In my previous post I commented on Canada’s election, which was held yesterday. A reader named TangoMan kindly posted a primer of Canadian politics. I thought it was important to post the entire comment here in case anyone would like a thoughtful and brief analysis of political forces in Canada.
James R. Rummel
This is Important Even if Most People Don’t Care
Tomorrow is the day when Canadians go to the polls. This is significant because it’s just possible that the Liberal Party, which has held sway over Canada for so long, might just lose it’s majority. In fact, that’s what Collin May over at Innocents Abroad is predicting.
So what may happen if the Conservative Party wins? To an American I doubt it will look like much will change. That won’t be the best of all possible outcomes but it’s better than if the Liberals get another chance at mucking things up.
A Matter of Policy, A Matter of Semantics
At one time I had a job in law enforcement. This is both an advantage and a dis-.
The advantage is that I can more easily tell what’s going on when it comes to police investigations. The disadvantage is that I have trouble communicating this to people who haven’t had similar experience.
Steven den Beste has a post where he discusses a recent nail bomb that went off in a Turkish neighborhood in Cologne, Germany. 22 people were injured, and as of yet there’s no report of any fatalities. The police have stated that there’s no evidence that there is a terrorist connection.
This pretty much set Steven off. His position seems to be (and I’m sure he’ll correct me if I’m wrong on this) that it pretty much had to be the work of terrorists. In the post script below his main entry he takes the European governments and people to task for not recognizing the threat.
Now I don’t want to be too hard on Steven. I pretty much feel the same way about the prevailing attitude in Europe: that the world-spanning Islamic terrorist organizations will pass them by and avoid attacking them if they keep their heads down and complain about how the Israelis treat the Palestinians. I agree completely that the Euros are making a mistake.
Otherwise Steven is way off base on this one.
Someone Better Wake up and Smell the Gunpowder
I had a writing assignment for my Anthropology class. Find an article published in The American Anthropologist magazine, write a summary followed by commentary. The subject was up to the student.
So I went to the college library and started to go through the volumes of back issues. What I found appalled and frightened me.
There were numerous articles written after 9/11 that dealt with violence. Not surprising for work by academics for academics, the focus was on trying to discover Why They Hate Us. The main unifying theme found through all of these works was that violence was an aberration. The ground state of humanity (the authors insisted) was peace, cooperation, good fellowship and concern for others.
This is where I became appalled. History teaches us in no uncertain terms that violence is the natural state of human beings. We’re the killer apes, the master predators, the most successful land-dwelling beings on the planet considering the environments we inhabit. There’s no place on Earth that’s free from conflict, no society that doesn’t spawn its own crop of violent criminals.
The reason why I was frightened was the way that the academic community prepared for violent encounters. They ignore it!
Bush and Kerry and Their Bikes
The recent stories about Bush and Kerry falling off their bicycles were more revealing than they initially appeared to be. Jim Miller picked up on this point, noting that Bush was the better sport for not making fun of Kerry after the latter’s mishap a few weeks ago. The fact that Kerry didn’t return the favor when Bush took a spill more recently, shows at the least a lack of class on Kerry’s part. (Chicago mayor Richard Daley has BTDT and said what Bush was either too nice or too politically cautious to say.)
The stories were revealing in another way too, which Bill Hobbs caught. Kerry got into a car after he fell, Bush got back on the bike. You shouldn’t read too much into it, but public perceptions matter in politics, and Kerry, his fancy bike quickly abandoned, ended up looking like a phoney. He may have had good reason not to get back on the bike. However, his spokesmen were in a bind, because if they told the truth — i.e., Kerry was acting reasonably for a 60-year old guy, even a fit one, who had taken a spill — they might diminish the he-man image he works hard to maintain. So they brushed the incident off. It wasn’t Dukakis in the tank, but Kerry might have gotten more political mileage in this case by getting in some additional bike mileage.
Bush’s behavior here reinforces my impression, gained since Sept. 11, that he deals well with pressure and setbacks. Would Kerry do as well? I don’t know and I don’t want to have to find out.
UPDATE: Lex raises questions in the comments about Kerry’s supposed wussiness and about the cost of his bikes. I don’t know that Kerry is a wuss; he is reputed to be physically courageous. I suspect that he was on the bike in large part because he wanted to be seen being on a bike, to reinforce his green/macho/athletic image. When the going got tough he got in the car. Bush, by contrast, was riding on a trail, out of public view. He was 16 miles into a 17-mile ride (equivalent in exertion to a much longer ride on the road), and after he fell he got back on the bike and finished the ride. That’s the kind of behavior you would expect from a serious person who has limited time and a commitment to staying in shape. Maybe Kerry has done some long rides, but he comes across as a showboater by comparison.
As for the bikes, according to news articles Kerry has multiple bikes including one that cost $8 grand. There’s nothing suspect about having expensive bikes, especially if you’re tall like Kerry and can benefit from having them custom made, but $8k is pricey by any standard. I think it’s like the SUV thing: he comes across as either a poseur or someone who has grown accustomed to having other people pay for his stuff. Neither trait is desirable in a seeker of high public office.