What's That Smell? Is It Fear?



Reliably rightwing newspaper columnists seem rattled by the ouster of former Conservative leader, Erin O'Toole. They're suddenly worried about the extremists in the Tory ranks, perhaps fearing some sort of Tea Party takeover akin to political ebola.

The latest is NatPo's Kelly McParland.

O’Toole’s margin of defeat — 73 of 118 caucus members voted against him — doesn’t necessarily reflect the actual number of Conservative MPs who would have been content to keep him on. What it does indicate is that the guerrilla war against him was so effective that even those who supported him realized he couldn’t survive. If there’s going to be a lynching, better to get it over with and move on.

His opponents succeeded by undermining him at every opportunity — questioning his decisions, defying his instructions, challenging his authority. A more domineering figure might have banished them all and dealt with the consequences, but that’s evidently not what O’Toole was about. If anything, he proved too open to accommodation for his own good. When challengers got away with it, they were emboldened. And they got away with it because of too much uncertainty within the party over what it believes and what it stands for.

...Reform failed because it couldn’t win seats in Ontario or the eastern provinces. The Canadian Alliance did no better. Harper succeeded by managing to contain the hardliners at a time when the Liberals were in ruins and much of their vote had shifted temporarily to New Democrats. For all the endless Liberal accusations, the Conservatives have never won an election on the sort of hard-nosed social conservative platform that the fiercest of O’Toole’s critics advocate.

If social conservatism was an electoral winner, former leader Andrew Scheer wouldn’t have put so much effort into trying to disguise his. O’Toole’s biggest mistake was seeking the leadership by pandering to the right, then quickly trying to decamp to the middle. But he did it because he clearly didn’t believe the alternative had a snowball’s chance of carrying the country.

McParland figures the moldy remnants of conservatism past might as well just roll the dice and give the job to Pierre Poilievre.  Then again, he wrote that before Pete appeared on CBC to denounce the truckers, the same guys he so warming greeted just last Saturday.  Anything is better than  mass suicide.

Comments

  1. rumleyfipsFebruary 4, 2022 at 11:16 AM

    Mirrors all around. Reformatory hacks at the Groat and Flail, Last Post, Sun etc. have been cheerleaders for Mulrooney, Harper, Sheer, Otoole 's anti Canadian nonsense for years. Now that they have bitten themselves in the ass they have second thoughts. Please ; be careful what you wish for.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibFebruary 4, 2022 at 12:05 PM

      They do seem to be soiling their dainties, Rumley. What they fear isn't extremism but another fracturing of the right delivering carte blanche to the Liberals for another decade or more. MacKay sold out the PCs but the two camps never got beyond their differences and, for that, we should be grateful.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Up in Smoke. 300 Sq. Mi. of Amazon Rainforest Lost Every Day.

Image
  The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at what should be an alarming rate. 312 sq. mi. or 808 sq. kms. every day. Over the past 30 years humans have destroyed a patch of the Amazon equal in area to the states of Texas and New Mexico . The Amazon – historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen – now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis. Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they’re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded by
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
Read more

"Creeping Normalcy" in the Plague Age

Image
  Britain is experiencing a new wave of Covid cases, 40,000 per day .  Yet it hasn't caused much reaction from the public. It sounds like the legendary stiff upper lip, the "Keep Calm and Carry On" resolve. Health officials think it's something much more troubling. “We’re in a phase where we still have large numbers of people dying from this disease,” said Linda Bauld, professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh. “But it has gone into the background. We’ve become used to something that has not gone away. I think there’s been a desensitisation to the mortality.” On Thursday, the UK reported more than 45,000 new coronavirus cases – the most since mid-July – and more than 800 deaths were reported in the past seven days. Hospitalisations are rising, with one-fifth of ICU beds occupied by Covid patients, and the latest figures showed an estimated 200,000 pupils absent from school. The UK is faring far worse than its European neighbours, with a rate of death
Read more