A partisan Christmas thought
Let's do a quick look at the Christmas greeting for our three major political parties.
A touching bit of poetry from the Conservatives.
A heartfelt plea for peace and share prosperity from the NDP.
An election speech from the Liberals.
The Conservative greeting names Christmas explicitly, and if it reads a bit like a Christmas card, at least it's short and classy.
Number of words: 58
Number of references to election issues: 0
Number of references to the election: 0
Uses the of word "Christmas": 2
The NDP message is written in prose, reminds us to remember those less fortunate, and to offers a non-denominational prayer for peace and goodwill.
Number of words: 90
Number of references to election issues: 0
Number of references to the election: 0
Uses the of word "Christmas": 1 (plus a bonus point for mentioning Hanukkah)
The Liberal message runs a full page in length. In all of that time, "Christmas" is never explicitly mentioned even once. However, Paul Martin does find time to mention the following issues explicitly:
- child care
- safe communities (no specific mention of handguns)
- job creation
- universal health care
- universal education and skills training
And like Santa Claus traveling from one end of this country to the other sharing gifts, Paul Martin has been traveling and sharing:
During this election campaign, I have had the privilege of traveling across the country, to share with many of you the Liberal Party’s vision for how to make this dream a reality, now and in the years to come.
I thought the point of the Christmas break was to pretend, for just a few days, that there wasn't an election going on.
Number of words: 390
Number of references to election issues: 5
Number of references to the election: 2
Uses the of word "Christmas": 0
When I started this post, I really was intending to merely reprint the holiday message from each of the three major parties. I had not intended to make judgment or criticize. But when I read the Liberal election speech holiday message, well, bah humbug, I just had to say something.
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Comments
Merry Christmas, Angry!
Posted by: Tuning Spork at December 25, 2005 10:05 AM
Nice post, but the link to the Conservative message seems to have changed to a different story on their site. Gotta love the Citizen!
Oh, and merry Christmas Angry.
Posted by: Jonny_eh at December 25, 2005 10:05 AM
Merry Christmas Steve
Posted by: Stephen Taylor at December 25, 2005 10:42 AM
So Angry, if you want to see a REASL scary Liberal message read Paul Wells column today.
http://weblogs.macleans.ca/paulwells/
Then watch the fun start.
Horny toad
Posted by: Horny Toad at December 25, 2005 03:14 PM
If you need some light reading over Xmas:
http://www.thiscanada.com ...
Inclues download links from my site for the policy & report documents mentioned. Merry Xmas.
Posted by: Erik Sorenson at December 25, 2005 04:49 PM
Merry Christmas, Angry. Can not fault you a bit for pointing out the differences in the messages from the leaders of those three parties. Does PM actually have a clue? Doesn't seem so.
Posted by: 49erDweet at December 25, 2005 04:50 PM
My wish for the New Year would be to see Paul Martin wiggling and waving those whirly bird arms of his trying to explain why he should not be jettisoned as the leader of the LIBRANOS. Seeing him flapping around like a shark out of water on the debates was mind boggling.
Ask him any question he can't tell the truth to he starts stuttering and stammering and flailing his hands in front of the camera.
Hopefully he will be the Ghost of Xmas' past.
Posted by: capt_bob at December 25, 2005 05:22 PM
Merry Christmas and hopes you have a nice relaxful holidays. After all, you deserves it after all these good posts and good work on your blog.
Posted by: Crazy Dan at December 25, 2005 06:52 PM
Hope you had a good Christmas Angry. I wonder what PMPM will do to try to recover from being unwilling to acknowledge the most celebrated season in the western world....even by those who would not identify with the one whose birth is celebrated. It makes me wonder who would slap his wrist for saying "Merry Christmas" ...certainly not the average Canadian me thinks.
Thanks for the good work and all the best in 2006.
Posted by: Don at December 25, 2005 08:41 PM
Is that Sheila there, under that beard?
Posted by: Tiburon at December 26, 2005 11:30 PM
THE LEFT-RIGHT TRAP
A cross-political perusal of the political blogosphere soon tells the objective observer just how irrelevant in meaning the old stand-by-prejudice terms ‘left-right’ have become in this new millennium.
The original French tennis court meaning may still have meaning in that: if you are against concentration of power you are ‘left’, if you want to democratize power, you are on the ‘left’, and if you are on the side that wants to keep power in power and you want to support political constrictions that will serve to keep power in power, then you are on the ‘right’.
If this original meaning is transposed to Canada today, then both the NDP and the ‘Conservatives’ are on the ‘left’ because both want genuine modernizing democratic reform in Canada so that the corrupt and corrupting strangle-hold on power by the autocratic PM and his ‘Liberal’ party can finally, permanently, be broken.
Yet, under the illusion of the commonly-held view of the ‘left-right’ paradigm, the NDP is considered to the left of the liberals, and the liberals are considered to the left of the conservatives, yet, nothing could be further from the truth.
The original intent of the ‘left-right’ dichotomy came from the fact that the ‘left’ wanted to give ‘power to the people’ via a genuine democracy. Canada today, because it has spent most of its history under the rule of the Liberal party, does not have much of a democratic system. A whole upper house and supreme court is autocratically appointed by the PM as was the preference of Louis the 16th. Similarly, this autocratic PM controls appointments to lucrative and powerful crown corporations, all manner of boards, and commissioners of everything pertaining to governance, ensuring, just like under Louis 16th , that everything important in the nation remains under the Sun King’s control. Yes, Canada does have elections, but only under a time-frame chosen by the Sun King PM under most circumstances, giving him a tremendous edge. Further, under Canada’s post-colonial skewed electoral and representative system, the election is over once the Liberal stronghold of Ontario is counted, and ‘majority’ Sun King governments often represent little more than 20% of potential ballots cast. (40% of 50%).
In any virtual one party state, especially in a country governed by mostly the same party for most of a century, the one party control over the nation is steeped in a lot more than just parliament. In such a system, government levers of control include a vast network of government dependants placed into every aspect of a national swollen Byzantine bureaucracy, crown corporations, judicial system, and a many-tentacled network of dependants on government contracts and grants.
Under such entrenched one party rule, even the provinces and cities become enmeshed in dependency on the central power monolith drawing so many taxes to itself at the expense of the taxation powers of the provinces and cities. Any jurisdiction’s hard-working citizenry represents a cash cow that can be milked only to a certain degree by the different levels of government. The ‘fiscal imbalance’ Bloc rightly talks about, is about the fact that the central Sun King Liberal government has over-taxed Canadian working citizens to such a high degree, that the provinces and cities are left straggling behind trying to raise taxes for infrastructure needs. Knowing this, then, at election time, the Sun King comes putting on a Santa suit, promising all kinds of billions of largesse so long as the autocratic one party state party gets re-elected. Had the Sun King with the divine right to rule not drained Canadians with so many taxes in the first place, the provinces and the cities could have raised their own funds to pay for their own citizens’ needs. The ‘fiscal imbalance’ issue goes to the heart of what is wrong with the federation of Canada, where the Sun King party has substituted a centrist state model for the genuine federation with clear divisions of power that Canada was intended to be.
In this Sun King running a one party state context, any party that seeks to institute democratic reform is running to the ‘left’ of the Sun King and his ‘divine right to rule’ party’ forming ‘majority’ governments with a minority of votes for most of Canada’s history under Canada’s quasi-democratic skewed electoral system. It is for this reason, that any attempt at genuine and far-reaching reform is met with cries of ‘constitutional fatigue’ by the Sun King and his media acolytes.
In this centralized Sun King –run Canada the NDP, the Bloc, and the Conservatives are all running on the ‘left’ of this autocratic PM-run party that has governed Canada for most of its history. Democratic reform that is far-reaching and genuine is the only thing that will save this federation. The one party state has squandered untold sums at the expense of Canada’s viability as a healthy federation. If Ontario voters cannot see now what one party rule has done to almost destroy Canada, when will they learn what all of Canada could be about?
Posted by: edward mills at December 27, 2005 01:00 AM
A belated Merry Christmas to everyone.
I found this thread very interesting, and thank you for pointing out the obvious differences in the "Christmas" greetings.
I've read a lot thru-out the MSM lately the absolute effort the Liberals (Paul Martin and his band of thieves) put into avoiding saying "Merry Christmas", electing to go with the generic "Happy Holidays or Season's Greetings" in effort to not offend certain groups, yet showing disregard for those of us that were raised to embrace "Christmas" for its true meaning and spirit.
Yet we shouldn't be surprised, Martin is a generic man who truly stands for nothing, other than lining his pockets and those of his friends with "OUR" hard earned dollars.
Lets hope and pray, that come January 23, the majority of Canadians finally put their foot down and say enough to these jackasses that have taken "our" country and our tax dollars hostage for the past 12 years.
Wait..praying hasn't become politically incorrect right? They haven't taken that away from us yet have they?
God Bless Canada and all "she" used to stand for.
Posted by: Rottigirl at December 30, 2005 11:32 AM
 
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