{"id":9173,"date":"2011-05-04T10:31:37","date_gmt":"2011-05-04T14:31:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9173"},"modified":"2011-05-04T10:31:37","modified_gmt":"2011-05-04T14:31:37","slug":"he-comes-not-to-praise-ignatieff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/05\/04\/he-comes-not-to-praise-ignatieff\/","title":{"rendered":"He comes not to praise Ignatieff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colby Cosh<\/a>, that is. He has a column up at Maclean’s<\/em> which he admits “was prepared in a factory that manufactures gloating. Some traces may appear.”<\/p>\n

\n

When I argued that Ignatieff\u2019s long absence from the country was a problem — very, very carefully distinguishing my own argument from the content of Conservative attack ads — I was greeted with a chorus of \u201cHow dare you?\u201d I was told I had no standing to criticize a man of Ignatieff\u2019s intellectual attainments; by that standard, none of those who have been living<\/em> Canadian politics for the last quarter-century had any right to speak — so how\u2019d that argument work out? I was told that I was engaging in a \u201cpersonal attack\u201d; how\u2019d the argument that personalities have nothing to do with election success work out? I was told that love for Canada is all that matters, and you can love it just as much from a distance as you do from the inside; how\u2019d the lovefest turn out? This is not just idle gloating — and even if it is, maybe it is about time for Liberals to stop obsessing over the psychological motives of commentators and start listening. This is about whether the Liberal Party is capable of making use of criticism, even unfriendly or biased criticism, as advice<\/em>. This is the question, fundamentally the only question, that will determine whether it has a future, if it wants one.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But the point he’s trying to make, other than a quite understandable bit of back-patting for his prescience back at the beginning of Ignatieff’s short run as Liberal leader, is that the back-room handlers set this up:<\/p>\n

\n

\u2026 this election could have been avoided if Ignatieff hadn\u2019t been allowed to commit to a \u201cNot another second of Conservative government\u201d position on the 2011 budget. I don\u2019t know what story Paul Wells will tell in his sprawling Making Of The Prime Minister 2011 feature, and if he disagrees with me I would strongly encourage you to take his word over mine. My information is that the Liberal high command was playing a calculated gambit by leaving the go\/no-go choice on Jack Layton\u2019s desk. They thought that a spring 2011 election was better for them than an autumn one or a 2012 one. And they thought that Layton, in any event, would probably be too ravaged by illness not to support the budget — in which case they were prepared to go out and blame him for every jot and tittle in that document. This makes sympathy for the Liberal braintrust very, very difficult.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colby Cosh, that is. He has a column up at Maclean’s which he admits “was prepared in a factory that manufactures gloating. Some traces may appear.” When I argued that Ignatieff\u2019s long absence from the country was a problem — very, very carefully distinguishing my own argument from the content of Conservative attack ads — […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,53],"tags":[188,297,296],"class_list":["post-9173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-politics","tag-electionwatch","tag-jacklayton","tag-michaelignatieff"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2nX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9173"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9174,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9173\/revisions\/9174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}