Silly Little Country

Ignatieff REALLY Needs a Good Editor

It is clear he does not have one right now. My guess is, he thinks he is smarter than any plausible candidate. I will say I would never have allowed him to write this brain-dead passage in public.
"Morally contemptible" is almost too kind. This passage leapt up at me as well:

“To imagine it as a citizen is to imagine it as a resident of Yellow Quill reservation in Saskatchewan would have had to imagine it, this Canada where two half-naked children died in a snow-covered field in the sub-Arctic darkness because their father tried to take the sick little girls to his parents and never made it, and all you can hope is that death was as mercilessly quick as the cold can make it. What does a resident of Yellow Quill imagine, what do we Canadians imagine our country to be, the morning we learn that children have perished in this way? It is surely more than just a tragic story of one family. It is a story about us.”

This sounds great if you do not know the story he is referring to.

I wonder what it takes to formulate it that way, knowing, as Ignatieff surely does, that Christopher Pauchay was drunk, so drunk that he was oblivious (or so we must presume, for he was found guilty merely of negligence, rather than sadism) to the fact that it was well after midnight, minus 50 with the wind chill, and he had dressed three-year-old Kaydance and 16-month Santana only in T-shirts and diapers. At 5 a.m., Pauchay was found on a neighbour’s doorstep, stinking of booze, frostbitten and aggressive, so that the RCMP were obliged to accompany the paramedics. It was not until eight hours later, in the hospital, that he mentioned the children.

"This is a story about us"? I do not accept that it is a story about me or actually anyone I know.

it’s a story about him: the vandalism he does to the memory of Kaydance and Santana Pauchay, the tasteless opportunism of cashing in on their fate by conscripting a grimly particular episode to the cheap generalities of societal guilt, the horrible glimpse inside the husk of a man once genuinely engaged by Iraq and Bosnia and reduced by ambition to peddling what he knows to be bilge.

It's actually shocking to find I think Harper the most principled of our party leaders, and that is one sorry comment.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 11:34 AM