Apologism, Defined

Lorne Gunter offers excuses for Conservative attack ads

In Canada's media environment the National Post is treated as Canada's predominant conservative newspaper.

If often receives a bum-rap for being exclusively conservative or reactionary -- often willfully overlooking the contributions made to the paper's Full Comment blog by individuals such as David Akin, Stephen LeDrew and, in the past, Warren Kinsella. Even mainstays such as David Frum aren't nearly as reactionary and dogmatic as the Post's detractors would have people believe.

There's little question that the National Post does, indeed, lean right. Sometimes it even makes good on its reputation. Such is the case today when, on the Full Comment blog, Lorne Gunter has seemingly settled for making excuses about the Conservative party's recent batch of anti-Michael Ignatieff attack ads.

Gunter does this by recounting the Liberal party's own litany of offences against political civility in Canada, and their historical tendency to wrap themselves in the flag while denigrating the patriotism of their political opponents:

"Not a fan of government monopoly health care? You're un-Canadian. Not big on easy unemployment benefits, official bilingualism, dismantling our military, beggaring our economy in the name of environmentalism, coddling criminals, huge public debts, activist judges, multiculturalism, foreign investment reviews, national energy policies and so on? Shame on you for being so un-Canadian."

There's little question that the Liberal party has indulged itself in these kinds of tactics often in Canadian history.

One recalls that the Liberals opened the 2005/06 federal election campaign by questioning Stephen Harper's alleged unwillingness to gush over his love of this country -- although his tendency to close his speeches with "god bless Canada" speaks well enough of his love for his country.

But Gunter is making the error of insisting that the Liberals' past misconducts excuse the ads the Tories have deployed against Michael Ignatieff:

"Now the Tories are using the Liberals' own tactic against them and the Grits are sputtering with indignation.

The clear implication of the Tories' current attack ads -- the ones pointing out that Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff lived outside the country for 34 years and during that time frequently scoffed at this country'simportance-- is that Mr. Ignatieff does not care enough about this country to be entrusted with leading it.

The big problem for the Liberals is that the Tory ads, while exaggerated, are largely true: Mr. Ignatieff left the country, more or less permanently, in the 1970s, lived away most of his adult life and showed no intention of returning until he was seduced back by the idea of becoming Liberal leader in 2005."

Of course, the problem with this particular assertion is that the Liberal party was not yet in search of a new leader in 2005. Paul Martin expected not only to win the federal election early in 2006, but had previously expected to win the largest majority government in Canadian history.

Few Canadians actively expected the Harper Conservatives to defeat the Martin Liberals in the 2005/06 campaign. One has to remember that, adscam and all, they very nearly didn't.

"While he was away, Canada seems barely to have crossed his mind. For instance, in The New York Times, where he wrote opinion pieces for a time, he referred to 'we' Americans.

As recently as 2004 -- just a year before his opportunistic return-- Mr. Ignatieff said on C-SPAN, the congressional cable channel, 'Look, this is America and you have to decide what kind of country you want. This is your country as much as it is mine.'

During the 2006 election, when he was first seeking a seat in Parliament, he told The Harvard Crimson newspaper that if he lost he would move back to Massachusetts. If Canadian voters did not embrace him, he apparently had no intention of making his home here or working for the betterment of the country."

All of this may well be true. Michael Ignatieff may well have made career plans contingent on a possible electoral defeat. Any wise political candidate does.

Michael Ignatieff may well have spent the surplus of his adult life outside of Canada, and some of Ignatieff's comments could certainly be spun to suggest that he cares little for this country.

Certainly, the Liberals have rarely declined to spin any comments made by their political opponents into something more damaging to the public perception of their patriotism -- many Liberals continue to milk Stephen Harper's 1997 speech to the Council for National Policy, even though the full text of that speech demonstrates those comments to be far less than malignant.

They've even gleefully played the George Bush card when desperation left them with little else to work with:

"The Liberals like to say, still, that Tory Prime Minister Stephen Harper is George Bush's biggest fan. Yet, while he was head of a human rights institute at Harvard University, Mr Ignatieff was a bigger defender of Mr Bush's war on terror than anyone else currently in Canadian politics."

All of this may well be true, and those with a taste for politics as a political bloodsport may all for the wild ruminations made in the Tories' anti-Ignatieff ads.

But the looming question is: does past Liberal misconduct truly excuse these ads?

Gunter offers his answer thusly:

"Now here's where the Liberals are their most hypocritical about the Tories' ads: Imagine their reaction if it were Mr Harper who had spent 34 years outside the country, moved back only to take a shot at being PM, said the only thing he missed while away was a provincial park and referred to himself as an American many times.

Other Liberals were saying the same things the Tories are of Mr Ignatieff just two-and-a-half years ago. While running against him for the Liberal leadership, Joe Volpe said no one who had been away for more than three decades could be an expert about his party or this country. Bob Rae complained 'there are things about a country that you don't learn from a book,' that can only be learned by being here and being at the centre of tough constitutional or economic debates. In other words, someone should only seek to lead this country if he has 'Canada in his bones.'

Now the Liberals are purple with rage at the Tories for saying pretty much the same things."

Certainly, the Liberals wouldn't hesitate to infer such things about Harper, or any other conservative leader who had done such things.

While some of Canada's most rabid partisan demagogues will offer no end of excuses for these transgressions, every Canadian who has paid so much as a modicum of attention to Canadian politics knows this.

Even the Liberals' own deployment of such such arguments against Ignatieff doesn't excuse the Conservatives' stooping to this level, as Gunter seems to infer:

"Again, I ask, imagine the Liberals' indignation and self-righteousness if it were a Tory leader who had spent very little time here in nearly four decades, who had (as Mr Ignatieff did) once told a British paper our flag reminded him of 'a beer label' and who, most significantly, had referred to himself as an American on several occasions.

In the 2006 election, Mr Harper proposed a rebuilding of our military. For that 'American' idea, the Liberals accused him of plotting to militarize our cities. They ran ads saying that were the Tories to be elected there would be 'soldiers, with guns. In our cities. In Canada.'

They claimed they were not making this up, but clearly they were. If they could spin wild conspiracies about military coups from a simple promise to rearm our military, it's not hard to speculate what they would make up to smear a Tory politician with the same CV as Mr Ignatieff.

Their ads would make the Tories' spots look like public service announcements for the Christian Children's Fund."

The point that seems to be lost on Lorne Gunter is that, if the Liberals' past conduct was truly so disgusting -- and there is no doubt that it absolutely was -- then we must expect our other political parties (and especially our alternative government) to be better.

The recent batch of Conservative campaign ads have demonstrated decisively to Canadians that they are not. Whatever other reasons Canadians have to support the Conservatives -- a stronger foreign policy, superior fiscal priorities and an all-around better nose for the current needs of the country -- moral superiority in political campaigning is no longer one of them.

Lorne Gunter's apologetics do nothing to change that.

The CPSO Has Your "Pro-Choice" Right Here!

College of Physicians and Surgians of Ontario moves to deny doctors choice

Frequent readers of the Nexus will almost certainly recall a recent response to a challenge by a pro-abortion blogger in which the philosophical quandry of the so-called "pro-choice" lobby opposing legislation that would protect the rights of doctors to refuse to perform abortions for moral, religious or ethical reasons was brought to her attention.

According to a column published in today's National Post, it turns out the issue is worse than previously thought.

The CPSO has proposed new guidelines that could result in doctors who refuse to perform abortions, refer women for abortions, perscribe the morning after pill, or perform any number of medical procedures they find objectionable for any reason being stripped of their credentials.

The CPSO frames these proposals against a doctor's responsibility to their patients, postulating that a "physician's responsibility is to place the needs of the patient first, [so] there will be times when it may be necessary for physicians to set aside their personal beliefs in order to ensure that patients or potential patients are provided with the medical services they require."

As Gunter notes, one may have questions about at one point an abortion is or isn't a "necessary" service.

Perhaps one of the most recent Order of Canada recipients, Dr Henry Morgentaler, can provide us with a clue.

"We don't abort babies, we want to abort fetuses before they become babies," Morgentaler told CTV in 2004. "Around 24 weeks I have ethical problems doing that."

Morgentaler used his ethical concerns about late-term abortions as a reason to refuse to perform late-term abortions. "What we do at our clinics is if we have a problem like that we usually council the woman to continue the pregnancy and put it up for adoption if she is unable to care for it," Morgentaler noted.

Morgentaler's clinics were only performing late-term abortions in cases where the woman's life was imperiled by her pregnancy, or when a child would be born facing serious health concerns.

That most physicians refuse to perform abortion was cited by Morgentaler as a reason why no rules regulating late-term abortions are necessary. The argument in 2004 was, essentially, that doctors were regulating themselves.

Now, the CPSO is moving to refuse doctors in Ontario the right to refuse to perform an abortion or refer for an abortion.

It was bad enough when the pro-abortion lobby was merely opposing legislation like Bill C-537. Now, one can fully expect that the pro-abortion lobby will inevitably flock to shower praise on the CPSO for passing guidelines that will essentially grant women in Ontario the right to demand abortions (or, at the very least, referrals for abortion) from doctors who would otherwise be unwilling to perform them.

Even while they parrot Dr Morgentaler's insistence that regulation of late-term abortion is unncessary because doctors can refuse to perform them, they'll happily support the CPSO in making that very costly, indeed.

Unfortunately, it isn't at all like the pro-abortion lobby to gut their own logic in support of their cause.

But when the pro-abortion lobby's support of the CPSO emerges -- and it inevitably will -- Canadians will once again have their confirmation that, for the so-called "pro-choice" lobby, the issue isn't about choice at all.

It's about abortion. So much so that they believe that doctors should be denied the right to choose as punishment for the "egregious crime" of opposing abortion for ethical, moral or religious reasons.

One has to wonder, however: how will the "pro-choice" Dr Morgentaler respond if the CPSO makes it impossible for his clinics to refuse to perform abortions it would otherwise refuse to perform for ethical reasons?

Ultimately, Morgentaler himself has a great deal to lose if the CPSO gets its way.

Kevin Potvin Lashes Out

Holy shit! He's gonna blow!

The nagging Kevin Potvin saga took a turn for the absurd today, as he abruptly added a column to the website for his Republic of East Vancouver website today.

Like any borderline-psychopathic ideologue with wounded pride, Potvin rages against those he deems his oppressors, derides his critics, and repeatedly threatens to sue.

Among his numerous targets are Peter O’Neil, who failed while attempting to interview Potvin for a piece regarding his disqualification as a Green Party candidate when Potvin, according to his own account, attempted to interview him. In his tirade, Potvin recounts, “he grew audibly distressed when I told him I am a journalist too, and I was in fact interviewing him at the same time.” According to Potvin, O’Neil terminated the interview after having been asked “if he is for or against corporatism and militarism. “I’m asking the questions!” he barked, before flatly refusing to answer anything further at all.”

He notes that the Vancouver Sun was “forced to print a correction explaining that the hapless and flustering O’Neil didn’t mean to fabricate the quote he couldn’t get from [Potvin].”

In a story published April 13, O’Neil attributes the comment “go, Osama, go!” to Potvin’s “Revolting Confession” article. In the original article Potvin also wrote (and I know this is merely reiterating on this blog, as I’ve already reproduced these comments once, but they are so astoundingly offensive they are somehow worth repeating once again), “Nor was I alone, I know for a fact, whenever I passed a TV or newspaper with a report on the ensuing US war to capture Osama bin Laden, and I secretly said to myself, "Go, Osama, Go!" I am happy he has eluded capture by the Americans. I am in love with those Afghans who, whenever asked, said, "He went that-a-way," and their fifty hands pointed in fifty different directions.”

Whatever O’Neil’s misquote was, Potvin should be able to forgive him. He was probably just taking Potvin’s advice, and using his emotions as a form of “mental shorthand”, and reconstructing Potvin’s comments as he remembered them.

Potvin also takes aim at Province columnist Michael Smyth. Potvin describes ”Greens Must Dump Pro-Al Qaida Candidate article as “libelous”. Unfortunately for Potvin, all of his comments are on the public record, and verifiable.

He also takes note with Smyth’s description of Potvin’s behaviour as “weird”. Potvin himself describes it as “dignity”. Suddenly, in Potvin’s mind, it’s dignified to accept an interview request from a journalist and insist that he shall be the one doing the interview. Weird, indeed.

Potvin complains that, “In his story, Smyth writes, “Potvin refused to take questions from reporters” to substantiate his claim I was running and hiding. So far, his boss, Roz Guggi, has refused to take questions from me regarding the libel they printed in his article.” Yet, by his own account, Potvin has refused to take any questions from reporters. He has insisted on asking the questions. Apparently, his journalistic instinct tells him that, in a situation wherein a political candidate has made incredibly outrageous – as well as just plain stupid – comments regarding 9/11, the really newsworthy event is that a reporter would as HIM a question. Wow.

Bruce Hutchinson also comes under fire. Or, rather, Brian Hutchinson comes under fire – but it’s OK, mr Potvin, it’s another b-name – whose mention of the behaviour of Potvin’s supporters Potvin dismisses with the following statement: “Could it really be that traumatic to face a couple of questions yourself after so gracelessly hounding me?”

Once again, mr Potvin might do well to remember that Brian Hutchinson isn’t the story – Potvin’s own comments about 9/11 are.

Lastly, Potvin lashes out at National Post columnist Lorne Gunter. Potvin decries Gunter’s “Greens’ answer to John Beck article as a “late hit” . Potvin insists that he is no worse than a “an Earth-abusing, pro-Bush, pro-NAFTA, pro-war type” like Gunter.

Potvin decries it all the entire time. Potvin would surely have everyone believe he is nothing more than a victim, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Unfortunately for Potvin, he has called this all upon himself – by refusing to adequately address and defend his comments, by refusing to answer questions, and by making boneheaded comments to begin with.

At the end of the day, Potvin is lucky. Opposition research (or “oppo” as experienced political strategists call it for shot) is a common practice in electoral campaigns today, and one can only imagine what the Conservative party or even the NDP would have done with something like this.

While incredibly amusing, Potvin’s latest outburst has probably established a new adage: “when the going gets tough, nearly-psychotic hateful ideologues pout.”