Torture: Opposition Doing Great Job, Govt Scared

Great Inquiry motion, great debate, great vote. Great debate on privilege question yesterday, all were good, esp. Rae, who was also excellent in scrums today. Bloc & NDP doing excellent work. Great series of QPs. Well designed order of questions, Iggy did good job, Rae always excellent, others all good. As noted, facts damn Cons. They are really scared. Hoping media get tired/bored and events conspire to help them change the channel is their only chance. But the facts are the facts, the Committee goes on, the Opposition does its job, the media do theirs, and the Cons scream louder by the day, like jackals caught by avenging Lions. We all know that they only wheel out Gallant & the other crazies to sling mud when they are desperate, like when the coalition was on the verge of taking power, Gallant: "that French leader doesn't belong with us".

Being a good, effective Opposition is holding onto an issue and snarling, chewing that bone. A well-run Opposition can advance public debate and pressure on an issue, vitally, by letting its conduct indicate what it considers important - what the media and others should be covering. You have to keep on it. As we see almost daily, documents are coming out. Kinsman's piece for CBC is very important. There is simply no way for the Cons to stop the documents coming out, and the more public servants feel the Opposition, media & public are serious, the more emboldened they'll be. The Opposition should keep up the good work. The Govt looks worse and worse the more they have to repeat empty fabulations & smears. The permissibility of open disdain by the commentariat grows with every ridiculous bit of attempted information control and smear. As the Hill Times noted, it's awful enough to attempt a cover up, but to insult everyone by doing it so badly, so incompetently? Insult to injury. What a bunch of yahoos.

In that sense, Gallant is logical: she represents the Cons' soul better than almost anyone else. Keep on pushing Opposition, you're almost there. As tiresome as Cons get, remember: our soldiers are about to open and guard the road from Kabul to Kandahar, the most dangerous job in Afghanistan. They need to be sure their government has and will do all it can to keep them safe, including giving them a detainee policy that decreases, not increases, the risk of alienation and attack. If Canadian soldiers can and must do their job, you can and must do yours. Give 'er!