Although I regret the loss of innocent life and fear the outcome, I derive grim satisfaction from the impending demise of Moammar Gadhafi. And the pointed lessons it teaches.

First, it was highly instructive to watch the rambling, disastrous speech by Gadhafi's son Saif alIslam last Sunday. I mean watch literally; I speak no Arabic. And yet it was plain that here was a man -hailed last year by Landon Thomas Jr. in The New York Times as "the Western-friendly face of Libya and symbol of its hopes for reform and openness" and praised by the U.S. State Department as recently as Sunday -who had never heard an honest disagreement in his life.

Forced to attempt to speak frankly to his people in a crisis, he was catastrophically ill-equipped for the task, alternately threatening and patronizing and above all plainly bored at having to waste so much of his evening talking down to ungrateful morons.

At that moment we suddenly saw a great weakness of all tyrannies.

Censorship deprives them not only of factual knowledge about their own country and the world but, more importantly, of the vital self-discipline that comes from having always to think hard about what you're doing. When the need arises, they're lost.

Second, Gadhafi's entire 41-year reign, including that weird diatribe on Tuesday, proves that you can be at once ludicrous and sinister. Because the Libyan strongman was frequently perplexingly absurd, a lot of people somehow concluded, despite all the evidence, that he could not be a menace to his own people and ours. The real lesson was the exact opposite: Tyrants whose goals seem different from our own really think very differently from us, and their weird rhetoric and antics resonate with their intended target audience because political culture outside the West is deeply different from ours.

Some people have taken exception to my pessimism about Middle Eastern political culture. I assure you I would like to be wrong, especially given the courage protesters have lately shown in a number of countries.

But I will not pretend things are otherwise than they are just to seem polite. Refusal to face reality squarely is not merely undignified but dangerous, especially in international affairs.

That brings me to a third, related lesson about how, with Gadhafi's loathsome regime unexpectedly tottering on the brink of destruction, so many idealists have suddenly found their moral and even physical courage. Where have all these people been all these years, and why? For instance former prime minister Paul Martin who now wants the United Nations to intervene in Libya; I don't recall him try-ing to organize such an expedition when he was in power. Was the Libyan government any less horrible back then? Or did it just look stronger?

Where were all the students busy with Israeli apartheid week when it came time to denounce Libya? Sure, the regime is now shooting protesters. But Gadhafi has been repressing his own people, meddling violently in neighbouring countries and subsidizing terror for four decades and I don't recall anyone seeking a boycott of Libyan oil.

Realpolitikers have supposedly pragmatic reasons for taking this approach, albeit ones rarely greeted sympathetically on the Left. But where have the idealists been on Libya? Other than insisting that mankind places its hopes in the UN, on whose supposedly new improved Human Rights Council Gadhafi won a seat in 2010. Why have they been so critical of democracies and so mute on tyrannies?

If pressed, some of them might force out a pro forma denunciation of Libya and its ilk although you couldn't even count on that. But you could count on their very quickly getting back to slagging Israel, capitalism, Israel, U.S. imperialism and especially Israel.

Of course it is possible to reply that because Israel is, like Canada, a democracy in the rule-of-law sense we not only can but should hold it to higher standards. And I grant that it would be more than a little ludicrous to quibble over minor lapses of due process in a murderous tyranny actively sponsoring terror abroad, from Libya or Iran to the old Soviet Union and on. But the weird thing is that so many people who begin by making that argument rapidly move to asserting moral equivalence between the West and its sworn enemies and from there slide into depicting us as worse.

This attitude bears a disconcerting resemblance to a death wish. If you suffer such a thing in your personal life you have my sympathies. But if you reliably bring it into defence and security policy where it puts me and my country at risk, my attitude hardens fast. You were no help when it took real courage and you're no help now.

None of this amounts exactly to enjoying the bloody drama now lurching toward a worrying conclusion. But it brings a certain grim satisfaction . and I'll take it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It's surprising what really bugs me about public policy. For instance The New York Times trying to whitewash the Muslim Brotherhood just slides off my back. But I'm still fuming about something dopey a politician said about taxes last Monday.

Look: The New York Times embraced Stalin, declared Hitler harmless and welcomed Pol Pot and I can't get excited when they do it again. I'd feel weird if they didn't. But what can explain Ontario Tory leader Tim Hudak's vacuous pirouette last week after his office issued a statement apparently pledging him not to abolish Dalton Mc-Guinty's hated health premium-taxflip-flop thingy?

Pressed by reporters, Hudak refused to confirm the promise, saying instead, "We are considering all tax options and how to give families a break." Amazingly, this statement was at once offensively evasive and transparently false. How do you do that?

The evasiveness is clear and typical, even unimaginative. If he and his team are considering everything no one can have any idea what they might do, not do, say, think or waffle on later. But all tax options are manifestly not on the table under an Ontario Tory government. For instance the gabelle, the hated pre-Revolutionary French salt tax, is not coming back. Nor is Britain's infamous 1696-1851 tax on windows. Nor do we face a poll tax, a doubling of the income tax, its abolition, a Henry George "single tax," a flat tax or dozens of other obvious possibilities.

I don't expect everyone to have strong views on taxation or to hold coherent ones if they do. But think for a moment about our education system, the filtering process within political parties, the role of an informed (now you laugh) press in keeping rubbish out of public debate. And then consider that we face a choice between a man who promised not to raise taxes, raised them and lied about it being a tax, got caught but got re-elected anyway, and a man who portrays himself as not having views on taxes.

In a wealthy province in an advanced industrial democracy, currently slogging through the Way Too Much Information Age, how can a person who has made politics his adult life's work possess, or convincingly pretend to possess, not one single clue about what makes for good tax policy? And become leader of a major party with a good chance of forming the next government?

While I was steaming away about this, The Patriot Post down in Tennessee sent me this quotation from Thomas Jefferson: "It is a wise rule and should be fundamental in a government disposed to cherish its credit, and at the same time to restrain the use of it within the limits of its faculties, never to borrow a dollar without laying a tax in the same instant for paying the interest annually, and the principal within a given term; and to consider that tax as pledged to the creditors on the public faith."

If I said it I might be called simplistic. But no one ever said that about Jefferson. I personally consider him a great villain, prone to daffy enthusiasm for bloody tyrants that might have embarrassed even The New York Times and guilty of appalling personal and intellectual hypocrisy over slavery. But when even such an unbalanced radical sees the folly of unfunded deficits you'd think it would get some attention as we read today's newspapers.

For instance Wednesday's story that Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page thinks the federal government is doing too little to avoid a large structural deficit. It's a complicated subject and hard to be sure but the historical record is not encouraging. Canadian governments have been very wrong in their budgetary projections for decades and only Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, having risked unpopularity by making tough choices, had the luxury of then courting popularity by having deficits lower than they'd predicted. The Harper Tories have not made tough choices and I darkly suspect they are making fatuously rosy projections half-deliberately.

You might disagree. But I'll tell you one thing: If we did it Jefferson's way we'd have no room for an argument because the whole deficit would be funded by current tax plans. With, I might add, the additional virtue of making deficits very politically unattractive even to voters currently duped by promises of free money, directly through handouts or indirectly through "stimulating the economy" by spending money we ain't got on things we don't need for reasons we can't explain. And Jefferson suggested it back in 1813. What, wasn't two centuries enough time to ponder it?

That's why I can't just shrug off budgetary follies as I can "The Grey Lady" embracing one more odious foe of western civilization. With all tax options allegedly on the table, it is infuriating that no one will add to the pile Jefferson's suggestion that our governments pay for things when they buy them.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It seems Ontario Tory leader Tim Hudak wants to buy me a beer. Or sell me one cheap. I didn't know he was in that business. And now that I do know, I can't figure out why.

On Monday, Hudak said, "I do hear from people who say 'Come on, I can't even get a buck a beer in this province thanks to Dalton McGuinty's policies', " specifically his finance minister's 2008 instruction to the Liquor Control Board of Ontario to raise the minimum price of a two-four from $24 to $25.60 (it's now $25.95 plus deposits). A number of people are incensed that the Tory leader would waste time on this allegedly trivial issue when so many more serious things are wrong with government in Ontario. I'm incensed that he didn't denounce the whole concept of government minimum prices for beer.

For starters, I'm baffled by the notion that beer is trivial. Benjamin Franklin said, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." No one ever said that about politics, did they? Beer is real. Beer is actual. People drink beer when they're having fun, relaxing with friends, reading a book, watching the sunset or, in extreme strange cases, writing a newspaper column. It is part of the stuff of life and gloriously good in a normal healthy way. That's why it is profoundly wrong that the government should reach for our beer glasses.

Sure, in one sense all bad policy matters. Bad energy policy matters because we use electricity every day, bad health policy because we might get sick or already are or know someone who is. But while we live with the consequences of every type of bad policy (or under the shadow of its possible consequences), bad beer policy hits closer to home. Beer is part of our everyday life and it is a very important principle that ordinary people ought not to be meddled with in the course of their normal lives. Such meddling fosters destructive arrogance in the governors and demeaning helpless servility in the governed.

A key argument for government beer stores, minimum prices, and cameras in our houses is a patronizing belief that politicians must protect us from ourselves. In 2008, an LCBO spokesman defended the price hike by saying, "The concept is that if prices are low, consumption goes higher." But this amounts to saying my government thinks I'm probably an irresponsible drunk and should certainly be treated preemptively as such. Thank you. Thank you very much. Want to hear my opinion of you?

Of course there are people who drink too much. And of course raising the price of booze does tend to discourage consumption (although raising the price of only one kind leads to a significant amount of substitution especially among those whose real aim is to get high rather than savour a fine wine, scotch or beer). But the notion that it is the business of the state forcibly to prevent us from misusing life's good things to our own detriment violates the key conservative principle that it is only in the exercise of responsible choice that we are fully human.

That's why news stories like this one make me wonder: How do people know they're Tories? I ask more in the philosophical than the partisan sense though I'm frequently puzzled on the latter point as well. I know how people know they're tall, dark, handsome, and so on: They look in a mirror. But if you look in the mirror and you're blue it means you're really cold, have strange light bulbs, or forgot to take off your shades, not that you're a Tory.

I thought you figured out that sort of thing by realizing that, over time, you had come to accept a particular, coherent set of fundamental principles about human affairs with inherent policy implications. It certainly seems to be working for Maxime Bernier. And the rank and file; I've seen audiences at any number of nominally conservative political crowds routinely leap to their feet at denunciations of deficits, lavish spending, and arrogant bureaucrats and politicians meddling in citizens' lives.

Tories, in the philosophical sense, know that, as Barbara Bush once put it, what happens in your house matters more than what happens in the White House. Indeed, that's how they know they're Tories: They consider the state a useful servant but a dangerous master and believe self-government means controlling the conditions of our daily lives, not voting periodically on who shall control them for us. They definitely do not favour state-set minimum prices for life's small pleasures and consolations.

If you look in a mirror, see a Tory, then object to a minimum state price for beer in state-controlled stores because it's 8.125 per cent too high, I think you should, at the very least, try to get your money back on the mirror. Frankly I'd also take your philosophy back to the store although I doubt they'll give you even a nickel deposit for it.

Meanwhile I'll buy my own beer, thanks.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

So what should our policy be toward Egypt? I don't mean what attitude should we adopt, nor what our opinion should be of events there, except insofar as intelligent understanding is a crucial preliminary to action. I mean what practical measures should we take?

I ask you not as individuals who neither can nor should attempt to meddle privately in world affairs. My question is what we, as citizens of Canada, should want and urge our government to do in furtherance of its primary duty of protecting us from foreign threats.

For that we do need to develop opinions on these questions: What outcomes might plausibly result from the turmoil in Egypt? Which of them are dangerous to us and how? And what can we reasonably do to mitigate these various dangers?

The first step is for everybody to abandon the notion that striking a suitably righteous pose is anything but perilous pomposity in such matters. For instance Tuesday's National Post editorial beginning "On Sunday, Michael Ignatieff said that 'Canada has to say very, very clearly that there needs to be a peaceful transition to free and fair elections (in Egypt). The Egyptian authorities need to be under no illusions what we think about this.' The Liberal leader is entirely correct, and we urge Prime Minister Stephen Harper to follow his advice." Or Wednesday's Globe and Mail editorial lecturing the Egyptian populace that "Opposition groups should now be willing to enter into conversations with the government; they should no longer insist upon Mr. Mubarak's immediate resignation as a precondition."

What manner of drivel is this? Does anyone suppose the corrupt, brutal regime in Egypt perched precariously atop an Islamist volcano, the protesters trying to dislodge it, or the small middle class trembling that they might succeed, give a hoot what Canada says? We need deeds, not words, an idea people in democracies find difficult to understand.

In Parliament on Monday NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar thundered "The Conservatives' response has been tepid and disappointing. This is a moment for us to use our influence on the world stage and exert pressure on the Egyptian regime to respect democratic rights." Meaning what? Send the Airborne Regiment into Cairo? Blockade Suez?

No, wag our finger even harder: "Canadians are speaking out loudly in support of human rights and democratic freedoms. Why is the government not doing the same?" But the world does not need, or hear, narcissistic Canadian prose in moments of crisis. And thinking it does is a way of avoiding clear thinking about hard truths.

Start with the fact that various groups in Egypt are playing an ugly game for keeps and it is highly probable that somebody nasty will win because Egypt's political culture is not hospitable to representative democracy of the sort we enjoy. I wish it were otherwise, but large segments of the Egyptian population do not trust one another and, sadly, such mutual mistrust becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hosni Mubarak's government was a classic squalid tyranny, suppressing chaos at the cost of sucking all vitality from public life. Unfortunately the regime, and its foreign backers, believed the alternative was a popular movement that looked democratic at first but was intellectually and institutionally incoherent and would swiftly spiral downward into Islamist frenzy. We're about to find out if they were right.

If my attitude matters I'm against that. But at the risk of incurring Paul Dewar's disappointment, I have no plan for preventing it and no hope of developing one so I'd better think about how to react if it does. Pretending nothing bad can happen is about the craziest approach anyone could suggest.

It is therefore being adopted. Barack Obama is doing his level best to imitate Jimmy Carter's disastrous reaction to the Iranian revolution. But backing a dictator while he's strong, then assuring everyone you wanted him to be nice once he loses his grip, simply conveys to friend and foe alike a toxic impression of dishonest weakness. Meanwhile, attempts by western politicians to deny the menacing nature of the Muslim Brotherhood recall Carter's UN ambassador Andrew Young saying in February 1979 "Khomeini will be somewhat of a saint when we get over the panic."

The Brotherhood dreams of jihad and death to Jews and wants Egypt to develop nuclear weapons. What do we do if they win? Send more editorials? Or work with our allies to develop a plan for retaliating if Egypt becomes a base for terror or hurls itself with murderous fury at Israel while Hezbollah, Syria and maybe even Jordan join in? If that happens, do we send troops? Do we have any to send? Should we get some? What else can we do to help America and possibly the British intervene?

These are unpleasant thoughts about an unpleasant situation. But they're also practical, and we need that.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Tuesday's State of the Union address confirms that the president of the United States is a boring blatherskite. The nation will survive, but it's bad news for them and us, given the key U.S. role in preserving order and liberty in the world and the enduring appeal of his vacuous sort of style to progressives. The speech was awful in several dimensions starting with a painful failed laugh line about oil company prosperity (the White House transcript obsequiously indicated "laughter" that their video, also available online, makes clear did not happen). You'd think someone in the White House would know what members of Congress find funny.

Or patronizing; if anyone doesn't need an undergraduate lecture on the virtues of public discussion it's them. I realize the president wasn't really talking to Congress. He was trying to go over their heads to the American people ... who just handed House Democrats the largest midterm defeat since 1938 and gave Republicans the biggest gain in state legislative seats ever.

Arguably Barack Obama was doing the only thing he knows how to do; give a campaign speech long on feel-good rhetoric and anecdotes but short on facts or logic. But couldn't he find a speech writer with more range? Especially now?

Remember, the State of the Union exists because Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution requires that the president "shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." Tuesday's speech contained virtually no information, a disregard of Constitutional propriety unnecessarily grating to Tea Party sensibilities.

Before Woodrow Wilson it was customary to deliver the State of the Union in written form. I'd love to see Obama try to write anything Congress would read or newspapers would cover. Almost the only solid fact he cited was that "most of the cuts and savings I've proposed only address annual domestic spending, which represents a little more than 12 per cent of our budget." And that's a humiliating admission of failure presented as if it were a great achievement. If it's not enough, why don't you suggest more? You're the president.

A five-year spending freeze is a frank admission that he has no idea what to do about the budget. Why didn't he remind congresspersons how much of federal spending goes on the big social programs then offer a statesmanlike trade-off of painful cuts in those areas for the elimination of outrageous tax loopholes?

Typically, he instead offered detailed facts about a hypothetical future while glossing blithely over to-day's difficulties. "By 2035, 80 per cent of America's electricity will come from clean energy sources" and "Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 per cent of Americans access to high-speed rail." I like trains; I'm a country music fan. But what has this to do with America's real problems including deficits menacing to its status as a great power?

Obama simply does not think in any recognizable sense of the word. For instance he praised China for building "faster trains and newer airports" (how would you build older ones?) then later noted, with no hint of a connection, that in undemocratic countries "If the central government wants a railroad, they build a railroad, no matter how many homes get bulldozed." Ahem.

On world affairs, neo-liberal blather about beating Asian kids at math is no substitute for frank geopolitical analysis. And his model of good government seems to be putting another man on the moon, a single-minded, expensive triumph a quarter of a million miles from the unravelling Great Society half a century ago that offers no lessons on the painful trade-offs critical to restore fiscal sanity today.

Likewise his insistence that federal intrusion into education is necessary to "win the future," a line lifted from Newt Gingrich that doesn't even mean anything anyway. Since the U.S. achieved global economic, military and cultural primacy with a drastically decentralized education system, what analysis supports the notion that it can only get it back by doing the exact opposite? And where in the constitution does it say the federal government is entitled to mess with education?

Instead, Obama used some variant of "win the future" nine times and expressed a desire to "move forward" three times, as though moving sideways at a 57 degree angle was an option others might favour. Such words are plainly uttered not in service of a thought but in place of one, and the President who uttered them is manifestly a doofus.

Fortunately, in America, it doesn't matter. The electorate can and just did turn effective control over to the other party, leaving Barack Obama to model expensive suits for two more painful but probably harmless years. The Union is strong. But that speech, and the guy giving it, were embarrassingly weak.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Did we lose our minds, and our pants, when we went online? I have to ask because of a news story about a guy who used women's Facebook profiles to hijack their e-mail accounts, retrieve the nude photos they'd sent of themselves, and humiliate or blackmail them. Yes. I said nude photos.

MSNBC says in nine months this wretch hijacked the accounts of hundreds of women and wound up with "more than 170 files of explicit photographs stolen from e-mail accounts he had hijacked." Remember, he wasn't able to target known senders of nude pictures. His victims were just foolish enough to list on Facebook the personal details you'd need to answer typical "Forgot your password?" questions about your mother's maiden name, favourite food etc. And hundreds of them had self-published porn pictures sitting around in their Sent Items folders.

Can someone tell me what is going on? In the pre-Internet era, how many women were sending out nude Polaroids of themselves? And at least back then it was laborious to create copies. The Internet seems to affect people the way that T-shirt says tequila does: First you think you're invulnerable, then you think you're invisible. Why?

The creepy perp, by the way, now faces up to six years in the Big House. Leaving aside the question of how he could be so nasty, how could he be so stupid as to think he wouldn't be tracked down?

Another MSNBC story earlier this month noted six girls in Nevada arrested over a Facebook invitation to an "Attack a Teacher Day" at two schools. A parent spotted that one, and you don't have to be too Internet-savvy to get the POS thing. (For those even less hip than I am, which means you're pretty much elbow: POS means "Parents Over Shoulder" so ixnay on the exsay.) How did anyone think they could post stuff like that online and not get caught?

Then there's Courtney Love, who once described herself as covered in "loser dust" and now faces a libel suit over some extremely nasty tweets. I am not so foolish as to speculate about the facts of the case in print or online but again, she apparently didn't realize sending abusive comments to 40,000 followers is not a great place to hide them. Lady, Twitter doesn't make you invisible or judgment-proof. Not legal judgment, anyway.

I'm not blaming the Internet for some cretin's dark impulse to humiliate and victimize women. At least not directly. On the surface it was just the venue for his stalking, and if all he wanted was nude photos, a fairly innocent online search for "naked women" would have given him 33 million hits in a tenth of a second.

I mean that literally; I tested it Wednesday. But I also noticed that the thumbnail descriptions suggested many of my results were not just girlie pix but extremely, wilfully nasty stuff. What amazes me is not that such evil lurks in the hearts of men but that they now seem to have no hesitation in shouting it to the world. And in that sense something funny is happening online.

As I say, I'm not blaming hypertext directly. People used to claim that capitalism debauched consumer tastes. I assure you, we didn't need any help then and we don't now. Capitalism simply offered us far more choices at far better prices and we did the rest.

So essentially, did the Internet, and in the process it offered many great benefits including a much smaller environmental footprint. But somehow, in magnifying our opportunities without improving our morals, cyberspace, far more than the marketplace, seems to be exposing not just our vices but our growing shamelessness.

The other day I read a piece on how to increase traffic to your website whose key tip was: Be a jerk. A deliberately rude comment will draw a host of even more obnoxious followers in a downward spiral to online popularity without the slightest embarrassment. Nor are people embarrassed to e-mail me notes about my column they wouldn't write on a bathroom wall, let alone stationary.

It also puzzles me that the victims of this Facebook/e-mail predator were careless in a way they surely would not have been in days gone by. Password security is increasingly an illusion in the face of high-speed attacks. But to post all those personal details online shows a weird lack of sense of privacy. Women who wouldn't walk around naked with the curtains open, or tell a stranger their birthday, expose themselves online, literally and figuratively, then sit there thinking "What could go wrong?" without even the sense to delete the sent nudie pix.

That's the part I really don't get. What is it about the Internet that makes people lose all sense of shame? It's not like it won't catch up with you and, when it does, it won't be any less embarrassing than it would have been when you had to Xerox your butt.

I ask again: Did we lose our minds as well as our pants when we logged on?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The irony in commentary about toxic American political rhetoric after Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot is how toxic the commentary is. If the American right really had a particular penchant for murderous language and ideas it would be important to say it. But it's just not true.

In one sense it doesn't matter because the suspect, Jared Lee Loughner, appears to be insane. But if we are going there, let's go the full distance: He appears to be an atheist Nietzschean enthusiast for the Communist Manifesto whose obsession with language resembles the PC fixation on "privileged discourse." So let's try to stick to the facts.

On Monday's Citizen front page Andrew Cohen wrote "the Tea Party, as agents of a contagion of right-wing extremism in the United States, have helped create a climate of paranoia that has alarmed observers. ... The political discourse has been seriously deteriorating since the presidential campaign of 2008. ... Anxiety and fear are not new in the United States. Richard Hofstadter identified these undercurrents in a provocative essay called 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics.' " Yes. And as a good progressive, Hofstadter pinned it on the right. I'm not sure American political paranoia is a problem compared to, say, the Middle East with its Mossad sharks and vultures. But I do know alarming rhetoric in the U.S. comes mostly from the left.

Remember "Burn, baby, burn" in the 1960s, or Jeremiah Wright, or Susan Sontag calling the white race "the cancer of history" to general applause in the salons? Amerika and The Anarchist Cookbook and radical chic and hijackings to Cuba? The New York Times lionizing Castro in the early 1960s as they had Stalin in the early 1930s? Thomas Jefferson writing in 1793 that rather than see Robespierre's revolution fail "I would have seen half the earth desolated"? Or seventh president and Democratic icon Andrew Jackson saying on his deathbed his only two regrets were "That I didn't shoot Henry Clay and hang John C. Calhoun"?

In Tuesday's Globe and Mail Konrad Yakabuski cited Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? to let loose a blast at Arizona, John McCain, "middle-class angst" and immigration reform. But Frank's title originates in a scathing 1896 Emporia Gazette editorial by William Allen White about Kansas turning itself into a backwater by voting for the clinically paranoid left-wing Populist party.

The Populists' 1892 federal eat-the-rich platform said "a vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at once it forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism." This bile (about, of all things, gold-backed currency) won them six states.

In 1896 the silver-tongued (and silver-obsessed) William Jennings Bryan won the Populist and Democratic nominations with an electrifying speech to the Democratic National Convention ending "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold," surely an unkind portrayal of his adversaries' intentions. He lost but ran for the Democrats again in 1900, accusing the Republicans of holding a "monarchical" principle. William McKinley beat him again, but within a year was assassinated by an anarchist. No monarchist shot Bryan.

If it matters, Loughner was a bimetallist like Bryan. JFK was shot by a guy who'd tried to become a Soviet citizen and his brother Robert by an anti-Israel Palestinian. Reagan was shot by a guy obsessed with a celebrity and a member of the deranged hippie Manson family tried to shoot Gerald Ford.

In Canada, too, politically motivated violence comes mainly from the left: radical separatists, antiglobalizers, aboriginal militants and environmental kooks.

According to MSNBC, Jared Lee Loughner believed the U.S. government was behind the 9-11 attacks. Yes, it's a paranoid, vicious, conspiracy theory ... from the left. Signatories to the October 2004 "911 Truth Statement" included Ralph Nader, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, radical historian Howard Zinn, who said he was misled, and Obama adviser Van Jones, who later said he hadn't read it.

Political rhetoric didn't make Jared Lee Loughner go on a murderous rampage. But when a deranged loner shoots a politician and a chorus immediately blames it on their partisan, intellectual or cultural opponents it's not just proof of a toxic strain in North American political discourse. It's an example of it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Just how excited are you that Julian Fantino is now secretary of state for seniors while Diane Ablonczy traded that prune for the obscurity of secretary of state for the Americas from which Peter Kent vaulted to minister of the environment? What? Didn't you see all the stories we wrote?

See, this mini-shuffle means Prime Minister Stephen Harper may or may not be keen on a spring election while his government's position on the environment may become more evasive -- unless it already was. Surely that's worth putting on the front page and quoting opposition and government politicians saying exactly what they would say anyway about this very minor shuffle.

The only remotely pertinent comment I detected was NDP deputy leader Thomas Mulcair saying that "Mr. Kent will be there to deliver the lines that are prepared for him by the Prime Minister's Office," and "The arrival of the fifth environment minister in five years augurs nothing well for future generations."

The first part is a standard opposition jibe about Peter Kent's alleged empty smoothness as a former TV news anchor. And I know I used to get a lot of vacuous press releases from his office saying "Minister of State Kent Welcomes Government of Nicaragua Declaration Nicaragua Is Free of Anti-Personnel Mines" (June 18, 2010) or "Minister of State Kent Congratulates People of Ecuador on Bicentennial of First Call for Independence" (August 10, 2009) when Kent clearly did not know when the first call for Ecuadorean independence occurred nor would he have cared if he did know.

Of course you're liable to retort that he didn't write that bumf himself; it was generated by the bureaucracy which will doubtless saddle Ablonczy with more of the same. You are right, and moreover I congratulate you for saying something of genuine importance.

Whatever his merits as a human being, a politician or a policy-maker, Peter Kent is simply not going to make environmental policy in Canada. Nor, really, will he even make excuses for it, though he will utter them. He will be given policy positions settled by senior public servants and senior cabinet ministers obsessed with avoiding controversy. But it's not, as I think Mulcair was implying, because the PM is a cynical, environment-hating control freak. It's because of the problematic fusion of the inner cabinet with the senior bureaucracy into a fourth branch of government unforeseen in our Constitution and incompatible with it.

It's bad enough that the people allegedly responsible for policy are not really making it and, given the massively overextended, unwieldy nature of modern governments, probably couldn't. But it gets worse. Given that ministers, other than a handful of the most senior ones, have so little influence, why do we have so many? Canada now has 38 cabinet positions plus 25 parliamentary secretaries to

various ministers, so fully 63 members of the 143-member Tory Commons caucus (plus the government leader in the Senate) are in cabinet or its penumbra. (The U.S. number is 22.) Scary, huh?

If we consider the ruling party's parliamentary caucus merely an embarrassing extension of "the government" used, dangerously inaccurately, to mean the executive branch, all these fancy titles might just sound like jobs for the boys and girls. But if we understand the role of the legislature is to hold the executive to account, the absorption of much of the government caucus into the executive branch with prestige, pseudo-importance and money, is a serious matter. (Parliamentary secretaries are not members of the Privy Council but do get an extra $15,600 a year ... a nice reward for loyal backbenchers and tempting bait for mavericks).

Considering how much of the real work of generating policy and public relations falls to the bureaucracy, the gains from this extensive system of fake jobs (seriously, what political philosophy justifies keeping a Minister of State for Sport on the payroll?) are clearly outweighed by the drawbacks. If Julian Fantino were not Secretary of State for Seniors, and if Diane Ablonczy had not been, what aspect of Canada's looming demographic crisis would be more serious or in any detectable way different?

What we need isn't more cabinet members. It's more backbenchers, as in Britain, where the 650-member Commons contains hundreds of MPs who cannot aspire to climb the greasy pole and whose job satisfaction and ego gratification depend on annoying the executive as effective committee members. If you agree with James Madison (in "Federalist #51") that for the sake of good government and liberty "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition," our system is clearly pernicious as well as petty.

Instead of pondering the electoral significance of our new Secretary of State for Seniors, we should be complaining about having one at all.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]