Crooked in Canada

It has been almost a week since Stephane Dion led the leaders to one of their most humiliating and embarrassing defeats, and until today he has been living under the rock he crawled out from under to ponder his future with the Liberal Party. Today his future with the Grits all but came to an end, and when all is said and done Dion has become only the second leader in the Liberal Party’s history to not WIN the top job in Canada via an election, the first one being

What was it Dion said about not being a quitter again?  Hmm, looks like he is a quitter after all. I bet PM Stephen Harper is having quite a chuckle now, after all it was his nemesis Dion who labeled him a quitter not too many days ago.

While Dion is still officially leading the Grits until a new leader is chosen to succeed him, you can bet there are more than a just a couple of party members hoisting a few in celebration that Dion will not be leading the Liberals into the next federal election, which by the way shouldn’t happen for another 24 months, provided of course that PM Stephen Harper and his Conservatives don’t screw up to the extent the former Liberal government did just before they were relegated to the cheap seats in the House of  Commons in 2006.

Dion is still the leader for now, but as he was before heading into the 2008 election campaign, his leadership is merely in name only and he will no longer be able to harm the party like he has since he first took over the top job.  He is still a puppet, though I really think he should have relinquished his position now and let somebody else act as interim leader until a leadership convention.

How is he going to help with the leadership transition, the reason he is staying on as the interim leader when he was an ineffective leader himself. More importantly whoever the new Liberal leader is, he is going to look pretty stupid himself for looking to Dion to help him with that transition.

In announcing his resignation Dion said that he failed, that after consultations he learned that Liberal candidates while doing their door-to-door canvassing for this past election campaign were told more often than not by people that answered the door knocks that they did not like Stephane Dion.

No shit Sherlock!

Who can blame any voter for not liking Dion, he was as ignorant of a lot of what Canadians (especially Liberal supporters) wanted when it came to Canada’s leader as he was stupid, and at the end of the day his ignorance of what Canadians wanted and needed, his own stupidity, his empty threats, the hidden truths (costs) about his Green Shift policy, and the fact that he spent most of his time attacking PM Harper and the Conservatives in the media and in the House of Commons on the taxpayer dime no less, instead of actually allowing the government to get work done on behalf and for Canadians, killed any chance he had of becoming Prime Minister of Canada, and never mind the fact that he has never been able to re-establish the credibility and integrity the Liberal Party lost during the sponsorship scandal, which in the end was what brought Dion to power in the party in the first place.

Dion failed to deliver for his party and the blame for his party’s demise rests on his shoulders, nobody else’s. No sense in trying to pass the buck, and besides Canadians no better.

The expectation of Dion when he replaced Paul Martin was that he was going to help the party win back some of the respect the party lost as a result of the sponsorship scandal that brought the former Liberal government down at the end of 2005 and then buried them in the 2006 election. Having former MP Garth Turner as a confidante in his inner circle didn’t help his or the Liberal cause either. That was just to stupid on Dion’s part, nothing short of leadership suicide as far as I’m concerned.  Dion failed to deliver from the moment he arrived in Ottawa as leader of the official opposition and not only that, he went out of his way to impede the federal government from getting any work done when the parliament was in session, and he had help to do that from a Liberal dominated senate.

Taxpayer money is definitely being wasted when it comes to the effectiveness of the Liberal opposition and a Liberal dominated senate.

Those Liberal senators by the way should be as history as Dion is going to be by the way, and although they can’t be fired, they should do the right thing by Canadians and step aside. Enough of the bullshit in the senate already, it’s time for them to be put out to pasture. If Harper has his way that will happen, though he is going to need a majority government to accomplish that.

And Dion blames somebody else for his party’s humiliating and embarrassing defeat. Go figure.

Dion has also blamed the negative advertising directed towards him by the Conservatives during the election campaign that saw the Liberals lose 19 seats of the 95 seats they held before going into the election, and that to me doesn’t sound like a man who is taking full responsibility and ownership for the Liberal’s demise. He is the party’s leader and as such he should know better than to be blaming the opposition for his party’s demise. What, did he expect the Conservatives to play nice after all the grief he caused them during the past couple of years? If memory serves me well, it was Dion that antagonized the Conservatives with his personal attacks, egged the Conservatives on and in the end especially when it comes to politics, you get what you give.

Certainly the Conservative’s negative advertising campaign against Dion didn’t help the Liberals, but Dion set himself up for that kind of strategy when he began taking pot shots at PM Harper while parliament was in session. Why he blames Harper for what has happened to the Liberals now is beyond me. It doesn’t make sense and his passing the buck for something he himself caused shows just what kind of man Dion really is, and to think the could have been Prime Minister.

If Dion didn’t like the retaliatory personal attacks that were levelled against him, perhaps he should have thought twice about launching a few of his own.

By the way, the Liberals would have tried to outdo the Conservatives with a negative advertising campaign if they could afford to do so, but the party was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy when they went into this election and therefore were in no position to attack the Conservatives full on as much as they would have liked to.

I bet if the Liberals could afford to mount a negative advertising campaign against Harper they would have, but because nobody really had any interest in contributing to Liberal coffers because of the dufus leading the party, their advertising budget was stripped down to the bare minimum. Negative advertising or not Dion never had a chance without having enough money to mount an effective election campaign. I wonder how much this election is going to cost them in the end, and how much is still owing from the 2006 election campaign.

As the title of today’s blog suggests, there are some Liberals who are going to celebrate Dion’s resignation announcement, and they won’t be sipping champagne, but a $5.00 bottle of wine might do the trick. Can you still buy a $5.00 bottle of wine in Canada?