Hey, where'd my update go? No, not software. The Sept. 10 Update of Economic and Fiscal Projections. Jim Flaherty announced a catastrophic change in the federal government's fiscal situation, labelled it "staying the course", scurried off, and everyone went back to discussing Michael Ignatieff's electoral prospects. It would be more appropriate to recall Brian Mulroney's.

This budget update was a downdate, a trip a quarter century back into the dismal past of bad decisions defended by fantasy. The runaway spending and deficits are bad enough. But what really scared me about the Update was its return to the pattern of the Mulroney years in which, whatever could reasonably be foreseen was terrible but whatever lurked on the borders of Never-never-land was mysteriously going to be fine. People ignored this phenomenon until it was very nearly too late.

And now it's back.

In the 2009 Update shows that over the next three years or so, the lines denoting ballooning deficits and debt have the shape known technically among economists as "scarily steep" and then they suddenly relax and become "reassuringly flat." We have seen this before, and it was bad news. (In case you like charts more than my editors, I've posted a few here).

Federal deficit projections in the 1980s always had the shape of Vimy Ridge, dauntingly steep on our side but sloping gently away on theirs. Worse, the point where we were magically saved moved inexorably away as we approached, exactly as though it was a mirage and exactly the way it receded by a year between the September 2009 Update and the budget just eight months earlier.

And with finance ministers peddling such snake oil, instead of a refreshing drink of solvency, all we ever got was an oily brew of self-satisfaction.

So I invite you to savour Flaherty's "Foreword" and the "Introduction" to the Budget Update. They ooze reassuring phrases like "will stay the course ... committed to its plan ... Although the timing of this return to balanced budgets has changed, our commitment ... has not. When the time is right... additional spending restraint is necessary.... staying the course ... return to a balanced budget as the economy recovers.... stay the course... committed to returning to balanced budgets.... continue to follow a disciplined approach to fiscal planning... a return to budgetary balance without endangering the... recovery."

Reading this guff, you wouldn't guess the actual numbers in the crucial "Summary Statement of Transactions" show spending up $13.9 billion dollars this year alone, would you? No. That would require the finance minister to say "My hair is on fire and my projections are out the window ha ha I have no idea what nasty surprise I'll pass on next!" Which they never do even when they're quietly admitting in the Summary Statement of Transactions that next year's deficit is also now predicted to be fifteen and a half billion dollars more than they expected eight months ago.

I call that pretty ugly. A deficit for this year and next of $101.2 billion, $37.7 billion higher than they said just eight months earlier, strikes me as a bit of an "Ooopsie." But not for these guys an admission of past error or a confession that current projections are as worthless as the last batch. Instead they say on the one hand the recession made them do it, and boast on the other that Canada is singularly well placed to weather the recession, apparently unaware of the glaring contradiction. And they never get to the third hand where this incredible surge in spending makes any sense. As for the fact that they're planning to add $76.1 billion more to the debt in the next five years than they were as recently as January, it's just not something to discuss in polite company.

Yup, $76.1 billion. That's $2,200 per Canadian. And that's just the difference between the $83.1 billion they planned to add to the debt over five years back in January, and the $159.2 billion they now intend to add over five years. The total debt is now meant to reach $622.9 billion by 2013-14, or $18,500 for each of us including little babies. And that's assuming that the swell downturn in catastrophically runaway spending happens magically three years from now exactly the way it persistently didn't in the 1980s.

Then we have the government's cackling about a "disciplined approach to fiscal planning," a phrase that means "not cutting anything that buys votes." Even before the recession hit, the Tories -- between bouts of yapping about those awful big spending Liberals and socialists-- were hiking spending seven per cent a year.

So never mind Michael Ignatieff's risible electoral prospects or budgetary fantasies. It's Brian Mulroney's that matter now.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

A lot of bloodthirsty maniacs out there want to blow us up. What are we meant to do about people who don't take it seriously?

On Monday, the Israeli Embassy invited me to meet Dr. Jonathan Fine of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya. Claiming some knowledge of the terrorist threat, I asked him to skip the basic briefing and instead tell me how to move the discussion forward.

He said start with ideas. Talk about who our enemies are and what they want. Too often, he added, even counter-terror experts immediately turn to the adversary's strategy and tactics. These things matter, he said, but first things first: Tell me your adversary's image of you, and I'll tell you his strategy and tactics.

I was immediately sympathetic.

A great paradox of the modern world is that most intellectuals do not think ideas matter. During the Cold War, the chattering classes didn't take Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism seriously; in the 1930s they dismissed Nazi doctrine; now they brush off radical Islam. New era, old error.

The standard materialist liberal claim that poverty causes violence is not merely, as Chesterton said, a slander on the poor. It is also preposterously at odds with the facts. Where are the suicide bombers from Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa? And it is dangerously arrogant.

Liberals who cannot conceive of honest, intelligent dissent from their own views interpret any sign of genuinely different thinking as, essentially, cover for a ransom demand. So they offer bribes, foreign aid for roads, jobs, clean water, etc. on the theory that if only those foreigners had nicer stuff they'd stop that jibber-jabber about jihad.

This approach is madness. Once you have paid him the Danegeld you will never be rid of the Dane.

Besides, some people want your blood not your money.

Here Fine stressed the transition from secular to religious terror at, essentially, the Iranian revolution of 1979. And he underlined the Ayatollah Khomeini's threefold justification for suicide bombing: The suicide bomber purifies himself, purifies his community, and shows contempt for the Judeo-Christian belief in the sanctity of life in this world.

I consider the third crucial. Christians holding "John 3:16" signs in football end zones agree with Jews who believe Genesis 1:31 ("God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good."). Suicide bombers do not. They hate this world and everything in it, so offering them more of life's good things is not just ineffective but feeble-minded.

When Islamists say they are in love with death, we need to believe them before we do anything else. Their deaths are as sweet to them as ours and it dictates their strategy and tactics.

Jonathan Fine notes that traditional terror movements before 1979 had socioeconomic goals. Their aims may have been as unrealistic as they were horrible, and their methods despicable. But in principle they wanted things we could give them.

The FLN wanted France out of Algeria not France, while even the ghastly Yasser Arafat, at least in public, criticized "the Zionist entity", which was ostensibly an attack on the policy orientation of the Israeli government and not a cry to exterminate the Jews. The Hamas Charter is an entirely different matter, as only those who refuse to read it can fail to recognize. And Osama bin Laden's followers want a caliphate from Cordoba to Indonesia and beyond. Their starting point is Spain, and we are next. And they cannot be negotiated with.

As Fine noted, air traffic control repeatedly tried to contact the 9/11 hijackers. But Mohammed Atta and company wouldn't pick up the radio even to shout abuse. And Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh gasped "Can't we talk about this?" to the Islamist who was shooting, stabbing and trying to behead him. But there was nothing to discuss. The medium was the message. Thus, Fine observed, you could at least buy time by haggling with old-style terrorists but "once a suicide bomber enters the target zone it is lost" which means the only effective response is preemptive.

So, he said, start with ideas and read the sources. Including one I should have known but didn't, bin Laden's mentor Abdullah Yusuf Azzam.

There comes a point where it's OK to stop accumulating examples; how many times does someone have to shout "Slaughter the Jews" before you abandon attempts at dialogue on a two-state solution? But to get there you need to spend some time on the Palestinian Media Watch website and learn what "Itbach al Yahud" means.

Some people ignore such chants due to a corruption of the will rather than merely a clouding of the intellect. Everyone else needs to take ideas seriously and read the sources in horrified amazement.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

There's a lot of excitement in the press about the Liberals' new campaign ads. So perhaps I could request 37 seconds of your time on the subject.

I pick 37 seconds for two reasons. First, that's how long the incredibly exciting English-language ad lasts, which suggests either an insulting estimate of your attention span or a realistic estimate of your interest in Michael Ignatieff's views. Second, I make the second estimate.

I'm personally about as enthusiastic about the churn of Canadian politics as about leprosy. My excuse for writing about it is that an election can come even if you don't want it to and someone will win even if you refuse to vote. If space permitted, I could draw critical lessons about the media here, from their enthusiasm for the subject to the fact that the Globe and Mail and a major Ottawa-based newspaper both ran front-page stories Monday that said the ads were available on YouTube but didn't even provide the URLs let alone put hyperlinks on the online version.

(FYI the English one is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ2ixKkwljI and the French ones at 9pHJ273PlGU and Q1SMxRWem9Q. There, that wasn't hard, was it?) But apparently many journalists still think the Internet is something we write about not through, which... [Space does not permit - ed.]

Yes, sorry, back to the ads. They are interesting, in a grotesque sort of way, for what they reveal about the person who made them. One newspaper ran the headline "New ad tries to soften Ignatieff 's image, expert says" without waiting to see what effect the ad actually had on voters before covering it. But I digress.

The ads clearly are intended to soften Ignatieff's image. For obvious reasons. But the attempt is so transparent, from background to clothing to overgrooming, that it's hard to believe it will work, especially since voters will, at some point, see and hear him speak. What struck me listening to Ignatieff's English-language ad was how clumsy it was. He even starts: "Wherever I've worked, I've met Canadians who are the best the world has to offer." They might as well have included a subtitle: So there's nothing wrong with Mike here having been abroad his whole adult life. And a lot wrong with the parochial hicks who didn't even go to Harvard ... d'oh, that's the voters. Aaaargh.

Even more awkward, even in a 37-second clip, is the blatant absence of any real argument in the ad. I mean argument in the classic sense of a series of logically connected propositions taking you somewhere mentally. There's no subordination, no if-then. It's all just assertion. A revealing sign: he never says the word "if." Which might go some way to dispel Ignatieff's image as an intellectual but not in a good way. Especially since one of the weird things about him, even as an intellectual, is how hard it is to name one important idea with which he's been consistently associated.

Even his desire to be prime minister has more whim than long-term obsession about it. And his infamous "Wait and see" on how to balance the budget without raising taxes wasn't just the most unsuccessful attempt I ever saw to evoke Trudeau's "Just watch me." It also embarrassingly underlined that whatever he spent his academic career pondering, it didn't include how to balance budgets in a vote-buying welfare state.

As Jeffrey Simpson noted in the Globe and Mail, Ignatieff, in the same appearance, insisted that the Liberals balanced the budget in the 1990s without raising taxes but that's not true. In 1995, they "raised taxes on corporations, financial institutions, tobacco and gasoline, and made other corporate tax changes and alterations to retirement plans that added about $1.5 billion to Ottawa's coffers each year." So Ignatieff's assertion was either a clumsy lie or embarrassing ignorance. I know he was out of the country at the time, but shouldn't a former Harvard professor have had his staff do a bit of research?

As for the French ads, they show first that Ignatieff attended the Ekol Joe Clark de Fransay, second that he thinks Québécois have even shorter attention spans at just 31 seconds, and third that he has no more interest in assembling an argument in the other official language. It's just one surly assertion after another, set against a harsh black background rather than the soft fake natural one of the English ads.

For the record, I agree with his attack on the Harper government's budgetary policies. The slogan "Nous méritons mieux" might be a stretch but as for the English version "We can do better," it shouldn't even be hard. The problem is, he has no idea how and doesn't even realize it matters.

That is worth 37 seconds of your time to verify. Probably not 40. But 37.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

In Alan Garner's novel The Weirdstone of Brisinghamen, the stolid British farmer Gowther Mossock is awakened by his dog barking at a sinister little intruder returned to prowl round his farm so he fetches his shotgun. His wife says "Watch thy step, lad. You're bigger than he is, and that's all the more of thee for him to hit." "I'll be all reet, but he wunner," Gowther replies. How times have changed.

I'm not recommending this second-rate fantasy for teens I happened to revisit as part of my summer reading. But far better to read about Gowther than imitate him.

Act like that today and the authorities will swoop on you for violating firearms laws, daring to defend yourself, and for good measure tag you for a hate crime against goblins, who would probably then get government jobs under an affirmative action program.

We were never told this would happen.

Those who brought in various changes to the law over the last half-century to expand the rights of criminals, restrict those of normal folks and import exotic brands of sociology into the justice system never warned us we would be turned into terrified wimps reduced to calling 911, fleeing, being told there was no film in the surveillance cameras and charged if we fight back.

We were hypnotized into passive acceptance in a way Garner's evil wizards would admire and envy.

What is most revealing about a society is not the things on which it concentrates its attention but those it takes for granted.

That is why humour is so revealing, and so problematic for outsiders. And it is what makes this trivial action by Farmer Mossock so significant.

In order to sell us the far-fetched action and chaotic, fragmented metaphysics of his yarn, Garner has to make the background dialogue and action as normal as possible.

Which makes the most extraordinary part of his book not Cadellin the wizard or the magic jewel Firefrost but the casual assumption of the author, in 1960, that a normal, reassuringly solid Cheshire farmer will have firearms, feel comfortable using them, and be utterly, unflappably willing to defend himself with them.

Likewise, in G.K. Chesterton's older novel The Man Who Was Thursday, published a century ago last year, the main character's experience becomes so odd that at one point even "the common things he carried with him -- the food and the brandy and the loaded pistol..." start feeling strange and fantastic.

Who in Canada today, I ask you, would not find a revolver in their pocket stranger, more fantastic and more terrifying than, say, an iPod full of hip-hop "tunes," a sex manual, or maybe that pole-dancing doll for young girls that's been causing an online flap lately (see for instance the gadget blog gizmodo.com).

What happened to us? It wasn't always this way; in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the increasingly apprehensive narrator Dr. Lanyon recounts that "though I dismissed my servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver that I might be found in some posture of self-defense."

It's not just "right-wingers" like Chesterton and, I suppose, Stevenson.

In the 1937 edition of his The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism George Bernard Shaw observed as a commonplace about hobbies that, "Indoor people want books and pictures and pianos: outdoor people want guns and fishing-rods and horses and motor cars."

Aaack. Guns? Yes. And three years after Shaw wrote, and 20 years before Garner did, the British government intentionally distributed weapons to the civilian populace to resist a feared Nazi invasion.

At the time it seemed not merely logical but part of a hallowed tradition going back to the early fifth century assertion, as Rome withdrew, that free men could bear arms, affirmed repeatedly in such vital documents as the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Yet if Britain were faced with such a deadly peril today, would any politician dare defend such a measure, or would the scientific extermination of the populace seem far more reasonable and civilized than its disorderly self-protection? We're the strange case, and an intelligent woman urgently needs a guide to us.

I would expect young people to find some aspects of life in days past unfamiliar, even magical, like riding in a horse-drawn wagon, not watching television or going to bed by candlelight. But it worries me that they would have less trouble believing in Garner's ancient wizard keeping 140 knights in an enchanted sleep until the final showdown between good and evil than in a normal person having a gun they were neither afraid nor ashamed to use in self-defence.

There's something weird here. But it's not that stone. And we are not all reet.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The past week has seen a typical flood of press releases from the federal government claiming to highlight "Canada's Economic Action Plan." They make it sound like not much of a plan yet at the same time a very bad one.

Let me cite three telling examples: "PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER ANNOUNCES CONSTRUCTION OF NEW SMALL CRAFT HARBOUR IN PANGNIRTUNG"; "PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER LAUNCHES NEW REGIONAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AGENCY FOR CANADA'S NORTH"; and "PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER LAUNCHES NEW ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AGENCY FOR SOUTHERN ONTARIO."

Do only ideological purists object when the Conservative Party, headed by an ex-libertarian, thinks the prime minister should not merely interest himself in but fund and announce the construction of a dock in the Arctic? But government, of any stripe, is overstretched if such matters occupy the time and attention of the guy or gal at the top. I think it's also worth debating whether a new regional economic development agency could possibly play a meaningful role in the long-term economic development of Canada's North. And whether this one is likely to have the appropriate structure and philosophy when the same government that created it had, five days earlier, announced a similar body for Southern Ontario.

Who, I ask, is meant to provide the money to help struggling Toronto find prosperity? And what dazzling new approaches to effective wealth creation will this agency unveil to a region that, throughout our history, has done little besides lead one of the world's most productive nations in a few minor areas like finance, manufacturing and services?

The press release said the prime minister babbled, "This is a region with distinct needs, and the people of Southern Ontario deserve economic programs delivered in ways specifically tailored to their own priorities. FedDev Ontario is one more tool to ensure that workers and businesses in Southern Ontario have the resources they need to succeed."

OK, it's probably just more of the boilerplate press-release writers put in the mouths of people who, whatever their sins, never actually said such nonsense, rhetoric that neither means anything nor tries to. I realize the government subjects us to a thunderous, almost automated barrage of such self-congratulatory sludge; it is not unusual to get four a day on Canada's Economic Action Plan alone, a surprising number specifically crediting the PM. And it can seem both trivial and off-putting to be told that Harper's tour of the Yukon Energy Project site is a "Photo opportunity only," in which we may depict but not speak to him.

Trying hard to be fair, I grant a photo op heads-up is useful to the press. And when the PMO distributes its own photos of the boss in remote places it smacks of vainglorious flattery but saves us the time and expense of getting to places like Pangnirtung which probably don't have a convenient Starbucks. Sometimes they even save us the trouble of taking our own unflattering shots of Mr. Harper's belly.

Besides, even a PMO picture can be worth a few hundred words.

For instance, the Aug. 20 one tagged "Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Nunavut Premier Eva Aariak, Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq and Indian and Northern Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl visit the community's small craft harbour." It's a revealing shot of rugged-looking boats on a Pangnirtung tidal flat, with Strahl looking ready to get behind the wheel of one of those babies and Harper looking like an unusually plump model in outdoor clothes he'd never otherwise wear trying in vain to stand in a natural pose next to a real working man's boat with two big shiny outboard motors.

What most struck me was that a lot of the boats had two engines. I take it the locals are firmly persuaded the waters off Pangnirtung are no place to have your only motor conk out. And who am I to argue? Or tell them where or how to build their docks? Then again, who is Stephen Harper to do it? At least I've spent a lot of time driving boats, mostly not into rocks.

Even a photo op consumes the time and attention of the person involved. As for an economic action plan that apparently depends on the notion that not a sparrow gets a job in Canada, from Pangnirtung to Toronto, without a strategic government initiative, it absorbs enormous quantities of mental effort as well as money, even if flacks do most of the appalling writing.

Government can't do everything, and when it thinks it not only can but must, it's a certain and ominous warning that it won't be devoting enough time, money or attention to the things it actually can and should do.

An economic development agency for Southern Ontario? What rubbish.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The conventional wisdom is that Barack Obama is in trouble over government health care. The truth is, government health care is in trouble over Barack Obama.

True, some of the president's political troubles stem from the inflated expectations of his supporters. There is a tendency in politics to invest unrealistic hopes in the election of "our guy" as a triumphant vindication of who we are rather than his probable performance in office. (See for instance the boppy 1952 "I Like Ike" ad at www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ml9VZW7V_U where the sun rises again because we've sent Ike to Washington not because of anything we expected he'd do once he got there which, indeed, he largely did not.) But that's a side issue.

The main problem is that there never was a health-care plan. There was simply an assumption, as persistent as it was unrealistic, that government could easily provide more health care for less money, more fairly, than the private sector. What has driven Republicans out of the bipartisan reform effort, while giving so-called "Blue Dog" democrats the cold robbies about the probable political, fiscal and medical results of this reform, is that it was meant to save money yet has been revealed as horribly expensive.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) fired a pair of deadly broadsides in June, first saying the health bill before the Senate Finance Committee would cost an extra $1.6 trillion over a decade, then declaring that rather than the supposed savings in the second decade would be an even steeper increase in spending. Now the naive would ask, if the plan is meant to save money, why is it so much more expensive? The skeptical would ask, what possibly made you think increasing the role of government would save money?

Recently supporters of the administration have turned to a health insurance co-op lack-of-plan as an alternative, or perhaps a supplement, to the government insurance lack-of-plan. The administration denies changing its lack of position. But it doesn't matter. There's no there there either.

Why would there be? Can anyone name one thing government provides more efficiently than the private sector? I concede that there are things the private sector cannot provide, like defence and criminal justice. But there are not as many as people think and they all turn on the familiar triad of free rider, holdout and transaction cost problems.

To say the state must do things like defence and justice is not to suggest that it is likely to do them efficiently. Rather, mankind has long searched for mechanisms like representative democracy, separation of powers, federalism, decentralization, property rights and a vigilant citizenry to prevent it from doing them cruelly and wastefully. But admirable as these devices are, they cannot work as well as consumer sovereignty. They're just necessary where markets can't operate. And there is no reason to think health care fits into that category. So why cling to the expensive disaster of state-run medicine?

Not just here, either. Most Canadian defenders of our system dishonestly insist that the United States has little public health care. But in fiscal year 2009 Medicare and Medicaid, the two largest U.S. federal health programs, accounted for 41 per cent of Washington's $3.1-trillion budget, gobbling up over a trillion and a quarter dollars between them. Worse, before the current debate began, the CBO already warned that without effective cost control the two Ms would consume "13 per cent of GDP in 2040 and 38 per cent of GDP by 2082." Finding ways to make this system enormously more expensive is clearly pointless politically and medically.

A recent MSNBC news story said "a plurality of Americans now oppose a government-run plan." But that's not quite right. It's not a matter of the public turning against a workable plan thanks to rude conservative extremists hijacking town hall meetings. The public is realizing there is, in the proper sense of the word, no plan, just a disposition to spend vast sums while trusting central planning to muddle through.

Try asking any of its defenders why, if the Canada Health Act is such a good idea, we shouldn't adopt a similar Canada Car Act, Canada Software Act or Canada Food Act? They will laugh dismissively, as though your question were deliberately vulgar. But they cannot answer it seriously because everyone instinctively knows the devastating answer given 200 years ago by Thomas Jefferson: "Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread." The same is true of health care. Consider only that the British system, unlike ours, covers dentistry, and they have waiting lists for dentists as well.

That Barack Obama didn't realize this, and made absurd promises based on his lack of realization, is a negative reflection on the man. But the problem that now exists isn't that he wasn't magic. It's that government health care isn't.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Some days the headlines make me think I'm in the wrong business. Like Wednesday when it was reported that Premier Dalton McGuinty had personally appointed the two top executives of eHealth who caused a scandal by doing highly expensive nothing with a bunch of their cronies. Where do I get a job like that?

OK, so they eventually had to resign because they weren't doing anything useful. But that would happen to me too, sooner and without the lavish salary or untendered-contract-to-crony bit first. Let alone the $317,000 severance former eHealth CEO Sarah Kramer pocketed. They don't pay columnists that kind of money to stay and write, let alone to go away.

Actually I know of one exception. Boris Johnson, the overly colourful mayor of London (England), gets a quarter of a million pounds to write a newspaper column, just over $450,000 Canadian, while his day job brings in another £140,000. Unfortunately, I think you have to be mayor as well to pull in that kind of coin which in Ottawa might mean spending most of my term under investigation or on trial and three quarters of a million bucks on my legal defence which, even on Mr. Johnson's salary, doesn't leave that much for groceries.

I should probably also admit that I haven't yet approached my editors to ask whether they'd pay me that lavishly if I somehow deluded voters into entrusting me with the keys to the municipal treasury. They are not as a rule choleric individuals but I fear this suggestion might lead them to step dramatically out of character.

By sickening contrast, when the premier of Ontario raised his own salary from $159,000 to more than $200,000, plus perks, voters had no such reaction. He won't actually get rich that way, of course. That's what the consulting, boards and speaking fees afterward are for, especially if you're shameless. Which reminds me that some Canadian federal government tourism stimulus funds will reportedly be used to bring Bill Clinton to speak at the CNE, adding to the $4.6 million the Ozark Casanova already earned between 2006 and 2008 in Canada. For some reason it comes across as carping when I say he was a bad president as well as a bad man and it is weird to pay to hear him deceive you on both counts. See: "some days I think I'm in the wrong business," above.

On such days, the eHealth jobs aren't really the ones I want. In a pinch I'd take Kramer's $380,000 salary plus $114,000 bonus four months into a job she was botching. But what I really want is to be premier. Talk about a job where you get away with stuff.

Remember how Dalton McGuinty started off promising not to raise taxes, then imposed a health care tax he lied was a premium, promptly flopped his flip when he realized he hadn't checked out the fine print in public sector labour contracts about such premiums, and won the next election. In which he shamelessly blasted his main opponent for supporting sectarian schools to which he sent his own kids and where his wife works and not one drop of his own mud flew back and hit him. Amazing.

As the Globe and Mail reported Wednesday, when the CEO and chairman of eHealth both resigned, Premier McGuinty intoned "The buck stops with me," and declared an end to outrageous untendered contracts. Yet it seems he personally ordered the hiring of Kramer without the usual competitive process, a detail he smoothly omitted when, effortlessly adopting that look of wounded integrity that fits him like an oily second skin, he took charge in the name of the outraged citizens of blah blah blah. (He now denies seeing the warnings senior bureaucrats sent to his office about her not knowing enough to do the job.)

I'm not saying I want to be Dalton McGuinty. Like many successful politicians, he too often reminds me of C.S. Lewis's appalling portrait in That Hideous Strength of John Wither, Deputy Director of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE), who over many years perfected a rhetorical and intellectual style so automatically genial, equivocal, reassuring yet vaguely menacing that his spirit could roam through dark places while his brain and body conducted everyday business in its absence. And I recognize that Mr. McGuinty's job carries drawbacks, like the forced smile as you shake hands with people you despise (including me on more than one occasion but then I had to do it too and my molars still hurt).

Still, I wish I knew how they did it. Imagine being well-paid, fawned over and taken seriously for years without the ghost of a hint of accountability. It just doesn't happen in my job. So tell me, please: How do I get one of those lavish, untendered ones where ducking blame is a key qualification and I can expense a muffin?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Hamas wants to enter a film at the Cannes Film Festival. No prize for guessing its central theme of death-to-you-know-who, or whether men and women had to sit separately at the Gaza première. But will the usual suspects win the Palme d'Or in appeasement by letting the film in and even praising it?

I'm currently making my way through the first volume of Winston Churchill's history of the Second World War, The Gathering Storm, a chilling account of the spineless fatuity of western elites in the face of Hitler's growing aggression. It's so dismal I wondered if I could stand to read this story if I didn't know how, against all odds, it ended well. To test this, I picked up Bruce Bawer's book Surrender, a chilling account of the spineless fatuity of western elites in the face of Islamists' growing aggression. It was frightening and discouraging.

For one thing, given the current state of discussion, I probably need to pre-empt criticism by saying Bawer is gay. He's not your typical backward-right-wing-easy-to-caricature bad person. But he has opened his eyes to Islamists' grotesque hostility to homosexuality (which, he notes, carries the death penalty in five Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia and Iran). And with them wide open, he stares in horror at the bewilderingly obtuse attempts of multiculturalist, gay-friendly, feminist progressives to ignore the scope and toxicity of radical Islam. Consider a poll he cites: 36 per cent of young British Muslims want Muslims who convert to another faith killed. OK, so 64 per cent didn't express this opinion out loud to pollsters. But imagine the reaction if a survey found similar numbers for, say, American Jews or Canadian Christians. Picture the angry headlines, scornful punditry and grovelling by establishment clerics and politicians.

Grovelling. There's the rub. Bawer produces an appalling catalogue of how western elites -- academic, cultural and political -- grovel before Islamist threats and abuse. Like French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who in 2002 said Saladin managed to "liberate" Jerusalem from the Crusaders, as though it had not been in Christian hands for centuries before Muslims seized it by force and then sulked for nine centuries over a failed attempt to get it back the same way. If Raffarin did not know this history, he is an appalling ignoramus. If he did, what possible combination of moral and mental defects can explain his grovelling?

Bawer presents an amazing series of examples, while Churchill, in The Gathering Storm, catalogues his efforts during the 1930s to warn about Britain's weakness and Germany's growing strength, and to challenge the incredibly foolish conventional wisdom. For instance, when the British government surrendered key naval bases to the Irish Republic in 1938, The Times of London blithered that it "releases the Government of ... the onerous and delicate task of defending" those bases "in the event of a war." Of course, it really meant dangerously longer routes for escort vessels protecting convoys from the dreadful U-boat menace. Attempting to combat this tide of soothing fatuity was, Churchill wrote, "like being smothered by a feather bed."

Today there are some sharp bits in the mattress, like agonizingly politically correct human rights tribunals keen to sweep away ancient, western, bourgeois patriarchal liberties like a fair trial at the behest of our jihadist enemies. But it was hard in the 1930s too; Malcolm Muggeridge got fired as a journalist for exposing Stalin's famine and Churchill was kept out of office from 1929 until 1940.

I'm no Churchill or even a Muggeridge. But I appeal to readers to put The Gathering Storm and Surrender side by side and wonder what's the matter with our elites. (Bruce Bawer will also be speaking in Ottawa on Sept. 14 at the invitation of the Free Thinking Film Society.)

Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once called modern liberalism "an extreme mental aberration best described by the Russian saying: that it is like a dog in reverse because it barks at its own folks and wags its tail in front of a stranger." Too harsh? Then ask yourself why so many progressive activists, respectable pundits and left-of-centre politicians are far more upset about Guantanamo Bay than about Saudis executing gays or clitorectomy. Better yet, ask them. It seems disquietingly similar to people calling Churchill a warmonger in the 1930s while ignoring Hitler and praising Stalin.

I grant that as a political program Islamism has a fatal flaw: It can no more govern successfully than Bolshevism or, I expect, Nazism. Over time such regimes would probably, like the U.S.S.R., collapse due to internal contradictions. But look at the dreadful human cost of the Soviet experiment, and of waiting until the last moment to stop Hitler. Why run such risks and pay such prices? Neither caution nor honest error are adequate explanations for what Churchill and Bawer catalogue.

Why, then, this disgusting urge to grovel before those who hate us? The Cannes committee may yet show steel and hurl that Hamas movie back into the filthy abyss. I'm afraid we'll see gold instead, glittering but soft.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]