JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Propaganda – and this kind of attack-advertising is just a form of propaganda – generally is effective when there is an accepted truth incorporated in the muck.

Thus, America blubbered about the plight of women while attacking Afghanistan (killing thousands of them along the way, too). Thus, past attacks on Ignatieff only said something we all believed already about that ineffective and disingenuous man.

These new ads cannot work against Trudeau because most Canadians rightly perceive him as a decent, earnest young man. And Trudeau is doing exactly the right thing in quietly explaining the ads’ dishonesty.

The ads will serve to confirm Harper as the most hateful person ever to have been prime minister.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL IGNATIEFF IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The genuine issue is not ex-pats as this piece by Ignatieff would have us believe.

Indeed, the claim is a pretty putrid way to excuse your own failings.

It is self-damning when you think about it: “Gee, I didn’t do anything wrong, I was just this wonderful cosmopolitan guy attacked by horrid little people!”

Please, the unexamined life is not worth living, and Ignatieff surely has not spent five minutes examining his own, else he would never write such tripe.

You cannot, anywhere in the world, expect to return from a great long period abroad and assume leadership of a great national party almost immediately.

The very idea is preposterous.

In politics, you earn your credentials, a thoroughly appropriate demand for what is the art of the practical.

Ignatieff spent no time earning his “creds.”

And, really, and I say this as a genuinely (small “l”) liberal-minded person, Ignatieff displayed pure arrogance in thinking he could do otherwise.

And, with this column, he is only demonstrating again that he “just does not get it.”

Pretty damning stuff for a highly educated man.

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“Michael Ignatieff is a Canadian.

“In every sense of the word.”

Michael Ignatieff is a drip.

In every sense of the word.

Being a Canadian drip doesn’t make any difference.

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“Mr Harper’s constant attacks on Mr Ignatieff for his time outside of Canada reflects [sic] insularity and insecurity.”

A totally false argument.

Insularity is an issue only in the mind of Michael Ignatieff, busy spinning tales to comfort himself about his utter failure.

Ignatieff was an incompetent politician. Full stop.

He also, as one reader has correctly remarked, proved to have an unappealing personality.

Writers often have unpleasant or underdeveloped personalities: after all, they spend most of their working hours alone with a keyboard or a tablet of paper, almost the polar opposite of what politicians do, glad-handing people as soon as they’re in high school.

He also lacked the largeness of spirit of the great Liberal prime ministers: he is a surprisingly conservative and unimaginative man, considering his education and travel.

Had it been otherwise, Harper’s nasty ads would have been ignored as background noise. After all, Canadians have not embraced Harper, a man of extreme views and unethical behavior, Canada’s first genuinely creepy leader, with a meager 39.6% mandate. They only avoided the unpleasant and incompetent and almost buffoonish Ignatieff.

Ignatieff has none of the fierce intelligence and drive of a Trudeau and none of the ineffable charm of a Chretien.

He showed no judgment, time and time again, as dallying in France when Parliament was prorogued. The insiders of the party made a terrible mistake luring him back, and they soon knew it, desperately putting on silly stunts like Ignatieff’s “Ma and Pa Kettle’s Excellent Adventure Crossing Canada by Bus.”

Simply inane.

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“He has principles and stood up to serve.”

God, what complete puffery.

What principles of Ignatieff’s stand out?

I fail to see any beyond the most ordinary.

Stood to serve?

What an overly-dignified description for a man’s being offered and given leadership of a great party without doing anything to earn it.

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“…there is far more support for Mr Ignatieff then you want to believe.”

You are asserting nonsense in the face of those election results?

That is delusional.

And I wonder, had you heard the previous buzz among some in the party about Ignatieff?

Many observed that he trusted no one but his wife.

He tended to consult no one.

So tense had this situation become that we saw in some Wikileaks material that the American ambassador secretly commented on the bad blood between Ignatieff and Rae.

In the end, I count myself a pretty seasoned “reader” of people, and Ignatieff struck the wrong note with me immediately.

It had nothing to do with his having lived abroad. It had nothing to do with his education. It was just my reading of a politician who could not connect.

I never had any doubt he would lose and lose big.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Yes, indeed, Jeffrey Simpson, but I think the problem goes deeper than that.

Ignatieff was parachuted into his seat.

Ignatieff was parachuted into the party leadership, and indeed over the heads of better men than himself.

He is an “insiders’ leader,” a backroom boy, not a people’s leader, and I think the public “gets” it.

No man who genuinely respects democratic principles could have accepted those terms of having a political career in this era. It might have been acceptable in the 1950s, but it is not today.

The trouble is Ignatieff’s whole background is replete with such contradictions in ethics and principles.

He was always touted as an academic who represented human values, but the reality was glaringly at odds with that claim.

I cannot imagine one of our great humanitarian writers – say a Graham Greene – ever doing what Ignatieff did in supporting torture and Nazi-like invasion of a country, an act which ended in a million deaths and a couple of million refugees.

I heard Ignatieff interviewed on several occasions years ago, saying things which were totally at odds, at least to my sensitivities, with strong humanitarian values.

He virtually worships American power and influence in the world. He actually warned Canadians against opposing American excesses, and, as we all know, he so identified with that imperial power that he went around there bragging of being an American.

He actually competed in his first bid for leadership by attacking the party’s achievements, providing Harper with film clips to use against Liberals.

Now, of course, other past statements of his own are used against the party.

Ignatieff is a disaster. The faster he steps down, the better.

Sadly for my country, Harper is an equally unfit man to represent Canada.

A political nightmare, surely.