By Carl Dow
When Michael Ignatieff announced his intention to run as a federal Liberal candidate in the January 2006 federal elections I, like some others, turned a curious eye. It wasn’t long before this academic rewrite man dove into Canadian politics and came up floundering. The powers that were at The Toronto Star were supporting Ignatieff as the new Trudeau. I shook my head in dismay and wrote the following letter to the editor at the Star. The letter wasn’t published, adding more fuel to the energy that finally produced True North Perspective. Here following was what I said:
To The Editor, the Toronto Star
Re: Tough talk on Quebec
Jan. 11, 2006. 08:09 AM
Linda Diebel writes, "Senior Liberals turned out last night to hear rookie politician Michael Ignatieff warn that Canada is facing a national unity crisis in which 'we need troops, warriors and chieftains' ready for the political battle over Quebec." Novice Michael Ignatieff's 27-year-absence from Canada is revealed in his expounding on the time worn theme of The Threat of Québec. What all too many fail to see is that there is no "political battle over Quebec." Fact is that the Bloc poll-support includes a heavy protest element that is growing wary of an overwhelming Bloc victory January 23 that could contribute to a PQ victory in 2008 and the misery of another referendum. That is why the protest vote is taking another look at the other credible federalist parties, the Conservatives and the New Democrats. While the majority of this shift will be toward the Conservatives, there are many Bloc supporters who have a kinship with the NDP. If Martin can restore a semblance of credibility the sea change may be only slight and give back to the Liberals a few seats they lost to the Bloc in close fights. If the sea change becomes a tsunami, then the Conservatives will replace the Liberals as the "other" party in Québec. Meanwhile, Michael Ignatieff can go back to back to sleep. Perhaps to Princeton, located in a country where getting things wrong, has become a way of life.
Carl Dow
For True North Perspective readers: I knew that Ignatieff is a Harvard man. I said Princeton just for fun. Maybe Harvard had done him enough damage.
Anyway, since then the Star has come to its senses and has chosen to follow True North’s analysis in the matter. Here is what Star columnist “Slinger” had to say about Ignatieff seven months later, Thursday. August 9.
"Ignatieff misses again on Iraq"
When Kevin Costner directed and starred in Dances With Wolves, Pauline
Kael, The New Yorker critic, came up with one of the greatest squelches
ever: "Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head."
If Kael had lived to review "Getting Iraq Wrong," Michael Ignatieff's
article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, she could have written, "Michael Ignatieff has feathers in his head," and let it go at that.
In the piece, Ignatieff reveals his profound anguish. "The unfolding
catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment" of George W.
Bush, the U.S. president, and many others, "myself included," who supported the invasion. Listing the mistakes Bush and his praetorian guard made, he confesses to
making some of the same ones, "and then a few of my own."
The thing is, though, as it always is when Ignatieff takes us along on one
of his Boy Scout rambles through his inner self, we soon learn that the
heart he pours out is an organ composed entirely of tin and horn.
It has been his great fortune to experience a miraculous transformation.
Having left the academic world ("where false ideas are merely false and
useless ones can be fun to play with") to become a politician, he has
discovered that "the judgments I now have to make in the political arena"
could well have saved him from being so dead, flat-out foolish.
Not to mention from the shame and embarrassment of having to own up.
And it might be that the source of this brave New-Michael insight
impresses the heck out of American readers who maybe think being deputy
leader of the Official Opposition is a big deal.
We Canadians are more inclined to see somebody who's ego allowed him to be lured away from Harvard with a guarantee he'd be crowned Pierre Trudeau II and who ended up getting his ass whipped by NERF Man.
Note to the producers of Corner Gas: How about Michael Ignatieff making a
guest appearance? He's appointed Grand Marshal of the parade to mark the
opening of trout season when the arrangements with Eddie Shack fall through at the last minute.
To us, that sounds about right.
What doesn't sound right is how cocksure he is that making a clean breast
of his mistakes and his former lousy judgment lets him off the hook.
It doesn't even slightly.
All he manages to do in the Times is prove that he completely misses the
point.
It wasn't that he thought the war was necessary, it was that he thought it
so loudly (publishing much of it in the same Times pages during the run-up
to and the early years of the war). And thinking it this loudly made him one
of the war's enablers. One of the foremost enablers. A "denizer of Harvard,"
a vaunted expert in international human rights, just about the most famous
public theorist on the ghastiliness of modern warfare.
If Bush and his cronies were cheesy, Ignatieff was pure gold, and they
used him for all he was worth, dressing their deeds in his words.
It doesn't matter that he was wrong about invading Iraq. What matters is
that he helped them do it.
They had the guns, he gave them the intellectual bullets.
Announcing he got it wrong is irrelevant. What he needs to do is apologize
for deserving so much of the blame. He doesn't, though. He doesn't because,
while he says he'd "learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts
with knowing when to admit your mistakes," to this day he has no idea what
his real mistake was.
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