Teetotalers and moonshiners

It’s hard to say who’s come the furthest, NASCAR or the Conservative Party of Canada. What we know is that the two forces have come together in the form of a Conservative Party logo appearing on the hood of a NASCAR race car for the first time this racing season.

The current Conservative Party is a coalition with the earlier Alliance Party formed from the ashes of the Reform Party which ultimately was a resurrection by Preston Manning of his father’s old Alberta-based Social Credit Party which first found its political feet during the prohibition era in the 1920s. Organizing against the evils of drink gave Social Credit its moxy and chasing rum runners and bootleggers its raison d’étré. If it weren’t for bootleggers, there’d be no Social Credit, no Preacher Manning, no son Preston Manning out to prove his worth to his father, so no Reform Party, no Alliance, and thus no renewed Conservative Party coalition and so no Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

NASCAR got its start with the moonshine-running bootleggers racing ahead of the cops in Model-T Fords up and down the Appalachian hills between the stills in the mountains and the customers in prohibition-era Atlanta. The first races that became the NASCAR circuit after World War II were held by young yahoos proving who lived up to their boasts of outrunning the cops on the sharpest turns and steepest drops with a top-heavy load of moonshine sloshing around inside the trunk and packed in the backseat.

And now descendents of teetotalers sponsor the cars of descendents of moonshine bootleggers. The Conservative Party continues to unfairly deny space to comedians.

What will happen in Iraq, the US and Canada

Democrats will win the White House and the Congress and the Senate in 2008. They will announce that getting out of Iraq will not be militarily possible without 350,000 additional troops sent there to get the 180,000 already there out. They will use the draft to do so, arguing that it is the only democratic option. The death rate of US troops in Iraq will thereafter go from three a day to ten a day. Widespread US popular rejection of the war draft and alarm about decreasing prospects in Iraq will unleash social unrest across the country, and pressured by Republicans as mid-term Congressional and Senate elections approach in 2010, the Democrats will let loose with unprecedented levels of police repression.

Canadian border crossings will be swamped by Americans running from the draft and fleeing the deteriorating conditions inside the country.

Against this backdrop, the security conditions surrounding Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic spectacle, run by a collapsing RCMP and an Afghan-weary and demoralized Canadian Army, and directed by a paranoid and unstable second-in-a-row governing Conservative minority flirting with recall by the Governor General, will be shocking to Canadians. It’ll go down in Canadian history as a watershed event referred to forever as simply “Vancouver,” as in “remember Vancouver.”

But don’t take our word for it, we predicted Canada wouldn’t even be in the medals for hockey at the Olympics in 2002, where we won gold. (Then in 2006 when we weren’t in the medals).

Dirty deals coming

After the BC Supreme Court found the Liberal Gordon Campbell regime in Victoria had acted unconstitutionally in tearing up Hospital Employee Union contracts when it first took office six years ago, a lot of speculation arose regarding what would happen next. Would employees laid off thereafter be hired back? Would wages of existing employees be driven back up to what they were before cuts? Would companies that moved in on the privatizing opportunity have their contracts terminated now? The answer is none of that.

It may well be unconstitutional but so are a lot of other practices. The question is not whether a practice is constitutional or not, but whether either side in such an arrangement will challenge the practice in court. For example, when the NHL players and owners agreed to a salary cap two seasons ago, the arrangement was unconstitutional (it amounts to collusion among the owners to “cap” and thus drive down the fair-market price players could charge), but the agreement consisted of players not challenging the owners in court in exchange for the owners handing over a steady percentage of the gate.

What the BC Liberals will say to the HEU is, you have a choice. You can start all over with a whole new court process to try and make us pay, a process we’ll appeal and that will take years to sort out. Or, we can come to an agreement to carry on with this unconstitutional arrangement without you taking us to court to make us pay. In about a year, there’ll be an announcement of a settlement between the government and the HEU, but details will be complicated and obscure and no workers will ever notice a difference. In about two years, the heads of the union will show up on the board of Concert Properties or as partners in one or another downtown law firm.

There ought to be a statue of Jack Munroe erected in Kelowna.

War brings more war every time

According to federal governing Conservatives, almost everything the formerly governing Liberals did was misguided or badly executed, from the gun registry to military reform to US relations to constitutional crises. Yet, the biggest thing the Liberals did, they apparently got right: the Conservatives have nothing bad to say about the Liberals deployment of the military in its biggest offensive since World War II, into Afghanistan.

Yet, of all the things the Liberals did, this choice abounds with the most evidence of wrong-headedness.

The fact brings to light a dilemma of governance and war. No nation at war, particularly after soldiers have been killed, can ever bring itself to admit that the whole idea was a bad one. Every side in every war fights on too long on the premise that to stop would be to dishonour those who had already fallen. So let more fall for even less reason, goes the strange logic.

The solution most favoured by the most warring nation on the planet, and the one most misguided in its military forays, the United States, is to simply declare victory and skedaddle. The problem with that solution for Canada is that the false and expedient declaration of victory transforms over time into a twisted myth of actual victory, thus lending support to the next hare-brained scheme. President Bush has begun touting the US deployment to South Korea as a winning model for the US deployment to Iraq—airbrushing over the fact that the US lost the Korean War (not once but twice—the first time in a defensive posture, getting nearly run off the whole peninsula, then later, in an offensive posture, unable to encroach over the line mid-peninsula earlier agreed to as a cease-fire line). But the real tragedy is how anti-Vietnam War activists allowed the myth of US victory there to metastasize from a deluded fantasy into a governing frame of mind enabling the US military to agree to blindly deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq on the flimsiest of civilian White House justifications.

Though they’ve been beaten back repeatedly, still they charge ahead and do it again, continually replenished with the energy of delusion. Now they’re arming Sunni insurgents to help take out Shia death squads they earlier armed, on the delusion that the Shia’s were the army and the troubling death squads are al Qaeda—a group they themselves invented in a New York court room. The truth is, America is arming both sides of a civil war they claim to be doing everything they can to prevent.