The supposed consensus on global warming has melted like a Himalayan glacier in an IPCC report. Scientists are admitting error and apologizing. So what's with the rearguard action by journalists?

We could be burning the last newspaper for warmth and they'd still be warning us about global warming. But now the scientists are admitting they bungled their research and misspoke themselves, don't the reporters and opinion writers on whom so many rely to keep informed also owe the public an apology?

Last month Phil Jones, the University of East Anglia director of climate research who concedes he inexplicably wrote "some very awful e-mails," admitted to the BBC that it may have been hotter during the "Medieval Warm Period" than it is today and there has been no "statistically significant" warming in the last 15 years. I'm not entirely sure why these admissions are noteworthy; after all, trying to hide the Medieval Warm Period is a bit like trying to hide that big hot yellow thing in the sky.

Science, we are constantly told, relies on solid facts, not the rubbish scattered all over the blogosphere. So presumably climate scientists all knew there was no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years and just didn't tell us. As for the Medieval Warm Period, well, we've known for centuries that the Vikings farmed Greenland back then. So why didn't all these scientists object to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) infamous 2001 "hockey stick" graph flatlining temperature over the past 1,000 years?

Inquiring minds want to know: The New York Times admitted this Wednesday that "Grudgingly, many climate scientists are beginning to engage critics, admit mistakes and open up their data" and said scientists "are learning a little humility and trying to make sure they avoid crossing a line into policy advocacy."

Unlike the press. That same New York Times story promptly assured us the public "uproar threatens to undermine decades of work" and that "Some of the most serious allegations against Dr. Jones ... and other researchers have been debunked." And it described the IPCC's critics as "citing several relatively minor errors in its most recent report."

The Associated Press, likewise, claims the IPCC is seeking outside review of its methods because "Critics have found a few unsettling errors, including projections of retreats in Himalayan glaciers, in the thousands of pages of the reports. Scientists say the problems are minor ..."

Hockey stick? What hockey stick? This is not science. It's not even journalism. It is now seven years since two Canadian researchers, Stephen MacIntyre and Ross McKitrick, demolished the "hockey stick" graph, forcing NASA to redo its homework and put Al Gore in the deep freeze because, as Lorne Gunter wrote more than two years ago, "The hottest year since 1880 becomes 1934 instead of 1998, which is now just second; 1921 is third. Four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade ... The 15 hottest years since 1880 are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before atmospheric carbon dioxide began its recent rise; seven occurred afterwards."

How can reporters assigned to write about the IPCC's credibility problem fail to Google "IPCC hockey stick"? It's called "research." For that matter, why did journalists tell us the IPCC was an "international panel of climate scientists" (New York Times editorial board) when that organization's own website says it's "comprised of government delegations"?

And shouldn't a few opinion writers also be considering an apology on grounds both of content and tone, such as the Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson, who wrote on February 3, 2007 that "There will remain denials about the IPCC report from the fringe ... just as there are those who believe the Earth is flat." And his newspaper's editorial board, which said the same day: "Global-warming skeptics and deniers now find themselves in the company of creationists, flat-Earthers and those who dispute the scientific consensus that HIV is the cause of AIDS."

A week later John Baird, then federal environment minister, assured both David Suzuki and Elizabeth May "I'm not a member of the Flat Earth Society." I'm not so daft as to expect him to apologize for channelling goofy journalism. But what of my Citizen colleague who claimed on November 20, 2007 that the IPCC's "first three reports this year have demolished the credibility of the last of the climate-change skeptics"? Or Toronto talk show host John Moore last October in the National Post: "Time is running out for the global warming deniers"?

We've seen some very awful columns and news stories and I think those who wrote them owe all of us an apology. Then they can do an online search for "medieval warm period."

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

With a federal budget due Thursday I must harp on government fiscal irresponsibility. Wait a minute. This isn't a harp. It's a pitchfork. Where have you led us?

The Citizen assured us it'll be steady-as-she-sinks for the feds, with "no new spending measures or tax cuts beyond what the Harper government has announced already in its plan to stimulate the economy, says a senior government official." The newspaper reported that the government official's comments "appear to douse speculation the Conservatives are transitioning to a period of serious belt tightening" -- that, despite Treasury Board president Stockwell Day's hints that the government would identify specific programs to be cut, "there will be no absolute spending cuts in the budget" (according, again, to that senior government official.)

Gosh, was that just rube bait?

For added horror, I read this solemn guff in parallel with Benjamin Franklin's mid-18th-century Poor Richard's Almanack maxims. Back then, people were so weird they believed in right and wrong and humility and other age-of-whale-oil barbarities like frugality. Who today would say, "If you'd be wealthy, think of saving, more than of getting: The Indies have not made Spain rich, because her Outgoes equal her Incomes." To be fair, our governments don't seem to be thinking of doing either.

Of course we'll be assured Thursday that in a few years, when the ship of state stops leaking red ink, they'll batten the hatches, trim the sails and get things back in balance. So here's Franklin: "To-morrow you'll reform, you always cry;/ In what far country does this morrow lie?"

Not Europe, that's for sure. It's old news that the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) have ghastly financial problems. But sophisticates have assumed countries like Germany and Britain would bail them out.

Guess again. Germany's deficit is way above the EU's alleged limit. And last week the Daily Telegraph reported: "In surprise news which sent the pound sliding on Thursday, official figures showed that the "British) Government borrowed £4.3 billion last month. It was the first time since 1993 that the public finances had gone into the red in January -- a month in which tax revenues usually push the Exchequer into the black," so Britain's deficit could exceed "even the Chancellor's forecast of a record £178 billion."

I especially like the fact no one saw it coming; in Britain, as here, finance ministers reliably give you 10 highly technical reasons why their predictions can't go wrong and, a month later, 10 equally brainy excuses why they did. As Franklin warned, "There are no fools so troublesome as those that have wit."

Big trouble is coming here. U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates just blasted America's European NATO allies for military feebleness. He's glad they've stopped attacking each other, as are we all. But he called the "demilitarization of Europe -- where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it ... an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace" because it might be "a temptation to miscalculation and aggression" by bad guys.

Europe's democracies have had this problem for ages, hence the unpleasantness over Hitler a few generations back. Bread and circuses leave little for legions. But who is he to talk?

Last week, foreigners dumped a record $53 billion of U.S. government debt, topping April 2009's $44.5 billion, led by geopolitical rival China tossing $34.2 billion. As the Associated Press observed, "The reductions in holdings, if they continue, could force the government to make higher interest payments at a time that it is running record federal deficits." So hear Franklin again, "He that would have a short Lent, let him borrow money to be repaid at Easter."

Mr. Gates' government is running larger deficits than at any time since the Second World War while spending less of GDP on defence than at any time since Pearl Harbor. Such recklessness threatens America's capacity to carry the strategic burden that Europe and Canada have shrugged off. But all Barack Obama and Congress can think of is to spend more, on health, job creation, housing subsidies (again) and anything else with votes in it.

As Franklin said, "Experience keeps a dear school, yet Fools will learn in no other." Remember the deficits of the 1980s and early 1990s? And remember when you were a teenager and wanted to do some dumb thing all your friends were doing and your mother asked if they were all jumping off a cliff would you? Apparently if you're a finance minister the answer is yes.

So excuse my harping on this fiscal crisis engulfing Western civilization. It beats singing about responsibility while plucking a pitchfork.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Can our financial problems really be so bad Jim Flaherty can help? The thought inspires panic.

So do the statistics. Apparently Canadian families took recent hard times as the ideal opportunity to make their own situation dramatically worse in the belief that ... that ... OK, what was the belief? Will someone tell me?

I'll tell you the stats, courtesy of the Vanier Institute on the Family. The average Canadian family's debt rose to $96,100 in 2009, setting a record debt-to-income ratio of 145 per cent. "Faster, Higher, Stronger" is the Olympic motto, not a debt strategy, people. The Institute study sociologized that "some 1.3 million households could have a vulnerable or dangerously high debt service load by 2011."

At the risk of speaking plainly about an important topic, I'd like to quote noted social commentator J.R. "Johnny" Cash: "The county will haul my belongings away, 'cuz I'm busted." Indeed, the Vanier study quoted a recent Canadian Payroll Association study that "59 per cent of Canadian employees report that they would have trouble making ends meet if their pay cheque was delayed by even one week."

I beg to differ. You're having trouble now. Hence the 50 per cent increase in the number of people three months or more behind on their mortgages last year, and 40 percent in those that far behind on their credit cards. And for what?

What is it everyone needs so badly they're putting their future and Canada's in hideous peril? Remember, these are families averaging $66,275 a year and convinced money will buy them happiness if only they can get, or even rent, a bit more.

Our ancestors had candles and homemade clothes and somehow found satisfaction in life. Fifty years ago they had one car running on low-test gas and a black and white TV and when they were bored they read a book. Today we have two incomes, special low-calorie energy drinks and Facebook and Google Buzz and Twitter and MySpace and YouTube and more than 100,000 iPhone apps and we're desperately convinced the next one will transform us into genuinely radiant beings.

A recent MSNBC story asked if we were getting gadget fatigue. I hope so. If the parade of dazzling breakthroughs we've endured in the last 60 years hasn't given us things worth having, it never will. And if not gadget fatigue, how about debt fatigue? Just how atrocious does your balance sheet have to look before you don't need energy drinks because you're completely jittery from swallowing all that red ink?

Heck, you're making me jittery because I just know what's going to happen here. People will ruin their own finances, then insist on a public bailout. And they'll get it, too, even though so many people are going to be so broke that plundering the rest of us won't yield enough booty. We really seem to trust politicians' prudence more than our own. We're that doomed.

People are now cheering because Finance Minister Jim Flaherty slapped tighter controls on mortgages to save us from our own recklessness. So who's going to save us from his? He's running a $55.9 billion deficit on projected revenue of $216.6 billion. Forget a 145 per cent debt-to-income ratio. The feds are already at 236 per cent and his idea of prudence is to pump it up by 25 percentage points a year. And he says you're too stupid to go into the bank by yourself.

Of course he claims his mortgage crackdown "will not affect the ability of a Canadian family to buy a house. It will affect those who are speculating." But he knows his real problem is that someone deliberately lowered the cost of borrowing to stimulate the economy by getting people to buy things they can't afford, including houses. Who was it again? Oh yeah, his government. Dang.

In a blog post the Citizen's Leonard Stern cited the libertarian argument that people's stupid borrowing is their own fault and admitted "Flaherty is trying to legislate virtue," but said "The transaction between a borrower and a lender ceases to be a purely private one when public money is needed to bail out the lender when the borrower walks away." It's not "needed," it's just inevitable, as politicians troll for votes by socializing risk: You get the nice house and taxpayers get the bill if you can't pay.

As usual, politicians created the crisis. But the bigger problem is cultural and we have to fix it by being less greedy. You may not want to imitate my great grandfather's drawer of "bits of string too short to be saved." But they were all paid for. And my father was a tenured university professor whose office desk, to the end of his days, was a door sitting on two filing cabinets. Also fully paid for.

What are you buying on the installment plan? Misery, ruin and bankruptcy all round, with a side of pandering political pontification.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Over the years Tintin has laughed off yetis, international drug smugglers, the curses of dead Aztec kings, hundreds of concussions, crocodiles and alien abduction. Even bullets seemed only to graze him. But now the intrepid Belgian boy reporter has met his match in Quebec's language paranoia.

As the National Post reported on Saturday, 30 years of wildly popular translations of Tintin's adventures into regional dialects from Alsace to Tahiti came to a screeching halt when the book, titled Colocs en stock, got the usual reception accorded outsiders in la belle province, a withering, non-negotiable, contemptuous, "If you don't know why I'm angry I'm certainly not going to explain it." Mille millions de mille sabords, if I may say so.

My own fondness for Tintin has the sort of peculiar origin readers of this column may by now take for granted. I read comic books to teach myself the rudiments of foreign languages, normally Astérix if I can find it. But some years back I was attempting to scrape the rust off my high school German to see if any metal remained at the bottom of the heap and couldn't find the intrepid Gallic boy warrior in that language so I settled for Die Sieben Krystalkugeln.

OK, Tintin is not highbrow literature. There's no Tintin à la Recherche de Temps Perdu ... thank goodness. And I confess that one can find all sorts of faults with Tintin, from an excessive fondness for pratfalls to ludicrous coincidences to grotesque offences against the laws of physics to the appalling ethnic stereotypes of early efforts like Tintin au Congo to laughing off the tragedy of alcoholism (until Captain Haddock becomes a sympathetic character and learns to ease off the rum a few points).

But Tintin remains wildly popular around the world among children of all ages because the adventures are great fun and core virtues like courage, perseverance, imagination and loyalty dependably lead good to triumph over evil. (OK, in Tintin au Congo he blows up a helpless rhinoceros for fun, in the dark days before environmentalism; but the yeti in Tintin au Tibet is a good guy.)

So yes, there are things in these stories that might harm impressionable children. But nothing justifies the angry eruption of childish Quebec nationalists at the rendition of Tintin into Québécois dialect.

A typical reaction, in Le Devoir, sniffed "We have a bit of pride left. Don't go taking that from us." A bit of pride? Let an impure laine put one foot wrong in Quebec and you'll encounter enough wounded pride to generate a manual on Deadly Sin #7. And there's practically nowhere to put a foot right.

The strongest negative reaction, apparently, was a conviction that people were making fun of them, a strangely pervasive and intense reflection of ubiquitous wounded pride. Get over it, folks. Jokes about English teeth merely make me laugh through my crooked yellow ones. So what's the deal in Quebec?

Normally you can go wrong in another culture in two opposite ways, by ignoring local folkways or patronizing them. But decades of the Quebec nationalist elite deliberately inflaming local resentments at history, outsiders, anglos, capitalists and so forth have apparently caused the two ends of the spectrum there to swell up into angry red blobs that overlap in the middle.

Nationalist Quebecers complain if you ignore them and they complain if you don't, with no happy place in between. As the Post story noted, give them a film with French slang and they howl. Give them a comic with Quebec slang and they howl. Give them something in English and they howl. What are we meant to do, speak Latin?

It doesn't have to be that way. Visiting Israel a few years ago, I was very struck by the locals' good humour at my stumbling efforts to squeeze out a few words of Hebrew. (They thought it was especially funny that I wanted to know how to say "Please.") And it's not as though Jewish history doesn't give ample grounds for doubting the good will of outsiders.

It's possible to argue that this is just the work of the usual suspects, a small, unrepresentative minority unavoidable for comment. But one odd part of Quebec's distinct culture seems to be extreme deference to elites. At any rate, Casterman doesn't just say Quebecers' reaction to the regional edition is unprecedented. They say it's so intense they won't produce a second volume in the series. Which is, of course, further proof that outsiders don't respect Quebec. See how they turn their backs.

Imagine Tintin undone by Quebec bigotry. It seems so pitiful.

[First appeared in the Ottawa Citizen]

If vindication is sweet, why do I have this bitter taste in my mouth over socialized medicine like I just ate stale kibble?

I ask because it is now 16 years (where do they go?) since I began an article in Fraser Forum: "Would you eat in a restaurant whose owners ordered out? If the answer is no, you need to think hard about socialized medicine, and about the case of Robert Bourassa. You also need to think about the 'restaurant critics,' the media, who haven't reported what sounds to me like a major story." Bourassa had gone to the United States for cancer treatment, but neither he, his political fellows nor the media claque would admit that citizens ought in principle to have the same right.

What has been the result of years of culpable silence since? Our doctor shortage has grown worse, our waiting lists longer, our expenses higher, our population older and our politicians still yap in the same shrill, annoying manner. And now Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams is off to the U.S. for medical treatment. In the interest of decency I wish him a quick and successful recovery. But just maybe he'd like to reciprocate by admitting that if it's good for him, it could be good for us.

Which is not to say we could all afford it. Williams is in the enviable position of having a big pile of money (back on The Rock he is sometimes known as "Danny Millions" for his success in both the cable TV and law businesses). I'm not against people being rich; I'm just not good at it myself. But I don't think that's anyone else's fault. And I'm not so naive as to suppose the rich and well connected won't have nicer stuff than everyone else.

This view may lead to accusations that I have a heart of stone and head to match. But at least I don't say one thing and do another, or pretend I've created a utopia where none exists. Which leaves me a lot better off than Danny Williams in non-financial matters. Or the normally vocal defenders of Canadian health care, who may be afraid to bite the hand that feeds them. But what price dignity?

If I could, I'd ask the Newfoundland premier: If our system is the best, why are you going elsewhere? If the answer is that you need to jump the queue because you're really sick, and Canadian law makes it impossible here, aren't you admitting we've established a system particularly favourable to the very wealthy? And if that's the case, doesn't a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, or at least our bit of it, require you to say whether it was on purpose and whether it's a good thing?

The question is pressing. Consider these other items just from this week's clipping file. First, from Saturday's Citizen, the Vancouver Island Health Authority apologized for leaving an elderly man in a bed in a hospital hallway for five months and then attempting to charge his family $55 a day for these luxury accommodations. Wednesday's Citizen reported that in response to Dalton McGuinty's threatened spending freeze, "Eastern Ontario hospitals say they would have to make cuts that would cause 'irreparable damage' to the region's health system if implemented ..."

It would be tedious, nay revolting, to read McGuinty's self-satisfied prose over the years about saving our health care system with a tax hike he first promised not to implement then denied was a tax. But no matter how badly they bungle the system, they insist that it is for our own good because we are not under any circumstances to be trusted to make our own arrangements. You would not, in fact, treat a dog like this (see another of my 1993 articles, in the April Fraser Forum, on being allowed to buy CAT scans for Rover and Fido but not granny). So what even lower life form do they take us for?

The press have done much better on the story this time around, including Don Martin in this newspaper on Wednesday noting that Williams will be famous in the U.S. for this decision, but not in a way helpful to Barack Obama. So let's exploit this publicity to focus on the core issue. A third of a millennium ago an English Puritan, denouncing abuse by the powerful, said he could not believe Providence had sent "a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden." He was promptly executed but his phrase echoes still as our masters gallop off to the United States for health care they deny to us chattels at home.

Our politicians cannot figure out how to fund health care as currently structured, or find any way to reduce the growth in costs and will not admit they are wrong. Despite this record of dismal failure they will let you rot in a hospital corridor while they get treatment abroad, because they think they are way, way better than you. Is this a great country or what? Woof.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

[First published at www.mercatornet.com] Barack Obama gave a decent election speech on Wednesday night. Unfortunately he was meant to be delivering a State of the Union address.

No one expects such an address to be entirely apolitical, or crafted to please his philosophical adversaries. But Barack Obama finds himself in a peculiar political hole in which his own smoothness makes the sides unclimbable. And plainly he does not know it.

A year into his mandate the wave of enthusiasm generated by his campaign oratory has receded, leaving a thick residue of public suspicion that he’s all talk and no action. The last thing he needed was one more airy and self-satisfied display of rhetorical prowess when an endless string of precisely such performances have him plunging in the polls and unable to secure legislative triumphs.

Even his rhetoric seems to have lost the charm it once possessed. His words are too polished to have edges; he speaks plausibly, but never produces a memorable phrase. And he has the three deadly unities of dull speaking: his pitch, pacing and volume never vary. Somehow in the campaign it seemed cool, especially to chronically ironic youth, but it is difficult now to recall why.

Contrast his delivery with that of Martin Luther King Jr. We cannot expect every orator to match Dr. King on a historic occasion, of course. But we can all watch his August 18, 1963 "I Have a Dream" and learn from a master. King’s splendid words are set to appropriate vocal music: He soars to a higher register or thunders from the depths; rushes onward in an unstoppable flood then pauses majestically; alternates quiet conviction with intense fervour. Obama just drones.

Wednesday’s speech was pseudo-professorial. It had the slightly patronising, crisp manner of a college instructor addressing ill-informed though somewhat promising students, but not the content of even a second-rate university lecture.

The president pedantically quoted the Constitutional requirement that he "from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union". But given his PR woes, information was the crucial word. Instead his speech was virtually fact-free, relying at key points upon the sorts of touching anecdotes effective on the stump but insulting to members of Congress with detailed policy responsibilities.

When he finally got to the deficit, more than half way through the speech, he promptly blamed George Bush for it. But he did not say how big it was. When he called for a spending freeze, he did not say how much it would save or why he now embraced an idea he once rejected. When he said it would exempt four key spending categories, he failed to explain what share of federal spending would be left unaffected. When he advocated abolishing the capital gains tax on small business investment, he didn’t say what the threshold for "small" business was.

Within hours MSNBC published an Associated Press "fact check" piece noting inaccuracies in more than a few of the facts he did offer. Mark Alexander of The Patriot Post chimed in that Obama’s only other reference to the Constitution, "We find unity in our incredible diversity, drawing on the promise enshrined in our Constitution, the notion that we’re all created equal" was botched because that’s the Declaration of Independence, a strange blunder from a former University of Chicago professor of constitutional law.

Complaints about lack of substance from politicians might themselves seem ritualistic. But compare the 1975 State of the Union by Gerald Ford, who not even his most ardent supporters considered an orator:

"To bolster business and industry and to create new jobs, I propose a 1-year tax reduction of $16 billion. Three-quarters would go to individuals and one-quarter to promote business investment. This cash rebate to individuals amounts to 12 percent of 1974 tax payments – a total cut of $12 billion, with a maximum of $1,000 per return."

Good idea or not, it’s specific. As was "we must reduce oil imports by 1 million barrels per day by the end of this year and by 2 million barrels per day by the end of 1977." Ford also warned that "If we project the current built-in momentum of Federal spending through the next 15 years, State, Federal, and local government expenditures could easily comprise half of our gross national product. This compares with less than a third in 1975."

This is actual information. Obama offered only hype, blame-shifting, and vague initiatives suitable for a campaign based on hope but deeply inadequate for a president mired in discontent because of the growing conviction that he’s all talk. (In 7,000 words he gave just 13 actual dollar figures; in 4,000 words in 1975 Ford managed 27.)

The speech also spectacularly lacked any sense of occasion. We cannot all be Abraham Lincoln either. But we should know that inappropriate bursts of levity and casual diction undermine any attempt to project gravitas to dispel a gathering image as shallow.

Obama conspicuously failed to engage in blunt talk about the nature or intractability of problems that would remain even if Congress did what he wanted. And the only specific fault he admitted, failing to explain his health care plan to voters, was catastrophically obtuse. Even if one grants that his plan is capable of clear and compelling explanation, he has given by one count 30 health care speeches as president. The notion that one more will do the trick is not now the solution to his political troubles but their cause, when so many Americans doubt he can do anything other than give pretty speeches.

Had he entitled Wednesday’s address "Why I was right all along and you should do what I say" it would have given fair notice of its content and tone. Its laundry list of solutions mirrored his campaign, unintentionally signalling that he had forgotten nothing and learned nothing. With a few minor edits it would have been a blockbuster in October 2008. But in January 2010 it merely reinforces the suspicion that Mr. Obama is a one-trick pony, and that trick is electoral not governmental.

Every step he took was false. He smirked that "Our administration has had some political setbacks this year, and some of them were deserved" but failed to say which or when or why, let alone take personal blame or indicate lessons learned. Instead he blamed Congress, lobbyists and partisan politicians, everyone but him. He even managed to provoke a Supreme Court Justice to shake his head and mouth "Not true" on camera, proving that you can deplore polarization while engaging in it, by vulgar berating of the Court as it sat solemnly in its robes before him.

The lack of sense of occasion was overwhelming. Not merely that it was the State of the Union, but the political context in which he found himself giving it. At the end he declared fiercely "I don’t quit" as though delivering the State of the Administration or State of Obama rather than State of the Union address.

For a different president, with different problems, it might have been the right rhetorical note of defiance. For Barack Obama, it was one more proof of shallow narcissism. And the last thing he needed.

By now I've reached the point in my career where I have a sizeable collection of half-written articles on issues that once seemed important that a search party couldn't find today. I don't expect my dusty files to command your sympathy, but spare some alarm for our collective attention deficit disorder. When we quietly forget trendy policy concepts without analyzing their failures properly we don't learn, we just flit about posing.

Consider the Japanese economic model. Remember when the land of the Rising Sun was going to show us all how crony corporatism beat free markets hollow? Or Germany, or Europe? Heck, I'm old enough to remember when the Soviet Union was a superior model for Third World development. These ideas sure look silly now. But emptying an old closet full of snake oil isn't like quietly purging your bell-bottoms and big glasses.

In this context please ponder Haiti. I've been getting more than 100 press releases a week on the devastating earthquake. Of course I'm not criticizing the urgent humanitarian response to a massive disaster. But surely the people really busy helping out have no time to draft, edit, proof and send out a flood of generally self-serving publicity as though it constituted some important form of international first aid.

The time politicians spend passing each other notes is time not spent digging through rubble or handing out water. Besides, it tends to create the unpleasant impression they are wasting scarce brain power figuring out how to pose to best effect against a riveting backdrop of human tragedy.

Most press releases have at least resisted the crass impulse to use the crisis as leverage for a favoured policy change. But, within two days, the Bloc Québécois demanded a "Marshall Plan" for Haiti as if the Marshall Plan were not, very famously, a successful initiative to rebuild advanced industrial economies devastated by war rather than a plan to promote development where it had not previously taken place.

Six days later the head of the IMF, who has a PhD in economics, repeated this inane demand.

Such bloviation is not harmless. The latest rhetorical trend is self-satisfied and misleading rhetoric about a 10-year effort to help Haiti as though we had any genuine idea how to do it. Remember, an equally powerful earthquake near San Francisco in 1989 killed 63 people rather than 200,000. The lethal difference is that Haiti is an "underdeveloped" country. We've been trying to help such countries since long before poverty was renamed "the Third World" with surprisingly little success.

And, while there are some clear lessons from decades of failed development aid, we don't seem able to focus on them. Indeed, a month from now I expect Haiti will have disappeared from my journalistic inbox as completely as, say, effective reform of Canadian health care.

Or aboriginal policy in Canada. Once a hot topic, it too has gone almost totally cold despite occasional tragic or alarming news stories. Which does not, I hasten to add, mean it's not still a major problem. Indeed, it means it's likely to get a lot worse.

There are a number of reasons why progress on the aboriginal front is difficult, from a deep background of historical tragedy, to aboriginal leaders' stridently impossible demands to oily and nebulous mainstream politicians.

I don't mean politically impossible; I mean metaphysically. History cannot be undone and the white man will not get back on his ship and go "home" to Europe. Any mainstream politician who tries to engage the Indian Industry in real discussions courts policy failure and PR disaster. But that does not begin to excuse their lack of imagination or courage.

Here I'd like to insert a plug for the riveting new novel Uprising by my colleague Doug Bland, chair of defence management studies at Queen's University (full disclosure: my wife and I are credited with helping in the editing). Uprising combines page-turning action with a sympathetic portrayal of many points of view including frustrated aboriginal radicals. The one group Doug's vitriolic pen fully dissolves, and rightly so, are politicians who ooze their way to the top with emptily smug rhetoric. With no vision beyond seeing themselves re-elected and advancing in ministerial rank, they will not speak hard truths to voters or aboriginal activists, and cannot bring themselves to make major policy changes that might avert the drift to disaster.

The scary scenario Doug outlines is a warning, not a prediction. But it is horrifyingly plausible in many ways. And when it reaches its disastrous conclusion, Ottawa is reduced to a pitiful attic full of abandoned files on forgotten initiatives.

For a journalist that's just life. For a nation it's a major problem.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

We need a new punchline to "What do you call a Republican Senate candidate from Massachusetts?" The old one was "Nobody calls him" or "You can't remember either?" I don't want to hear what they're calling him in the White House right now. But I'm calling him payback for a Nobel Peace Prize. And proof that I was right.

To my right-wing friends and colleagues, I told you Barack Obama was not as dangerous as you thought. Sure, he's far to the left and plausible. But he's also amazingly narrow, a stereotypical liberal always talking about other points of view who has never knowingly been in the presence of such a thing. And he lacks the political skills that made, say, FDR a menace to America economically and constitutionally.

To my left-wing friends (if any) and colleagues, I told you his agenda was neither well-thought out nor popular. Far too many commentators, like Obama himself, do not understand right-wing views intellectually or electorally. They assume everyone is, at heart, a Harvard professor, and they thought Americans had finally realized everything was George W. Bush's fault, boo hiss, let's have socialized medicine. In Canada, the short version was, "Finally, Americans have become Canadians," which was exceptionally silly.

At least no one is pretending Scott Brown's upset victory was a blip or a local aberration. The best line so far is The Patriot Post's "The Scott heard 'round the world" and there is no doubt this outcome has large implications. Not that Massachusetts has turned into Mississippi; the real punchline to my opening joke may well be "A Democrat," since Brown is pro-choice and once posed nude for Cosmopolitan. Not exactly a God and guns Republican. More a David Frum Republican ... but then David probably wishes the GOP would run Edward Brooke for president. Sorry, that's a Massachusetts Republican senator joke; Brooke, on the left fringe of the GOP anyway, lost their last Bay State Senate seat in 1979 (they haven't held both at once since 1953).

In the long run, this result might be less ominous for the Democrats than getting thumped in the Virginia governor's race two months ago. If Virginia is not becoming a swing state, as it seemed in 2008, it blasts their hopes of recovering majority party status, whereas no one supposes this outcome gives Massachusetts even a slight purple tinge.

But a Republican victory in a dark blue state is important. It underlines how badly Barack Obama is doing, in polls and by proxy in elections (and that's without yet having a major foreign policy disaster), because he overpromised and underdelivered domestically. I do not know who ever believed his clichés about nonpartisanship, pragmatism and changing Washington. But one man's pragmatism is another man's ideology, and when the product arrived, definitely not as shown in the ad, the clients' resulting disgust was hardly surprising given the product ... and the clients.

Americans sufficiently upset with George Bush to switch and vote his party out were generally unhappy that the economy was going sour, the budget was out of control and there was probably a connection between them. Remember: Bush never vetoed a big spending bill, a major reason the GOP got demoralized and was punished politically.

I do not say John McCain would have done better. But I do say that if Barack Obama had promised in 2008 the kind of spending Democrats produced in 2009, we would not be wondering how a McCain presidency would have gone. No one, especially not the swing voters who gave the balance of Congressional power to Blue Dog Democrats, wanted this before it happened or likes it now.

Americans are not immune to the lure of free money, especially my otherwise beloved Middle Americans. But they do insist it be free and, since it never is, a backlash is unavoidable and legitimate. They threw the bums out in 2008 the only way they could. But do not suppose their arms are now exhausted.

As for socialized medicine, some are making a big deal out of the Democrats now being one seat short of the 60 needed to ram health-care reform through the Senate. But if a party that still controls all three Houses (upper, lower and White) needs procedural tricks to pass supposedly popular legislation, then obviously it's not popular, for reasons so obvious only an intellectual needs them explained: It is intolerably complicated, will cost a fortune and will make U.S. health care worse.

The American people do not share the commentariat's cultural and economic radicalism and, unlike voters in other democracies, are not too demoralized to push back. And if commentators like diversity as much as they claim to, they should be happy.

What do I call a Republican Senate candidate from Massachusetts? Proof that the Republic is all right, and most commentators are all wrong.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]