PING!
Posted on 02/06/2007 6:20:59 AM PST by GMMAC
Why Stephane Dion is unfit to lead this country
Randall Denley, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Sunday, February 04, 2007
I've just met Liberal leader Stephane Dion for the first time and I have to say, it was a frightening experience. The thought that this fellow could become the prime minister of Canada ought to alarm us.
Everything about Dion seems soft, from his handshake to his policies. His appearance at the Citizen editorial board Friday confirmed the fears I had when the Liberals chose him as their leader. Dion is a verbose, mild-mannered academic with a shaky grasp of English who seems unfit to chair a university department, much less lead a country.
Don't take my word for it. You can catch the interview yourself at ottawacitizen.com.*
The Liberal leader is probably very smart in an academic sort of way and quite a decent person, but his ideas reflect the full, knee-jerk left-wing spectrum, and he can't even articulate them well. Nuclear power? He's against it because of concerns about the waste. At the same time that he's against this clean source of electrical power, the Liberal leader is for a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gases.
He's snidely un-American, in the way that the Liberal elite so often is. Canada's failure to meet its Kyoto commitments was partly due to the Americans' election of Kyoto-unfriendly George W. Bush, Dion would have us believe. He also believes it's OK to take shots at the Americans for domestic consumption, but not if you're in Washington. Dion doesn't seem to have learned much from the mistakes of his predecessor, Paul Martin, the man who thought American-bashing would get him re-elected.
Dion is, of course, opposed to an increased private sector role in health care and thinks the federal government would play a useful role by identifying best health care practices, so all the provinces can follow them. Here's a best practice: having enough doctors and nurses. That means having enough money. What's his plan?
Dion tries to tie every issue back to the environment, since it's the one area where he's supposed to be strong. Unfortunately, he's a one-issue candidate with no coherent position on that one issue.
Dion can't say often enough how unfortunate it is that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has wasted a year by not immediately enacting the Liberal environmental strategy. That still compares favourably to the seven or eight years the Liberals wasted. Greenhouse gas emissions went up under the Liberals' watch, but now Dion is attacking Harper for not fixing it all at the last minute. That just doesn't make sense. Dion introduced a motion in the House of Commons this week to force the Conservative government to meet Canada's Kyoto commitments, the same ones the Liberals couldn't meet.
It's certainly not feasible at this point.
Dion says he's sorry the Liberals failed to make the environment a big issue in the last election, when Harper was particularly vulnerable. One can understand the strategic regret, but what does it tell us about the Liberals? They'll damn the Conservatives now for not making the environment the issue of the millennium, but only a year ago, they were doing the same thing.
Dion does show a certain intellectual agility when he suggest that the Liberals' very lame Kyoto performance was in part the Conservatives' fault, because they were just so against it. It's challenging to see how this could have mattered in the years when the Liberals had a majority.
Hopeful Liberals have suggested that one of Dion's strengths is that he's not a slick politician. Slick he's not, but it's tough to make an asset out of that. Dion isn't one of those down to earth guys like Ralph Klein. He's more like the wooly-headed professor next door. Dion simply cannot give a clear, succinct answer to a question. It's a necessary skill for any politician at his level.
Harper just wants to build up the military and cut taxes, Dion says, and it's clear that any right-thinking, sorry, left-thinking, person would realize how ridiculous that is. While these priorities will clearly fail to galvanize Canadians, Dion is offering to make us a world leader in "water management."
I'm not a natural consumer of the Liberal brand, but as a voter, I like to feel that I have two valid choices. With Stephane Dion as Liberal leader, that's not the case. Dion would have us believe he's qualified to be prime minister. If he thinks that, he's kidding himself. Let's not let him kid us, too.
Contact Randall Denley at 613-596-3756 or by e-mail, rdenley@thecitizen.canwest.com
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
PING!
That's the really funny part....the she's a he. French...Stephanie...Liberal...LMAO. :-)
LBT
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BTW, view the 3 marvelous new CPC ads here.
Yes it is. :-)
LBT
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"hey, the guy's a dork ... so's his dog"
Canada's answer to Jacques Chirac.
LOL! Thank you my Canadian brother, or sister, for the good laugh!
LBT
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Great thread!
Here's the vrai Stephane Dion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartuffe
In a nutshell - a scheming priestly French hypocrite.
If you go back far enough in Quebecer geaeology, the tree has few branches. Aren't Quebecers with the same last name all related back to the same French colonial families?
Take the pompous self-righteousness ignorance and stupidity of Jimmy Carter,
Add a Liberal dose (what else?) of spoiled Chretien juice,
Stir in flavored essence of multiple environmental wackos,
A splash of classic 'anti-American vintage white whine',
Add a generous portion of barely literate Euro-Chirac-style English,
Mix well, shake it, shake it, shake it,
PRESTO!!!
Stephane Dion Quiche!
(no need for eggs, they'll be in his face soon enough)
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
I am nominating you for the Gordon Lightfoot/Céline Dion Prose Award!
One question: The Canadian Liberals expect this clousot to get votes where?
In other words, Dion is a yellow belly, sausage suckin', frog coward? How's that for domestic consumption? Say goodbye to the Liberal party. Lets hope they keep him for a long time.
From Small Dead Animals.......
The Stephane Dion English-To-English Dictionary
It's the launch of a new SDA category! Or, as Stephane might say "This category will propel sustainably. I have always believe that".
We'll start things off with this short transcript from a taped interview ;
OC: "When did your thinking on these issues start to change? When did you become aware of them? At the time that Paul Martin appointed you, or..."
Dion: "No, I must say I have always been a lover for nature...um, love with a nature and, as a Quebec city kid it's not difficult to be in the wood -- twenty minutes and you are, it's a beautiful lake in the woods, and I love that, and I'm always reading and very concern about protection of nature and involved and so on..."
Later on, same answer, same question, "Where I've been convince that the environment and the economy must be together, and it will become the issue of the century, it came over years, and when I became Minister of the Environment, right away, it's what I said to Mr. Martin and to my deputy minister. It was my plan."
OC: "After you became the Minister..."
Dion: "No, the very moment I became. The first thing I said to the Prime Minister was 'oh, if you give me that, this is the orientation I want to give to this department.' I think it's the key point to that."
Olaf, bless his heart, has more;
"the improvement of the information is too low"
"the necessity to speed up what we have to do is bigger than otherwise".
So, here's the deal. We're unlikely to find passages this rich reprinted in their raw form. But with the growing availability of original audio files, there should be ample opportunity to capture Mr. Green in his unspoiled, natural state.
Bonus points for catching media translation/sanitization of what is rapidly becoming known as "Dionglish". (eg. rewriting a quote on his behalf, or extracting two or three words and replacing the grammatically challenged portions with their own helpful rephrasing.)
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