When Justin Trudeau rolled the new citizenship guide into a dunce cap and jammed it firmly onto his head he revealed a great deal about the sorry mess that is modern liberalism.

It is true that he has since apologized. But his contrived apology is of no interest. It is their unreflective words that reveal politicians' thoughts, not the paste squeezed out of the PR machine once it is switched on, from the opening "Perhaps" through a disingenuous reference to "semantic weeds" to blaming his partisan opponents' cynicism, to the "if they've been interpreted" ploy that apologizes for other people's taking offence not his giving it. Plus it only appeared after a series of Tweets defending his original comments.

What merits attention is his original remarks. And not because he's a deep or leading thinker. Rather, when a handsome and privileged but otherwise ordinary political celebrity talks without a script we get contemporary liberalism unfiltered. And unfiltered, it wrinkles its nose at a vigorous denunciation of "honour killings" and "female genital mutilation." Calling them "barbaric," he said, made him "uncomfortable" because it was "pejorative."

I should hope it was. That both practices are widespread in the Middle East and parts of Africa clearly indicates that too many people there are in the grip of a profound and evil hatred of women. If such things don't make you want to shout something indignant, you have a problem. The question is, what problem?

Modern liberals don't seem to hate women. You can take serious exception to their entire feminist agenda, from no-fault divorce to abortion on demand to universal daycare, without denying their genuine outrage at violence against, discrimination against or even demeaning language directed at women. But why, then, do they instinctively recoil from a robust denunciation of those who do hate and harm women?

The problem is that they are also committed to a mentally and politically paralyzing cultural relativism, driven more by sentiment and snobbery than serious thought, that renders their core beliefs unredeemably incoherent.

It was in that intellectual mess, not "semantic weeds," that the hapless Justin Trudeau so wretchedly entangled himself when he said, "There's nothing that the word 'barbaric' achieves that the words 'absolutely unacceptable' would not have achieved. We accept that these acts are absolutely unacceptable. That's not the debate. In casual conversation, I'd even use the word barbaric to describe female circumcision, for example, but in an official Government of Canada publication, there needs to be a little bit of an attempt at responsible neutrality."

Why? Why does there need to be a public attempt at "responsible neutrality" between those who think you should destroy women's genitals early so they won't enjoy sex and those who call this practice revolting and wicked and don't want it practised here? Clearly what "barbaric" achieves that "unacceptable" does not is to express indignation. The question is why someone would find such a thing shocking, especially when he'd said it himself privately.

It's quite simple. If we admit publicly that such things are barbaric and also that they are common in some other cultures but very rare in our own we cannot, even if we are not very smart, avoid the conclusion that our culture is better than many others. Say that aloud and, before you know it, you're looking in the mirror and seeing George W. Bush. You become patriotic and proud of Western civilization, and start reading Kipling and watching Chuck Norris films. But to deny it depends on cultural relativism which is, in the end, inseparable from moral relativism and a nihilistic attitude toward truth. Thus Michael Ignatieff, supposedly a clever man, got drawn into the issue in Montreal on Tuesday and plunged voluntarily into some extremely rank semantic weeds.

"Let's not play word games with this stuff. ... There's no such thing as an honour killing, there's only killing and it's a crime everywhere. We're based on equality here and any of these practices are simply unacceptable. If you want to use the word barbaric, use the word barbaric."

No. Not good enough. The question isn't whether I "want" to use the word barbaric. It's whether the word "barbaric" accurately describes the practice. If it does, it's moral and intellectual irresponsibility not to use it, or to deny that "honour killings" exist. But the only way to avoid speaking such truths is to snatch for the totally relativist card and say what you call things is just "word games."

What snared Justin Trudeau was not semantic weeds. It was intellectual ones, deep and deadly, and if you get caught in them they'll strangle your brain. By demonstrating that point, he did us all a favour with his remarks. Uh, except himself. Nice dunce cap, buddy.

[First appeared in The Ottawa Citizen]

So how do we get yet another spending increase even bigger than they're letting on, dragging tax hikes behind it? I'll tell you: unanimously. Things are back to normal in the City of Ottawa and we're all going to pay for it.

I grant that under Larry O'Brien politics drifted much further from usual than we really wanted. But at least when he was mayor we thought big tax increases were just one among several choices and a bad one at that. Whereas under Jim Watson we're back to the soothing conviction that there is only one policy course open to reasonable people, which regrettably is lousy but we should all smile and look wise while lurching toward disaster. And the whole city council agrees.

I realize the headlines said the tax increase was only 2.45 per cent, which sounds sort of OK until you realize at that pace your taxes would double every 30 years. Moreover, as Randall Denley noted in Wednesday's Citizen, the official spending increase of $79 million is larger than the tax increase, at about 3.4 per cent. (And we all know what happens when spending goes up faster than revenues ... though our governments happily do it anyway and call it stimulus.) As Randall went on to say "it gets worse" because the real spending increase is $112.9 million or 4.95 per cent. It's just that "City staff have decided to make the figure look smaller by subtracting the revenue that growth provides, but there is no compelling rationale for that."

Actually, there is a rationale if you're in government and want to deflect attention from how fast the budget is growing and especially why. The latter is in fact the central question about the failure of the state in the late 20th century: Why, as we get more affluent, with far greater resources than our parents or grandparents for coping with our own problems and assisting our fellows, does government keep getting more expensive?

It should not necessarily get absolutely cheaper. More homes does mean more streets from which snow must be plowed and more trash to collect. The real issue is: Why isn't government getting cheaper relative to our growing wealth? Why are taxes outpacing our ability to pay them?

Even if a bigger, richer city generates more trash per inhabitant, and larger houses have a few more yards of street to plow per inhabitant in newer neighbourhoods, surely today's garbage trucks and snow plows outperform their 1960s counterparts as decisively as today's cars do. Plus if half a century of entrepreneurial innovation has made firms like Wal-Mart or Mc-Donald's massively more efficient, why aren't cities better at dealing with snow in winter or trash all year round which, the uninitiated might assume, is more predictable than consumer demand over time? And why aren't all those programs designed to mitigate social problems resulting from poverty getting less expensive as poverty diminishes?

In cities like Ottawa one reason leaps out, at least at me. Randall Denley began his column by complaining about "the abysmal job city council did of scrutinizing the budget." And clearly all the specific problems stem, ultimately, from that general one. Unless we fix it, we're in for politics as usual until our wallets cry Uncle. And we won't fix it until we ask: What is city council for?

OK, let's eliminate the funny but discourteous suggestions that just popped into our heads. Seriously, what do we pay these people for? They didn't write this 919 page budget (or, I fear, read it). Municipal staff did that. So why have 23 people rubber-stamp the thing when one clerk could do it way cheaper?

It won't do to explain that councillors are the board of directors of Ottawa Inc. responsible to "shareholders" for the performance of management. That model too easily degenerates into a mutual admiration society. I'd far prefer to have them act as a city legislature, using the power of the purse to control the executive on behalf of citizens and divided into one party that generally supports the mayor's program and one that offers an alternative.

Partisan politics gets a lot of bad press for obvious reasons. But oneparty government is a great deal worse. Even in a peaceful city in a civilized democratic country, where it doesn't get anybody shot or tortured, it means right out of the gate, Ottawa city councillors are all in this together, with a vested interest in convincing us that inexorably rising taxes may ruin the city, stunt the aspirations of the young and drive seniors from their homes but they are what all prudent, responsible non-weirdo-from-Mars types favour.

Sure, partisanship is ugly and mentally stifling. But it gives a lot of relentlessly ambitious people a serious incentive to delve into what's wrong with existing policy and suggest less hideous alternatives. Our municipal structure does not do that and we are paying the price ... every year.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The other day I was treated to a modern fairy tale about how the Big Bad Capitalists were gobbling up Little Red Unionized Worker in the America's formerly happy Dairyland of Wisconsin. I suppose these things frighten impressionable children. But it just left me baffled.

The story, told by the CAW's Jim Stanford during a debate on BNN, said that long, long ago when people were progressive and deficits had not been invented, governments bestowed upon the downtrodden masses the right to collective bargaining. And there was much rejoicing and prosperity reigned. But unionization worked so well the economy stagnated and real wages stopped rising and unionization declined except in the public sector and now there's an evil plot against them there too. Huh?

I know in fairy tales we're meant to accept flying carpets and talking trees and Keynesian economics. But here in the lands that we know, I cannot grasp how it can be asserted that anti-employee neo-liberal rich people have captured government and are using it to bash unions when unionization rates in the public sector are more than triple those in the private sector in Canada (75 per cent versus 19 per cent) and more than five times as high in the United States (36 per cent versus seven per cent).

What these numbers clearly show instead is that unions have captured government after being squeezed out of the private sector by their tendency to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. In government, unlike private business, you can hand someone else the bill. And while there may not really be ogres living in caves or trolls lurking under bridges, there certainly are activists, politicians and special interest groups working together to extract unearned benefits from the political process at the expense of those too young to vote or not yet born.

Personally I don't think even Rocky and Bullwinkle's old Fractured Fairy Tales could get voters smiling at a segment where the old business about capitalist hobgoblin mine and railroad and steel mill owners reducing the toiling masses to dirty bags of bones just for the cruel sport of it gets retold with public servants as the proletariat. Taxpayers tend not to react well to this kind of bedtime story for some reason.

Oh, I remember why: It's because taxes keep going up and services keep going down. Governments are in hock up to their eyeballs. And they may soothe us with tales of a happy-ever-after when deficits won't come calling and items that are "off budget" can't suddenly jump out and bite right through your wallet. But after they turn off our lights, they don't keep talking that way. It's not because they're mean. It's because even the most obtuse among them have to do the math eventually.

Those of you too old to be frightened by things that go bump in the night may recall that after his tax-funded trip to the Big Rock Candy Mountain went bad, former Ontario premier Bob Rae forced public sector workers to take unpaid days off and was bizarrely miscast as anti-union. Now it's current Premier Dalton McGuinty imposing pay freezes and insisting that future collective bargaining won't pay off the way it used to. But casting him as a neo-liberal troll just waiting to gobble up collective bargaining rights is about as convincing as having Little Red Riding Hood eat the wolf.

McGuinty isn't doing these things because he wants to. He's doing them because in Ontario, typically, compensation (wages, salaries and benefits) accounts for more than half of provincial program spending. And unless your treasury is well stocked with magic beans, you can't rein in runaway spending if you don't do something about big expenditure items that keep growing faster than inflation.

Wisconsin Democrats have run away from this reality, figuratively and literally, and hoping the big bad quorum won't find them. But grown-ups do not believe in this sort of stuff. Nor do they think Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is the big bad wolf or, as some protesters' signs alleged, Hitler.

Nor are he and his colleagues the band of real-life Simon Legrees depicted by New York Congressman Charles Rangel who said, "Collective bargaining is something that is so close to slavery in terms of abolishing it. ..." Tell me about lamps and genies if you must. But don't try to convince me if William Wilberforce were among us today he would be trying to free bureaucrats. You just cannot kiss this frog of an argument and turn it into a handsome prince.

If you're wondering, the Big Bad Capitalist story went on that within governments, beleaguered but defiant unions bravely continue their battle for the wretched of the Earth like public servants and autoworkers in desperate need of protection from robber barons, whereas those working part time in fast food restaurants can ... hey, the rest of the pages are missing.

Oh well. It was a silly story anyway.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

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]