Gas prices are down, and so am I. No, I'm not some sort of environmental nut. It's just that I know exactly what Susan Sontag meant when she said "I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them." And only last month I, as a consumer, was the victim of a vast international conspiracy. Those were the days. Back then I even had major politicians feeding my delusion. In September, Jack Layton called for a commissioner to review high gas prices; Stephen Harper told reporters it sure looked like gouging; and Stéphane Dion wanted more Competition Bureau powers to investigate price-fixing. Now prices are down, my political friends have gone silent and I'm a nobody.

Yeah, yeah, I've heard that gas prices both rise and fall in tandem because of the highly competitive nature of the industry, not the reverse, and are driven by actual or anticipated changes in the price of crude oil. But how lonely, how terribly lonely, to feel that it's all market forces, that I'm just a dust speck on the face of global trade. Of course politicians would rather be fearless crusaders against illicit plundering on an international scale than boring hacks mumbling populist clichés. And I'd rather be the target of such a conspiracy than just a guy struggling to make ends meet.

For the same reason -- to compensate for creeping feelings of insignificance, or insignificant feelings of creepiness -- I have frequently observed over many years that my investments invariably do what I wish my weight was doing and vice versa. Moreover, my mutual funds periodically jump up dramatically only to resume their steady painful day-by-day descent.

Just life in the market? Don't you believe it. Here's my theory: My holdings can't actually fall every day or they'd become worthless and the torment would stop. So once in a while the gnomes of Zurich engineer a sharp increase, over before I can enjoy it, then resume the long dreary decline. And while the "logical" explanation is that lots of people have the same problem, I don't open their financial statements. I'd rather sit alone brooding about a giant conspiracy pointed right at me. It makes me feel that I must really be somebody, when trillion-dollar international financial markets are rigged and jiggled daily just to make me feel bad. It sure beats sitting alone brooding that I'm sitting alone brooding.

So I'm not falling for any suggestion that I track the price fluctuations of my mutual funds to see if this fiendish pattern of occasional sharp rises and an overwhelming succession of small depressing declines even exists. No sir. They're not catching me with that one. I like feeling badly done to on a cosmic scale.

On the same basis I firmly refuse to track the long-term trend in gas prices adjusted for inflation. It risks revealing not only a fairly random pattern in the short to medium term, but also that gasoline is not more expensive now than in Henry Ford's day. Especially when you consider how much better it is. (Does anyone out there remember Johnny Cash's song about the guy whose filling station was put out of business by "high-test gasoline" that let cars whiz by on the freeway without constantly refuelling? If the name "Cisco Clifton" popped into your mind you may not be paranoid but you're certainly weird.) I say the tendency of prices to fall as well as rise just proves how clever they are.

Still, on a damp chilly October morning I can't shake the nagging suspicion that I am, at best, the victim of a third-rate failed conspiracy. Not for me fiendishness on the level of Ernst Stavro Blofeld or Fu Manchu or, to avoid the charge of making things up, the Masonic plot to take over the world and force us all to wear aprons or whatever it is they want.

It might be objected that the Masons have been so busy conspiring and hiding every single imaginable scrap of evidence except, um, that disquieting pyramid with the eye on the U.S. dollar that they've never really gotten around to doing all the sinister things their long-standing domination of everything permits. But I say that's a conspiracy where you get your money's worth: deep, patient, convoluted. The same way UFOs wouldn't be fun if the aliens crashed a spaceship on the West Block lawn in bright sunlight and a map and a medical manual fell out.

That's why I'm so disappointed with the gas price conspiracy. It turns out I'm the target of plotters on five continents and all I get is a lousy 90 cent per litre fill-up. What am I, chopped liver?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

To get ready for Halloween our politicians are dressing as the ghosts of deficits past. I admit it's scary. But it's also in very bad taste. It's scary because spending money you ain't got is unwise in good times and catastrophic in bad and, as Adam Smith warned, accumulating public debt "has gradually enfeebled every state which has adopted it." And if Smith is too "right-wing" for you, how about that mad Jacobin Thomas Jefferson, who said "The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

Such was the dusty wisdom of the ancients, blithely discarded in the 1960s and then painfully reacquired in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Strange that it should so promptly go out the window in the 2000s. Frightening, too.

These costumes bring back queasy memories of tragicomic finance ministers in the late 1970s and 1980s assuring us the deficit was finally tamed, and proving it with lovely charts showing it shooting up for a couple more years then suddenly coming down as though we had elected fiscal Uri Gellers who could bend curves with their minds. Of course the end result was that interest on the debt started crowding out program spending and after the electorate pummelled governments that relied on the paranormal to restore order, we actually got quasi-cutters who, in good times, managed to sort things out within reason.

I say within reason because the Chrétien Liberals balanced the budget largely by cutting transfers to the provinces, which meant cutting other people's spending, not their own. Which is more than the Mulroney Tories ever did. But they never learned how to curtail the tendency of governments year after year to do less with more -- nor did the provinces, who responded by delaying vital spending on health care and infrastructure, thus swindling futurity in a different way rather than treating it with honest respect.

Given that in many ways we are already that futurity, the trick looks less impressive now than it once did. Hence the new Fraser Institute report saying that, having blown the locks back off the treasury door in the good times just ended, six provinces will spend more than half their revenue on health care by 2036. Underinvestment followed by panicky overspending isn't prudence and it isn't frugality. It certainly isn't leadership.

Our political masters have the rhetoric down pat for their disguises. Stephen Harper, whose Tories inherited annual spending of $210 billion and have already sent it past $240 billion in a budget titled "Responsible Leadership," just declared it "premature" to say whether he'll run a deficit. (Though it wasn't premature to say he wouldn't during the campaign.)

However, Mr. Harper gravely assured us, his government would definitely maintain "responsible fiscal policies." Exactly the right tone: Solemn guff about responsible policies was the invariable accompaniment of irresponsible ones in the past, and will be again.

Then there's Ontario's Dalton McGuinty, uniting with his fellow premiers in demanding that Ottawa maintain transfers even if it means a federal deficit but unlike them admitting that, even if he contributes to financial catastrophe at the federal level, he'll inflict it provincially as well.

"I've got 200,000 people who have lost their jobs, so now I'm going to shut down their hospitals? It just doesn't make any sense," was his excuse for possibly going into a deficit so he wouldn't have to make program cuts or raise taxes.

"I think Canadians are ahead of us," he blithered. "I think they understand these are very challenging economic times, they understand that our revenues are going to go down, that we have to make some difficult choices."

It's exactly the appropriate tone of brazen double-speak, because drifting into disaster to avoid changing his spending or revenue plans is neither difficult nor a choice. And it was delivered with such sanctimonious solemnity you'd think Don Mazankowski was back, wrapped in the tatters of his budgets, especially once you remember that Mr. McGuinty inherited spending of around $74 billion, and within four years had cranked it up to $96 billion with further large increases planned.

Hard choices? It is to laugh. (And in case you're thinking about Ralph Klein, his Tories doubled program spending between 1996/97 and 2005-06. Yes. Doubled.)

What's really scary is that politicians haven't forgotten the lessons of the past. They haven't forgotten how to cut spending; they never learned it. And they haven't forgotten that deficit spending is ruinous. They just don't care.

So yes, the costumes are scary. Now please take them off before we really say Boo. And then boo hoo.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

If Barack Obama campaigns down to the wire it will be a courtesy to the Republicans, since he could now stop canvassing entirely and still win comfortably. Neither John McCain, Sarah Palin nor Joe the Plumber can hurt him on Nov. 4. It’s Nov. 5 he should be worried about. Judging by his recent comments at the Al Smith dinner, he doesn’t believe his own supporters’ more extravagant flattery. But he must also resist the temptation, widespread in his party and among the chattering classes, to assume that the size and ease of his victory mean those vulgar middle Americans are no longer politically significant.

In fact what historian Walter Russell Mead in Special Providence calls the “Jacksonians”, and David Hackett Fischer’s invaluable though regrettably interminable Albion’s Seed calls “borderers” (for their origins in the Anglo-Scots border region), remain the largest single component of the American political community. These folks left a huge stamp on America, with their rough and ready egalitarian manners and robust, unapologetic self-reliance.

It is they whom observers like Tocqueville took to be typical Americans and in large measure they still are. And though many will vote Democrat this time, it’s not because they share Barack Obama’s cultural or foreign policy instincts. If he doesn’t understand why he didn’t have to court them during the campaign he will become politically irrelevant with a speed that would astonish even Jimmy Carter. Especially given the growing contingent of “Blue Dog” Democrats in Congress, noted by Canadian commentator John Ibbitson in the Globe and Mail, who are classic Jacksonians, culturally conservative foreign-policy hawks.

At the moment Middle America is disaffected from the Republican party for good reasons. But not those the Democrats take for granted. Jacksonians have no patience with cultural radicalism. And they do not care that the world seems to despise America; Jacksonians despise foreigners and rally ferociously round the flag when America is attacked.

As long ago as 1798, when the Jacksonian influence on politics was far smaller than it would be from the 1830s on, a war scare with France brought a surge of support to the Federalist administration that ebbed away when President John Adams settled the conflict peacefully and never returned. And in the 1960s this group turned against the Vietnam War not because it was immoral but because it wasn’t working. The Democrats, who mistook this sentiment for their own, have been critically weak on national security ever since.

It is a mark of just how bad things are for Republicans this year that the Democrats can run a senator from Illinois and one from Delaware and romp to victory. Their last totally non-Jacksonian ticket, the Minnesota/New York team of Mondale and Ferraro, carried one state plus the District of Columbia in 1984. In the 1990s they won twice with a border twofer from Arkansas and Tennessee. They only won once in the last century without a southern or border presence on the ballot, FDR’s third term in 1940. Whereas the last time they elected an elegant northern intellectual who made liberal women swoon it worked out rather badly.

Mr. Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, recently committed a classic political “gaffe” (that is, spoke an important truth honestly) about the parallel: “Mark my words, it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.” But, curiously, he went on “it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.... I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, ‘Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?’”

No such difficulties will arise if Mr. Obama meets the test with resolution. It’s if he exudes sanctimonious weakness like, say, Jimmy Carter, that he faces domestic as well as foreign policy disaster. As Mead notes, the Jacksonian tradition in foreign policy frequently baffles observers although it is quite straightforward. At its core is this belief: “You can deal with a bully only by standing up to him. Anything else is appeasement, which is both dishonourable and futile.” If Barack Obama cannot understand and respect that sentiment, he will find himself in big trouble.

The Middle American charm of Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber has galvanized the Republican base but won’t help them much on Nov. 4. As of Nov. 5, though, the Jacksonians will be back. President Obama had better be ready.

[First published on Mercatornet.com]

The Social Democratic Party of Canada is to blame for the dismal election result we just had. If such a party existed and had run, we'd have a majority government. First, let's back up.

The outcome last Tuesday is definitely not Stephen Harper's fault. True, 143 seats out of 308 isn't a majority. But 133 of 233 outside Quebec sure is. And it isn't fair to ask, if Mr. Harper couldn't win a majority against Stéphane Dion or Paul Martin, whom can he beat? His problem was Gilles Duceppe. Besides, the right went through a prolonged period of soul-searching in the 1990s, and even if you don't like what they found, it's reasonable to assume there isn't anything else there they could go back and get.

The situation on the left is very different. So the first requirement for political progress in Canada is that Liberals avoid blaming Stéphane Dion and his admittedly wretched campaign. They must accept that they are not the natural governing party any more. They haven't won a majority in Canada under an Anglophone leader since Mackenzie King in 1945, nor a majority of Quebec seats since 1984. People have voted in three elections who weren't born then. This is not their grandfather's Liberal party and to see the policies they value implemented the Grits can't follow his strategy.

The second requirement is for the NDP to abandon the belief that they're still on the verge of that big breakthrough they've been expecting since 1961. Sure, they gained seven seats, but their share of the national vote rose by less than one per cent. And while they're understandably boasting about winning an Alberta seat, their most remarkable achievement is winning a Quebec seat in a general election for the first time ever.

That brings me to the Bloc and its weirdly anodyne campaigns. Their slogan this time was "Présent!", which is normally what you say when you show up but don't vote. The day after the election a BQ press release attributed to Mr. Duceppe the idea (my translation) that "the election result shows clearly that two visions confront one another, that of Quebec and that of Stephen Harper; the proof is that it is Quebec that kept the Conservatives in a minority by giving the Bloc two thirds of the seats." But the Tories got less than half the seats in Ontario and were wiped out in Newfoundland. Plenty of other voters and politicians desperately wanted Mr. Harper held to a minority, and helped do it. Why not work with them?

Mr. Duceppe's explanation makes no sense. From 1921 through 1988 every majority government in Canada included more than half of Quebec's MPs. Since 1993 it seems Quebecers have taken leave of their strategic senses, giving a majority of their seats six straight times to the one party that will never form even part of a government. Yet it can't be a deliberate attempt to paralyze our politics so that we will let them leave, because in referendums they keep voting to stay. So what is their game? It's a fair question, and the third requirement for sorting out our politics is that we get a sensible answer.

One prominent separatist tried to ask it during the election, reproaching Mr. Duceppe for having made the BQ just another social democratic party. The Bloc leader brushed him off. But social democrats should raise the same question from the other side, demanding to know what policies the Bloc, and their supporters, want implemented in a separate Quebec that could not be implemented across Canada by a social democratic government.

Of course neither the party of Laurier and Trudeau nor that of Tommy Douglas would form a coalition with separatists. But why does sovereignty matter when the position of the Bloc on questions from abortion to Kyoto to Afghanistan is substantially identical with that of Liberals and the NDP? Why not form a Social Democratic Party of Canada and implement them, in Quebec and elsewhere?

In Wednesday's National Post Jonathan Kay suggested that the divisions among left-wing parties are essentially cultural. But as Thomas Sowell says, culture is a set of working tools, and there should be no taboo on discussing whether some of the gear in the shed is plumb worn out. Especially given the equally powerful cultural phenomenon, unmistakable in parliamentary committees, that Liberal, NDP and Bloc members share a political sensibility as well as a political philosophy and are very comfortable working together. It's time they took responsibility for governing.

Even the Tories would benefit; the only way they can get a majority now is for the nation to try coherent social democratic governance and decide they don't like it very much.

I'm not saying I want a Social Democratic Party majority after the next election. I just want an explanation of why the social democratic majority doesn't either.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

With the election just days away, it's not enough to declare that contemporary Canadian politics is disgusting. You need to show it. So allow me to empty upon you a bucket of slop from my e-mail inbox. It contains a lumpy mess of campaign-driven press releases the parties send out to the Parliamentary Press Gallery in a concerted and largely successful effort to prove that they are as shallow as they are mean. They manage to hit one another with a fair quantity of well-aimed mud but rarely succeed in ducking what's coming back at them, and not infrequently wipe their filthy hands on their own clothes without seeming to notice it.

For instance, the Liberals had every right to point out that Stephen Harper's March 20, 2003 speech on Iraq contained an embarrassing amount of cutting and pasting from remarks by then-Australian prime minister John Howard two days earlier. But after a Conservative staffer confessed to having been "overzealous in copying segments" of Mr. Howard's speech and resigned, the Liberals put out another, thoroughly revolting, press release saying "The story does not add up, and took seven hours to concoct" as though it were self-evidently the deliberate policy of the PM to plagiarize.

Of course it is also appalling that Mr. Harper had harried staff slap stuff together for him on a topic of such importance. And how about the Liberals catching Jack Layton assuring CTV that when NDP deputy leader Thomas Mulcair advocated water exports years ago he only meant bottled water despite clear evidence to the contrary from the Quebec National Assembly's Journal of Debates? I do not know whether Mr. Layton made up a fib on the spot, was misled by Mr. Mulcair or just accepted a flip assurance from a junior staffer. But I do know he didn't bother finding out the truth before saying whatever sounded good.

It seems they're all willing to say just anything, provided it isn't sincere, clever or in tune with the public mood. Read the titles of four press releases I got within hours of the English-language leaders' debate, plainly written before the debate even started: "Harper reassures Canadians with plan for economy," "Jack Layton dominates English debate," "Dion stands out as only leader with a plan for the economy," "Elizabeth May wins English debate." For bad measure the Greens had earlier told me "Elizabeth May wins French debate" and later described her as "Fresh from victories in the national televised leaders' debates last week." Who do any of the parties think this stuff impresses? Who do they even think reads it? And haven't our politicians got anything less redolent of the frat house to say?

I get dozens of such missives a week and on the whole I find the accusations that other parties are making unsound policy on the fly convincing. It's the tone of angry self-satisfaction that I find not merely unjustified but actively disgraceful, given public disenchantment with the whole business. OK, guys. You got them, and they got you. But we got nothing.

I am put in mind of an observation by Alexis de Tocqueville that when politics seems stagnant, it "is the time for intrigues and small parties ... great political parties are those more attached to principles than to consequences, to generalities rather than to particular cases, to ideas rather than to personalities ... small parties are generally without political faith. ... They glow with a factious zeal. ... The means they employ are as disreputable as the aim sought."

Thus this election confronts me with a new version of a familiar dilemma. It's not that I'm puzzled how to vote when my ballot seems unlikely to be decisive nationally or even in my riding; that's normal. Nor is it how to vote "strategically"; all voting is strategic. The novel problem is finding a sensible strategy for voting for decency, since no party has attractive policies and all have a repellent political style. I would sooner watch crows squabble over road kill for two hours than our leaders at a table interrupting, talking over one another and jabbing fingers incessantly.

The question is, how do you vote for decency under such circumstances? In a few ridings you have the happy choice of supporting an incumbent who seems to be part of the solution rather than the problem. In others, I say, the less happy but equally clear obligation is to try to vote out the appallingly rude incumbent regardless of doubt about the civility of any possible replacement.

Yes, our politics is disgusting. To help clean it up, on Oct. 14 vote for the person in your riding you expect is most dismayed not at their opponents' vitriol, but at the sludge pouring out of their own camp.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

When is a gaffe not a gaffe in politics? When it's untrue, apparently. Enjoy the campaigns. A classic gaffe, a career-threatening humiliation delightful to the press, is when someone expresses a home truth in plain language. Like that if a foreign nation attacked a country with which you had a defensive alliance you would defend them. You can have real trouble living something like that down.

It's an especially juicy gaffe when someone blurts out what everyone knows.

Like the NDP candidate, formerly campaign director for the B.C. Marijuana Party in 2005, who got dumped because video surfaced of him smoking pot. Surely the real mistake was made by whoever in the NDP welcomed him as a candidate without realizing the marijuana in question was the stuff you smoke to get high. Didn't the party grasp that a guy whose political philosophy was openly based on weed had probably sampled it? So why is actual video of him smoking it confirmation of anything but the obvious? (The video of the other ex-NDP candidate apparently driving after taking hallucinogens is an entirely different matter -- surprising, stupid and dangerous).

Then there's the September 22 NDP e-mail inviting me to visit their digital "Orange Room" where a video called "Stephenstein" offers 39 seconds of alternating shots of the prime minister and Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, then says "Don't Let This Fool Fool You."

I say that posting mean, childish junk on your website reveals something important about your party. But, evidently it's just good clean fun, unlike, say, a cyberpuffin pooping on someone. Blurting out your real partisan feelings only seems to qualify as a gaffe when conservatives do it.

The most interesting case thus far this fall is the amazing howler by Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden in a September 22 CBS puffball "Exclusive" full of hard-hitting journalistic observations from Katie Couric like "Relating to the fears of the average American is one of Biden's strong suits" and "You say what's on your mind and I think people appreciate that." After claiming the Republicans will take things he says out of context (but "If I have to go parse through every single thing that I'm gonna say then I'm not me"), Mr. Biden illustrated his concept of true leadership with, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'look, here's what happened.'"

Well, yes. Except Roosevelt wasn't president at the time and there was no commercial television. If Sarah Palin had said it, she'd have been pilloried for cluelessness, and rightly so. But isn't it at least as bad for Biden, put on the Democratic ticket expressly for his knowledge and experience, having been first elected to the Senate in 1972, roughly half-way between the actual inauguration of Roosevelt in 1933 and that interview? It's peculiar, in fact, that the high-priced talent at CBS didn't notice this oopsie while filming, editing and airing the segment. After all, the fact that Republicans were in power when the Depression hit had a huge impact on American politics for the next 50 years and you'd think they'd know that and so should Biden.

Wednesday's Citizen suggested Mr. Biden mostly got away with that blunder because attention was focused on "two bigger gaffes" in the same week, namely not knowing Barack Obama's position on clean-coal plants and calling one of the Obama-Biden campaign's own TV ads "terrible" because it mocked John McCain's not knowing how to send e-mail (in fact Mr. McCain has great difficulty typing because of permanent injuries from being tortured as a Vietnam POW). The latter isn't a gaffe. It's refreshing honesty with a dash of decency. So of course it's what's getting him in real trouble.

Here at home, a Tory candidate in Toronto just "resigned" after his party learned he'd stated abrasively on a blog that if Canadians weren't sissies someone would have come to the aid of that poor guy beheaded on a bus, and advocated "concealed carry" handgun laws in Canada partly to help women and gays defend themselves against violent hate crimes. And he's gay. We complain endlessly that political debate is trite, bland and vacuous, with politicians constantly trying to play it safe. But look how we treat anything frank and unconventional during an election.

On the other hand, I don't see much point in debating Joe Biden's claim that President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation on TV in 1929. It raises serious questions about his fitness to be vice president. But at least it wasn't a gaffe.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

A recent BBC poll indicates enormous enthusiasm for Barack Obama outside the United States. In 22 countries from Italy to Egypt he leads John McCain by about four to one on average, margins not seen since the last time a Democrat faced a Republican in an American election. It's one more warning to Mr. Obama's domestic supporters that he's not quite the phenomenon they think he is. This foreign enthusiasm is puzzling. Recent liberal Democratic presidents have performed fairly poorly on security and trade, and if Mr. Obama had consistent positions they might well be protectionist. Meanwhile to many of his American supporters his appeal is less programmatic than spiritual; he will heal America of divisions that allegedly run as deep as any the republic has ever known. Why this prospect would appeal in, say, Singapore or France is not obvious, especially to people who don't like America very much. But in any case it is untenable because based on a false premise. Barack Obama may be a healer, and the inauguration of a black president would certainly be good for America. The problem is simply that the premise that America is divided as never before does not withstand informed scrutiny. Not on race, not on foreign affairs, not on economics, not on anything. Compare today with 1800, when the election of Thomas Jefferson prompted a leading member of George Washington's Federalist party, Fisher Ames, to expect "the loathsome steam of human victims offered in sacrifice." The Jeffersonian Republicans in return accused the Federalists of being closet monarchists possibly plotting to hand the U.S. back to Britain, and in 1814 the remnants of the Federalist party did make a politically lethal though otherwise feeble effort to take New England out of the Union. But after a short-lived "Era of Good Feelings," by 1832 president Andrew Jackson was threatening to hang his own former Vice President, John C. Calhoun, over tariff policy linked to states' rights and slavery.

Speaking of slavery, in 1856 Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner was savagely beaten on the floor of the Senate by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks, to general Southern approval, in the lead-up to a civil war that would kill over 600,000 Americans, nearly as many as all America's other wars combined. And the man who saved the Union, President Lincoln, was himself subjected to extraordinary abuse in his day, including unflattering comparison to a baboon by a member of his own cabinet.

The Civil War was obviously the nadir. But how do today's divisions compare with Senator "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman's campaign promise to stab president Grover Cleveland, a fellow Democrat, over bank policy? From a resurgent Klan in the 1920s to Republicans washing their children's mouths out with soap in the 1930s for saying "Roosevelt" to McCarthy-era accusations of treason in high places to "Hey Hey LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?" and "Burn Baby Burn", persistent urban rumours that Nixon would put blacks in concentration camps and ridicule of Ronald Reagan as a senile warmonger, American politics is consistently rambunctious, with a dash of venomous paranoia at least as evident on the left as the right. Even the relatively placid Clinton era saw the president impeached as a wretched cad then acquitted on a bitter partisan vote.

I happen to think the United States has had surprisingly good government under this system, in part because issues get very thoroughly aired. And (speaking for the record as a hard-core conservative) I consider 2008 a fairly unimportant election in which a cranky mediocrity and a charming novice seek to replace a disappointing incumbent.

I can't muster any views more apocalyptic than that. Except that, based on the historical record, enthusiasts for Barack Obama consumed with hatred of George W. Bush are in part imagining and in part creating the very abyss of partisan loathing they claim their man can fix with a few ritual phrases and a laying-on of hands. As for foreigners, they don't get to vote and Americans mostly don't care what they think. Rightly not, judging by that BBC poll.

[First published on Mercatornet.com]

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This just in from outer space. The government is censoring reporting of the election but doing it badly. OK, it's not from outer space. It's from Elections Canada, who on Sept. 9 e-mailed the press to remind us that the law imposes strict requirements, if we report on polls during an election, about what information we must divulge.

State agents pry from us such things as "how many persons were contacted" and "the survey's margin of error."

This law is at once foolish and malignant, two qualities I personally try to avoid even in isolation let alone in combination.

As an attempt to prevent objectionable speech during an election this weird little restriction on what we can say (or, more exactly, what we cannot not say) is entirely feeble. We print journalists remain free to speculate as to what various parties' campaign strategies are and whether they're working without having to justify our claims in any way to the meddlers at Elections Canada. We can cite "experts" without having to explain our choice of which experts we call. We can even declare that nobody understands how a given Tory policy would work but that it's "crafty politics" without having to put any evidence on the table. But cite a poll and we must include statistical details or offend the truth police.

Actually the law on poll reporting is such ineffective censorship that it only says the first outlet to report it must provide all this tedious detail. Thus, for example, the Citizen could report Wednesday an Ipsos Reid poll on Canadians' diverse electoral concerns without pestering you with how many people in northeastern Saskatchewan with blue garage doors were consulted on the economy versus health care as their main concern. Which is fine by me and I expect by you as well so the government should just buzz off.

On the whole, I'm not much interested in polls and wish everyone spent more time discussing issues (like, say, censorship). Sometimes polls are slanted for partisan purposes, and other times they're flawed because normal people either won't talk to pollsters or are not entirely frank with them. On the other hand, pollsters rely for their reputation, and thus their income, on the accuracy of their results so they try hard to avoid such pitfalls. Anyway, how much information journalists provide about polls and how often we report on them should be between us, the newspaper, and you, our readers. It is not properly the business of people to whom these poll numbers might spell electoral doom. And are those in government so thoroughly on top of their more important tasks that they have time to spare on this sort of stuff?

OK, the only practical effect of this rule is to make us occasionally waste ink and paper including statistical caveats of minimal interest. Mathematicians don't need them, whereas to the average reader a margin of error plus some phrase like "19 times out of 20" is just a fancy way of saying "unless it's not" which they already knew. But the Canada Elections Act that lies behind this warning from Elections Canada was written by incumbent politicians to prevent us from doing something they fear might get them voted out. And even if statistically imprecise reporting of polls is unlikely to have that effect, inept censorship remains censorship and sets a very bad precedent. Of which this warning is not the only example.

Radio stations, for instance, are legally obliged to provide "equitable" political coverage. Which is just a soothing name for the government hovering over their reporting on the government to make sure it's not left to citizens to decide what's fair. Our election laws also silence third parties during elections. And if the state can dictate coverage to radio stations and citizens, why not newspapers? Why just harry us over fiddly details of poll reporting when they could prosecute us for unfair coverage of their own splendid selves?

I'll tell you. It's because you the voter, not they the incumbent politicians, should decide whether we the press are giving you the information you need to cast an informed vote. Always.

Instead, if I say Stéphane Dion is a Martian, the law lets you make up your own mind about the reliability of the claim. But if I tell you 68 per cent of Martians support the Liberal leader, I'm obliged to disclose how many little green men I talked to with how large a margin of error, lest you be hoodwinked into some harmful voting behaviour impossible to specify. It may sound silly rather than toxic. But once the censorship principle is conceded, it's hard to fight back if the application gets more obnoxious.

Stupid, yet unfair. How strangely Earthlings conduct public affairs.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]