly more liberal than Harper.
Harper is a conservative and even more to the point he is also a statist. He has proven both in consistent actions over 4 years in power. I often read George and I know he is not a statist, so when he wrote he would vote for Harper he wrote that as a Conservative. No liberal would ever vote for Harper, he is not even the lesser of the evils to a liberal.
---------------
No comments:
Post a Comment