David Olive has always been one of the best. I thought of Paul Martin as a hollow man before Coyne used it, and the same for Iggy. Martin was not as bad as I thought, Iggy's even worse. Everyone should read
Olive on Iggy, which I reproduce below:
The hollow man.Day 567
Let us count the ways Canada deserves better than Michael Ignatieff as PM-in-waiting.
(Well, at least his tie matches the flags.)
1. He's a wuss. Iggy threatened last week to bring down the minority Harper government this Friday, then retreated quicker than a long-tailed cat escaping a room full of rocking chairs. In the main, Iggy's caucus doesn't want to force a summer election. As a British statesman once jokingly said, "I am their leader. I must follow them." Iggy's a follower, not a leader. No Chretien he, rightly chiding his caucus as "nervous Nellies" on the cusp of leading the Grits to a third consecutive majority. Ignatieff is so afraid of his own shadow that, as Liberal advisor Rob Silver wrote Monday: "Michael Ignatieff has given Stephen Harper possibly the easiest opportunity to continue governing as Prime Minister a minority leader has ever faced."
2. He doesn't understand politics. The NDP and Bloc Quebecois know the Harper government doesn't have the fighting spirit to take on this global recession. Iggy, by contrast, is still pondering whether this government deserves a stay of execution. How much more evidence does he need? The Tories have spent just one-quarter of their $15-billion infrastructure fund that was meant to jolt some life into an economy ravaged by job loss. Or, to cite one example, Ottawa has spent an almost whimsical $1.9 million of its promised $622 million for the extension of Toronto's subway into Vaughan. The world has learned by now not to count any longer on Canada for life-saving medical isotopes, the Tories having so horribly bungled Chalk River. The PM offers vague promises to adjust EI for these difficult times for the unemployed, sometime in the fall. Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress dealt with that issue, and raised the federal minimum wage, early this year. Obama has committed $8 billion (U.S.) to a revival of passenger rail alone, more than half of Harper's entire infrastructure stimulus. Iggy doesn't get that Harper is, of late, a faux progressive. Duceppe and Layton, veterans of Canadian politics, do understand Harper - the way millions of Canadians do: "I've always suspected that when Stephen Harper announces big sums of money to be spent," Layton said recently, "he so fundamentally doesn't believe in it...the money is very unlikely to flow at all."
3. He hasn't told us why he wants to be PM. Maybe he doesn't know. Where there is no vision, the people perish, the Scriptures tell us. Why exactly does Iggy want to be PM? Does he in fact want to be PM? Where's the fire in the belly? And where's the vision, what kind of country does he want Canada to be in 2020? Or next year? I wish I could put it better than Globe editorial writer Adam Radwanski in a recent blog post: "Time after time, [Iggy] articulately ties himself into knots trying to get around the fact that he has very little to say."
Which figures, because after spending most of his adult life in Britain and the U.S., Ignatieff simply does not know this country. And he's a political naif, time and again easily outfoxed. And we know little of Ignatieff, save for his scribblings in New York Times Magazine cover stories earlier this decade exhorting the West to join George W. Bush in his feckless invasion of Iraq. And Iggy's skirmishes with fellow Brit intellectuals over his apparent endorsement of torture of detainees. The then director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights giving liberal intellectual cover to an odious Bush regime. Here's Ignatieff in the NYT in May 2, 2004, long after the Iraq invasion he championed had become an obvious fiasco:
"To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war. These are evils because each strays from national and international law and because they kill people or deprive them of freedom without due process. They can be justified only because they prevent the greater evil. The question is not whether we should be trafficking in lesser evils but whether we can keep lesser evils under the control of free institutions."
Ignatieff believed (he has since recanted, sort of) that the American imperative was to impose its will on the rest of the world, and that in doing so it might understandably be required to embrace "lesser evils" including coercive interrorgations, the U.S. intelligence community's euphemism for waterboarding, stuffing detainees with known spider phobias into makeshift coffins filled with arachnids, and other forms of torture. Or as Dick Cheney said with more admirable clarity, we're going to have to spend some time "on the dark side."
Really, that's all I know of Ignatieff, it's the only thing of substance he's done. Which was dreadful. His esteemed diplomat father would not recognize what Iggy became.
Who he is now is anyone's guess.
(For the purposes of this blog, the inception of the Great Recession in the U.S., the epicentre of the crisis, is taken as the start date for the global slump. The U.S. has been in recession since December 2007.)
