It's not exactly "Give me liberty or give me death." But "If you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested" is a serviceable rallying cry for free people today. Why, you can even order a needlepoint version online.

For those of you who think that if men were meant to fly, God would have made their clothes transparent, the motto comes from one John Tyner who, on Nov. 13, said it to Transportation Security Administration agents at San Diego airport who wanted to feel him all over because he objected to going through a full-body scanner the TSA website wrongly said wasn't in place there.

I do not know whether these scans are bad for you. I also do not suspect the TSA of wanting to see me electronically disrobed. And no one can think I'm soft on terror. But it is a great story for four key reasons.

First, a modern twist, Tyner recorded much of it on his cellphone. Forget plausible deniability. His version "went viral" and the TSA went into a half-patronizing, half-menacing downward spiral into malevolent absurdity as its further abuses and obfuscations were heard around the Internet.

For instance a 71-year-old with a metal knee implant left with his pants round his ankles in a special examination room with ... transparent walls. Who designed that, the Marquis de Sade? I certainly suspect him on the woman forced to remove her nipple rings with pliers, or the retired special education teacher and bladder cancer survivor whose aggressive pat-down broke the seal on his urostomy bag and left him covered in pee.

Meanwhile TSA chief John Pistole told CNN Sunday: "I want to be as sensitive as I can to those folks. I'm very attuned given all the concerns that have been raised" but "we're not changing the policies." Which doesn't sound very attuned to me. On Monday, facing a possible Thanksgiving boycott of the whole naked X-ray groin-fondle government program for making travel unbearably wretched and sexually humiliating, he did a fake flip-flop. He hinted emptily at openness to less invasive searches while seeking to turn members of the public against one another instead of his agency by telling five TV networks: "If people choose to opt out of the advanced-imaging technology because they're trying to slow down the process, then I feel bad for the people who are simply, again, wanting to get home for the holidays that they would be delayed because of that."

The next great thing is how American entrepreneurs jumped on the story, with satirical products from that needlepoint to underwear to hide your personal bits from the scanner to someone posting a song Comply With Me spoofing an old BOAC ad.

Third is John Tyner's reaction as a free man enjoying liberty under law: He said if the agents felt him up, he'd have them arrested. The TSA, on the face of it, was not behaving lawlessly. It has statutory authorization to molest travellers, with fines for those who object. But Tyner rightly insisted there's a law higher than man's yet knowable and enforceable by humans, against which legislated statutes are to be measured.

Yeah, yeah, some of you may be thinking. But terrorists are devious and determined people quite capable of hiding weapons in prosthetic limbs or urostomy bags (the nipple rings I still don't get). As John Pistole also argued, "We cannot forget that less than one year ago a suicide bomber with explosives in his underwear tried to bring down a plane over Detroit."

Sure. But the solution isn't to look in everyone's underwear for a bad guy. It's to look everywhere in the bad guy for a bomb. And that brings me to the fourth great thing about this story. The constitutional ban on unreasonable search and seizure (we have it too) doesn't just protect citizens from harassment. It protects governments from their own stupidity.

At one point U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano babbled "I think we all understand the concerns Americans have about that. It's something new. Most Americans are not used to a real law-enforcement pat-down like that." No. And I'll tell you why, you dim bunny: They aren't criminals, and they rightly resent being treated as such. It keeps them from getting where they're going, gets them groped, and diverts the attention of security forces from the obvious bad guys.

Indeed, mentioning the Detroit incident was in especially bad taste since failed underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was reported to American authorities by his own father among others and they let him on the plane anyway. They're too busy pulling citizens' pants down to do their homework on patterns of behaviour and suspicious individuals. But Americans have had it with that.

A nation capable of tea parties 250 years apart can also make the state take its hands off their junk and lay them on real terrorists. And sell needlepoint online about it.

[First published in The Ottawa Citizen]

Did you see that scoop in the Postmedia papers this week about an Alberta woman who got workers' compensation from a court because serving ice cream made her arm hurt? How did we get to the point where difficulty handling small quantities of frozen dairy products creates a legal entitlement to public money? It must be all this progress we've been having.

I don't know about you. But I'm pretty sure I'm descended from people whose problems with food were (a) there wasn't much of it (b) most of what there was had gone a strange colour and started to smell three months earlier and (c) the stuff that wasn't rancid tended to fight back. Try announcing to a peasant harvesting grain by hand that if repetitive motions make your arm hurt you should go ask the king for coins. Or that a hunter should get cash because of those bowstring-induced blisters on his hand, or that a fisherman's sore back from pulling in nets carried a common law remedy.

I'd ask where's your beef over the fact that physical work can create soreness except I'd probably be told it never arrived because the guy carrying it tipped over and fell right into a lawyer's office. So I'll put aside this heartless approach and instead pursue what smells rather like a gravy train. Which now that I come to think of it also sounds like a dangerous thing indeed: If it derailed on a soft shoulder there'd be a tidal wave of hot, salty sludge liable to create hypertension and lawsuits.

At one time, as noted, the principal health hazard from food was eating too little of it. Later, after some progress, it became eating too much of it. But that was before a keenly honed capacity for inhaling the stuff (not literally -- see the Oreo story below) would get you judicially mandated extra airplane seats. Now you get money for not coping.

Seriously, folks. These days if we can cultivate sufficient ineptitude with food almost anything might be a meal ticket. The ice cream of doom is just the beginning. Before us lies a veritable cornucopia of mandated benefits. Consider cherry tomatoes. Those suckers explode. (Thus one of my rules for success in business is never eat a cherry tomato in a suit. True, you rarely encounter a cherry tomato in a suit. Except, if this nonsense keeps up, a lawsuit.) Meanwhile bananas have been infamous since vaudeville days but I still think you could get laughed into court if you slip on one.

Or take the humble celery stick ... please. Once upon a time the worst that could happen was being forced to eat one to lose weight, only to end up with a mouth full of what appeared to be polymer-reinforced string soaked in weak cucumber juice. Now, surely, you could get a lucrative repetitive strain injury from all the chewing. And what about things that are hard to slice like, say, meat, or vegetables, or bread? Then there's waiters carrying trays, sommeliers experiencing

stress-related disorders from being polite to guys faking knowledge of wine to impress their dates, short-order cooks feeling the heat ... is there one single food that's safe to serve or eat?

I don't think so. Some are too hot, others too cold, some too sticky and others too dry. For instance my wife has expressly authorized me to mention her recent harrowing experience with an Oreo: reading one of those exchanges now posted online about the bizarre corrections to text messages by a small white cellphone (produced by a company I won't name because it's a food) caused her to inhale sharply at an inexpedient point in the cookie consumption phase with consequences only an eye ear nose and throat specialist could love. I would say these bloopers are worth looking up, while warning that the ones that most often get posted are bleepers not suitable for children, except you might laugh so hard it hurt and I wouldn't want your lawyers to know I'd suggested anything of that sort.

I would also certainly not want to be overheard today suggesting that if serving ice cream makes your arm hurt you should put some ice on it. Frozen water poses far too many dangers, from hypothermia to hurt factor due to slippage to melting and inundating coastal cities. Suggesting you try switching hands would presumably be discrimination against the antiambidextrous, while suggesting you switch jobs would be shocking discrimination against the monoculturally gainful. Besides, what job doesn't make things hurt?

Indeed, I find myself sore from all the typing required to compose this column, especially because I was also eating a late dinner and had to make this odd stretching motion past the keyboard that aggravated an old injury, a broken stiff upper lip. I'd be well on my way to riches except I feel thirsty and what are the chances, in these enlightened times, of my getting and drinking a glass of water without doing myself in?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Now that we've observed a day of solemn remembrance of the war dead, the wounded, all who faced the horrors of combat or stood on guard, let us recall the noble cause of liberty under law they bravely served, and contemplate how desperately we still need such courage and resolve in a menacing world. Then let's have a good belly laugh.

No, I haven't taken leave of my so-called senses reading newspaper stories about Iran and Saudi Arabia seeking seats on the UN's marquee women's rights organization. Nor am I simply recommending that we laugh in the face of death, sneer at doom, and chuckle at catastrophe ... though sometimes that seems the best plan when petrified by the spinelessness of the West facing mortal perils. Rather, I'm suggesting we all fight back by watching that Volkswagen Polo ad on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad4fagTyaM4.

Go ahead. It's only 22 seconds, and I promise they'll be well spent. I'm not being frivolous here. Or rather, I'm being seriously frivolous. For those of you ill at ease with the Interwebs, the ad shows a grim-looking character in one of those black-and-white scarves silly campus progressives think stand for global justice, coming out of his apartment, getting into his car, driving past innocent Westerners having normal days, parking outside a cafe, pulling out a detonator as we glimpse his suicide vest, then pushing the button only to have the resulting explosion entirely contained within the car, after which the slogan "Polo. Small but tough" appears on the screen.

Wait, some may say. There's nothing funny about terrorism. It's deadly serious.

It kills and maims and leaves devastated kin and friends. It can paralyse societies.

I assure you I know all this, and support the most vigorous possible efforts to make terrorists become dead. But humour is not a frivolous pastime, an empty hobby for fools and children, to be put aside when serious things happen. It is a way of seeing the world that illuminates faster than poetry and gives much better light. It draws the most essential connections in the most unmistakable form.

Laughter is the most potent political weapon in a democracy because once people see what is funny about a candidate or office-holder, that person's career is finished ... unless he or she sees it too.

Ronald Reagan, for instance, drove many people mad because he was not only seriously right-wing, he told better Ronald Reagan jokes than almost anyone else, like confessing during a crisis to "burning the mid-day oil".

Because he got the jokes about his supposed laziness, and enjoyed them, people knew he understood his failings and was on some sort of guard against them.

Contrast Jimmy Carter, dour, petulant failed president and post-presidential embarrassment.

Now consider Islamist terrorists of the sort plainly lampooned by Volkswagen to sell cars.

Their attitude was perfectly captured by Ayatollah Khomeini's dictum "There is no humour in Islam"; which I consider not merely blasphemy but a serious political weakness. Islamists might snicker at our agonies but they cannot really laugh at us because they do not understand us. And they absolutely cannot laugh at themselves because they do not understand themselves either. They are blinded by hatred and we can see.

Communist regimes had the same problem, by the way. The Soviet system generated endless subversive jokes, but its official pronouncements were not just humourless in their critique of the West, they were entirely unaware of their own chronic tone of self-parody that made them instantly, memorably and indelibly unbelievable to all but malevolent halfwits.

I repeat: I know that terrorists kill and maim and traumatize and bereave. But I also know they are for the most part stunningly inept.

Be glad those who hate us are so stupid they fail to overwhelm our often pitifully feeble security measures.

And rejoice, also, that in a free society a grave national security blunder triggers not just sombrely indignant prose but editorial cartoons, comedians' rants and YouTube videos that make us laugh because they are so true, and show us what is wrong and how to fix it.

Islamists never do that. If you haven't seen it, go online, find Patrick Henry's It's in the Koran; song spoofing radical Islamist haters, and consider whether, despite everything, we will triumph because we can write this sort of song and they cannot.

Now think again of the war dead, the solemn Vimy monument, those cemeteries in Normandy, Ottawa's tomb of the unknown soldier.

And remember that our soldiers fought, and fight, so we may be free, to speak truth to power and laugh without fear.

There is humour in the West, inexhaustible, joyful and mighty. We mock anyone and anything. We joke and we see. So go ahead.

Watch the ad and laugh freely.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The U.S. midterm elections had something for everyone, from Tea Party triumphs to Tea Party flameouts, progressive stalwarts hanging tough or going down hard, centrists and radicals, inspiration, pathos and comedy, principles, ideas and stupidity. It's the sort of raucous free-for-all in which America specializes and I call it healthy democracy. It even offered lessons for Canadians. For instance there is now a very real possibility that Congress will repeal Obamacare after only a couple of years. On our side of the border it may seem an odd way to conduct public business. Imagine making an expensive mistake, realizing you'd blundered, and undoing it. Not how we do things, is it? We let Judy LaMarsh determine health policy for decades.

No, really. The Canada Health Act is over 25 years old, passed by a discredited government in its waning months on assumptions long outdated or wrong from the start. It never worked as advertised and is now destroying provincial budgets, souring federal-provincial fiscal relations, and setting us up for a massive crash as the boomers age. Therefore it is sacred because ... um ... Why? Why are we stuck in this rut?

The Globe and Mail reported last Friday on a new Canadian Institute for Health Information study saying spending on doctors is the fastest-growing part of public health spending and "sparking growing calls for an overhaul to the payment system for doctors." It then quoted the director of the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation at Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute, who said "The system that we have in Canada incentivizes volumes." Duh. Years ago I wrote that economic planners have a stark choice between rewarding intensity or rewarding quantity. Neither works: If you set nail quotas by volume the factory churns out pins and if you set them by weight it makes one 60-foot nail.

Health care is no different and it matters. But it is more than six months since former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge told a Liberal conference in Montreal that Canada needs an "adult conversation" about the future of health care and we're not doing well.

Shortly before Halloween, Brian Mulroney actually called for a review of whether medicare is financially sustainable. Roy Romanow, of 2002 Royal Commission fame, retorted that medicare had been "studied to death" and "Essentially, this is a values-of-Canada debate. Namely, is health care a social good which is to be provided through the common wealth of governments -- federal/provincial -- in order to make sure everybody is covered? Or is it going to take on more and more the concept of not a common good but an individual responsibility? That means user fees and more privatization."

Very sonorous. But play it back and note that he says it is a question of values whether we adopt the concept that health is a common good. I am tempted to say this is not a grownup way to discuss an issue. But clearly a large number of grownups do talk this way, to their shame and our disadvantage. So instead I will yield to the temptation to quote Chesterton: "We must see things objectively, as we do a tree; and understand that they exist whether we like them or not. We must not try and turn them into something different by the mere exercise of our own minds, as if we were witches."

The principles of economics are in the exist-whether-we-like-it-or-not category. They are not a question of "values" and they do not change with the passing years nor in response to our incantations.

Friday's Globe story added, "Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews responded to the report by warning doctors that she plans to pay more on salaries ... Part of the growth in physician billings comes from the fact that there are more doctors. In Ontario, the McGuinty government has helped one million more people find a doctor since 2003, said a spokesman for Ms. Matthews." This is another of those blow-on-the-head moments for which our politicians are so famous. They spent years trying to get more doctors so people could actually get health care, and now they've realized it means more doctors' bills. Who saw that coming? (Answer: the health ministers who, in 1992, cut medical school enrolment to reduce doctors' bills -- and failed to realize reducing the number of doctors would impact service.) So who now sees that putting doctors on salary will mean better treatment for fewer patients? Back to the 60-foot nail!

If this were the United States, someone would campaign in the next election on the idea that this system wasn't working and, after more than a quarter century, wasn't about to start working. They would be criticized, ridiculed, supported and talked about and in the end something different might happen.

Can you imagine doing it that way here? Yes, I can.

First published in The Ottawa Citizen]

Within a week the American political landscape will be altered almost as dramatically as Toronto's would have been had -- to take an absurd idea -- Rob Ford become mayor. Oh, that actually happened in Toronto. This could start to get exciting.

I am sure Republicans will regain the House of Representatives and probably also the U.S. Senate. This is not where the smart money is but I am not the smart money. I am a pundit. However, my prediction of a Republican victory in the Senate is not the product of wishful thinking nor is it a prediction of a Republican victory. To begin with, I do not regard electoral victories as transcendent or permanent. I grew up when the world really seemed to be going up the spout, and was delighted to see Thatcher, Reagan and John Paul II emerge. But when I read my friend John O'Sullivan's The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, a convincing argument that we can't possibly be in the mess we're in now, my reaction was: if those three changed the world, it sure changed back fast.

Lady Thatcher herself once said that there are no lost causes in politics because there are no won causes. It was not a very deep remark. I can readily reel off lost causes from Akkad to Bolshevism to the Mayan Empire. (I know their calendar is meant to make the world end in 2012 but I'm not cancelling my auto insurance just yet.) But she was right about permanently won causes. It does not surprise me that the left believes in salvation by voting alone but it seems oddly out of place on the right.

Moreover, what is coming up is not a Republican victory. Never mind formal labels; it will represent a victory for insurgents against a Republican Establishment too obtuse either to sympathize with or to thwart the uprising.

In this sense something important is going on. A recent MSNBC commentary explained, in splendid pundit fashion, why the Republicans would and would not take the House, including in the latter category, "the Tea Party pushing the GOP too far to the right" and "our poll shows the GOP with a lower fav/unfav than the Dem Party."

Connect the dots, people. The Republican party is unpopular because under George W. Bush it proved less than competent in foreign policy and wackily irresponsible on budgets. Tea Partiers dislike RINOs ("Republicans In Name Only" for those of you without Grand Union flags) more than Democrats. And when they provoked the usual scornful sniffing among the chattering classes, it only strengthened them.

Rob Ford's victory in the Toronto mayoral election is a non-trivial echo of this phenomenon, especially his running much further ahead of shoo-in progressive favourite George Smitherman among immigrants than native-born Canadians. The angry-white-male dismissal of the phenomenon is simply not possible any more.

As J. Budziszewski noted about patterns behind the apparent random madness of public affairs, people "are more logical than they know; they are only logical slowly." They are slowly but inexorably realizing that the methods and ideas of the past half century have definitively failed. If the political elites don't adjust, unbelievable things will continue to happen because only fringe candidates will speak important truths: We cannot make the state bigger, more expensive or more intrusive; it has exhausted its managerial capacity at the size it now is and runaway public spending is threatening not only the economy but the very social programs making the spending run away.

The inability of any of our mainstream parties to get traction with the electorate is a deeper symptom of the same thing. Even in boring Ottawa, where we put a perennial political insider back in a job he held more than a decade ago, mayor-elect Jim Watson felt obliged to say "the public has voted for change and they have voted for change in a very big way." The tune is all wrong, but the lyrics are revealing. Large numbers of people, here too, no longer believe that if the usual suspects are left undisturbed, they'll have everything under control in a year or two.

Of course, as Ottawans' decision to elect Larry O'Brien last time around proves, getting rid of someone hopelessly mired in the failed remedies of the past is no guarantee that you'll get someone who knows how to go back to the sound remedies of the more distant past. And even if you do, it won't be long before some charismatic clown comes along peddling exploded fatuities of state paternalism as bold and new. There may be heaps of lost causes in politics, but no permanent victories.

I've seen 'em come and go and I take it in stride. But when I sense the popular mood changing in ways politicians and elites can no longer ignore or safely insult, I nearly get excited.

[First published in The Ottawa Citizen]

So now we've all seen pictures of Russell Williams in stolen lingerie and read ghastly details of his murders and other sex crimes. Have we learned anything about the nature of evil?

I hope so, because we have surely been on a trip through hell this week and if we did not go there to learn something important we may be suspected of disgraceful voyeurism. Indeed, my initial reaction to this week's news coverage was that it was lurid and grotesque. Permit me to quote the tee-up from this very newspaper on Monday: "It's not yet clear whether anyone, least of all Williams himself, will offer any insight into his state-of-mind. The case promises to draw reporters and columnists from across Canada and the U.S. (The Citizen is sending a team of seven to cover the sentencing.)"

How many journalists does it take to type "He was convicted of unspeakable sex crimes and sentenced to life with no parole for 25 years"?

There was a time when people would have called such crimes "unspeakable" and meant it literally. Only a small number would have been privy to the details: police, a coroner, a few court and prison officials. And they would not have spoken of it because it was morally filthy without redeeming value.

I do not mean to sound squeamish. I would not, for example, oppose showing photographs of the emaciated, naked corpses found at Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps. It is not merely dangerous to be unaware of evil in the world; it is a dereliction of duty. We must understand who and what we are, the depths to which we can sink and how, if we are to be fully human and live as we should.

In the case of Nazism, there was a practical lesson: It was important to grasp the kind of horror that could emerge not from primitive cultures but from modernity. And I wish all who call themselves "pro-choice" would watch Silent Scream before defending abortion. But when it comes to sex killings, we are all already aware of their existence, their brutality, deliberate humiliation and terror. Would you look at pictures?

No? But stories and columns in recent days have not only given me obscene details of Williams' conduct, they have detailed the agonized horror of his victims' last hours and even described the position in which one died. What business have I knowing that, and what business has anyone describing it?

At this point you may object that I have clearly read the accounts and accuse me of hypocrisy for poring over the details and then professing shock. It was not possible to avoid exposure to the famous pictures of Williams in stolen lingerie. But I could have refused to read further and very nearly did.

My justification for doing the opposite is that, as a public commentator, I thought it was important to find out whether the stories that are selling newspapers were as lurid as the headlines suggested. They are. They are full of words I will not put in print, and images that will haunt us all our lives. Which brings me back to my opening question: Are we doing this to learn something important?

We might be. If you go back and read the quotation near the top of this column, it refers to the murderer's state of mind. What the devil do I care for his state of mind? This is not Silence of the Lambs and we are not sending him to a psychiatrist. What interests me in this dreadful affair is the state of his soul.

So look again at those internationally famous pictures of him in stolen underwear. Standing there expressionless, awkward, ludicrous and sinister, he looks like ... what? I was tempted to say he doesn't look like anything, that there is nothing useful to see here. But then I realized he looks like an idiot.

I don't mean that in a cheap shot kind of way, as you might call someone an idiot for driving badly or wearing an ugly hat. There is no therapeutic value in calling a sex killer names. I mean he literally looks like an idiot. That blank stare shows no trace of intellect, emotion or moral awareness.

In this there is something of value: the familiar but important recognition of the banality of evil. A number of stories referred to his escalating deviance as though he were embarked on some wild, forbidden adventure. But the truth lies in the pathetic quality of the pictures when he had to look at them in a courtroom.

Here is no superman, no transvaluer of values, dethroning God and issuing his own commandments. He is lethal, but utterly squalid. As Chesterton has Father Brown observe, "There is this about evil, that it opens door after door in hell, and always into smaller and smaller chambers."

We are justified in peering far enough into these crimes to reinforce the vital conclusion that even the worst evil is sordid, small and banal. The rest is just gruesome smut.

[First published in The Ottawa Citizen]

One of the saddest things in the newspapers is the collapse of British military power. A century ago Britannia ruled the waves and a good thing too. Now they seem ready to cede the waters to the Chinese or Iranians and lose the Battle of Britain by default. Might I ask why?

Wednesday's Daily Telegraph revealed that the British air force is going to cut its purchase of the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters from 138 to about 50, and probably get rid of all its Tornadoes, shut two bases and ditch almost 5,000 people. But you just know how politicians talk when doing something ruinous and dumb.

"We've got aeroplanes that are ready to do dog fights with the Soviet Union air force. That's not right," droned Tory PM David Cameron. Whereas not having aeroplanes at all is right because ... ?

The closest thing to an honest answer, and the farthest from their lips, is we couldn't get them anywhere useful anyway because the fleet is going to be deep-sixed (or, given budget realities, probably deep-threed). As the same newspaper reported last Friday, the British navy "is set to be reduced to the smallest size in its history ... cut by almost half to just 25, with frigates, destroyers, submarines, minesweepers and all amphibious craft scrapped" in order to fund two new aircraft carriers which won't have any planes but that's OK because one will probably be mothballed as soon as it's finished if it ever is.

How did this happen? Part of it is a failure of nerve; five years ago when the British celebrated the 200th anniversary of the magnificent victory at Trafalgar that helped inaugurate the century-long Pax Britannia, they did it with "blue" and "red" fleets rather than British and combined French/Spanish lest they should seem to be happy and proud that they won.

Mostly it's budgetary. The welfare state is unaffordable but, because of its political dynamics, it takes everything else down with it as it goes. The first duty of the state may be defence but it's the last thing most democratic governments are going to fund today, even if it means the glorious geopolitical role Albion has played for 500 years becomes a curiosity in a glass case.

What galls me about this miserable business is that nobody said they were going to do it before they did it and, worse, nobody admits they are doing it now. I realize politicians are not in the habit of telling you what they are going to do on those rare occasions when they know; the same Prime Minister David Cameron recently admitted that they probably should have mentioned during the campaign that they would cut the child benefit for millions of single-income families instead of, um, saying the reverse repeatedly, ending with the classic "yes I acknowledge this was not in our manifesto. Of course I'm sorry about that, but I think we need to be clear about why we're doing what we're doing."

OK. Be clear. Start with we're cutting middle class entitlements cuz we're busted. Then tell us, before you mothball the fleet: Does the world seem a safer place today than 10 years ago? Are we more confident that we can dispense with the capacity to project force into troubled regions?

If only they were that wrong. But in the case of former PM Tony Blair we know the reverse is true. No hard Realpolitiker, he openly believed that British and American military power should be used unsparingly for the improvement of mankind. He just didn't spend the money necessary to support his ambitions.

What on earth was he thinking? How was it all supposed to work?

We may never know, just as it's impossible to figure out what Canadian politicians think about a budgetary situation that has left us even less able than Britain to afford crucial defence spending. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty just admitted in his economic update that last year's deficit was even higher than predicted and two of the next three will be too. But as to whether stimulus spending is now over, he pledged that the government would not be "inflexible" while Liberal finance critic Scott Brison retorted "It's very important that governments remain nimble." So you have no idea what they're going to do and even less idea of why.

When everyone veered from supporting balanced budgets to running vast deficits, did they tell you they suddenly realized Keynes was right? That they'd always believed it? No, they just insisted we had to spend money we didn't have on stuff we didn't need for reasons we couldn't explain, even if it meant neglecting the military while radical states dominate international debate and scramble to acquire lethal weapons.

Stand by for a full, honest and sensible explanation ... just as soon as we discover why sinking Britain's navy and crashing its air force makes sense in the modern world.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Washington is a great city. This sentiment might shock my American and libertarian friends, who consider the place a wretched sinkhole of bloated arrogance, destructive politics, horrifying deficits and liberty-destroying anti-Constitutional policies, which they always manage to make sound so tawdry. But it has a really nice free zoo. Where's ours?

It is not a frivolous question. Washington is a city that works. Congress might be a dark star orbiting a twin at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and the city has its share of poverty, misery and terrible public schools. But I am enthralled by D.C.'s clean, well-maintained graffiti-free parks, its free museums and zoos, its outstanding subway, and its superb historical monuments and important organizations within comfortable walking distance of each other via about six million Starbucks outlets. D.C. is a great place to visit and the worthy capital of a great nation.

One libertarian colleague did ask me how I could praise a free zoo. Isn't it a classic example of legalized theft, of people in one place taking money from those elsewhere to spend on themselves? Isn't doing so wrong in principle and enormously destructive in practice; once we all seek to better ourselves by beggaring our fellows don't we only accomplish the latter, they cry? I do not dispute the analysis. I think we'd be better off if we were far less willing, or able, to engage in the politics of plunder (and add that not only the American but our own founding principles and Constitution are far less friendly to the practice than we have been led to believe). But spending public money to make the capital glow is an exception.

No, no, put down the smelling salts (and the rocks). I have not turned into one of those nits who thinks politics elevates and unites us. I still occasionally watch question period, you know. It is true, and important, that politics can unite us in moments of great crisis, though I'd far rather live in quiet times when mediocrities in high places can embarrass the nation quietly. But a great capital city is a desirable thing because politics and governance can embody our virtues in a key way.

When a constitution enshrines liberty and procedural fairness, when the laws say and the state insists that citizens may not murder, assault or rob one another, nor meddle patronizingly in their affairs, band together to take away their fellows' goods or freedoms or otherwise use the power of the majority tyrannically, that the state shall not deny, delay or sell justice, and that we shall defend to the death one another's right to responsible liberty, it really does enshrine our devotion to justice and fair play. That does not mean the government must become an agent of compassion; a constitution that says charity shall be private because a generous people care for one another and dependency on public assistance is soul-destroying is also a noble thing in my view.

Government may enforce these virtuous rules inefficiently and obnoxiously, incompletely and stupidly. But nevertheless thou shalt not do murder and thou shalt not steal are highly moral principles and a constitutional order that enshrines and enforces them is a thing to celebrate.

Who are we? Why are we a nation? These questions find expression in our political institutions, our foundational documents and our national capitals. Within walking distance of the White House the Theodore Roosevelt Island National Memorial commemorates, in a startlingly wild setting, the peculiar 26th president whose legacy includes the creation of national parks and the beginnings of a serious and practical environmental movement. Where else should it be? Should no such thing exist? And where is ours?

It is right that a capital should show off the spirit of a free people. A glorious national capital is obnoxious only when it lies, when it fakes national excellence and good governance rather than reflecting it, as too much monumental architecture does in the Third World (think of Pyongyang's statues or Saddam Hussein's obscene monuments).

So I ask again, who are we? Are Canadians mediocrities, ineffective ditherers, prattling about excellence and compassion while exhibiting neither? Or is it true that "Canada is free and freedom is its nationality" as Sir Wilfrid Laurier boasted?

In Washington I find the existence of free museums and other facilities not a betrayal but a celebration of responsible liberty. I also believe that spirit animated the founders of Canada and appeals to far more of us than the usual suspects would have you believe. So why can't we build a proper light rail system, let alone a Canadian counterpart to the Washington Mall and the proliferation of statues, parks and monuments that make D.C. so great?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]