Essential Topp advice on Harper vs. Democracy: "new opportunity for NDP if they can offer a better alternative WITHOUT OVERPLAYING THEIR HAND" (my bold). Any careful reader will know how unwilling Topp is to even hint at criticising NDP normally, so this was most important part, which he was trying to get across to Dippers. I also worried about this, given NDP's recent past, and danger it posed to CAPP & everyone. It was what infuriated CAPP folk & led to Shilo Davis quitting NDP. But somehow, the message doesn't seem to be getting through. Topp, CAPP, Davis, doesn't matter who warns them, too many Dippers can't/won't see forest for the trees. what does it take, Layton & Broadbent themselves? This is all inspired by post by a prominent NDP blogger, who also appears in the National Post, and just penned what may be the stupidest or the most dishonest post I have ever read. It moved me to comment on his blog, it was so bad, in so many ways. I reproduce my comment below. And I hope this post, in which I have tried to distinguish responsible Dippers from the irresponsible, and the generous tone of my previous post or this one will help convince paranoid Dippers that I, Liberals, Greens, Bloc, non-partisans & CAPP do not act out of some evil desire to do them in, and that they should have the goodness & good sense to see the big picture and do the right thing. I know many will deplore reactions such as that of the Dipper blogger I noted, and are not behaving in this way. I hope they will be able to prevail on their more immature colleagues to do likewise.
COMMENT REPRODUCED
I have read you enough to have thought you knew something of these matters and were not blindly partisan. But this post, which I first saw at the National Post, is a terrible dispointment, It is possible that you honestly don't understand that Ignatieff's proposals are stricter than the NDP's, since there would be limits on even a majority government (delay, debate, committees running, etc.) rather than the NDP's all or nothing approach. In addition to these limits, placed in the Standing Orders (and here I would have assumed you understood the importance of that, although, judging from this post, perhaps not), would be a requirement to get House agreement to break them so as to prorogue without respecting one or more of them. This combination doesn't just make these limits more stringent on minority governments than the NDP's worthwhile initial proposal, they impose limits on majority governments as well, that would, as Standing Orders, be extremely hard to break. This proposal subjugates minority governments more than the NDP's, and limits majorities, which the NDP didn't think through. Since this is perfectly obvious to any fair-minded unbiased observer, you might have followed the NDP's official first reactioon, and welcomed them as a basis for discussion. That you did not indicates that you are either so lost to partisan passions as to be incapable of fair judgement, or too deliberately ignorant to understand. If it is an honest matter of ignorance, and you wrote such a dyspeptic post not because you are rabid but because didn't know what you didn't know, in which there is no shame, then you should read my post and the two links embedded within, to educate yourself.
But if you knew Iggy's proposal was better, on its merits, and still wrote such a screed, then that is truly shameful, and counterproductive to the cause of all good faith democrats. And I must admit, that since we are in a very sensitive period of trying to keep CAPP together and move forward with the democracy movement, and since Shilo Davis & CAPP organisers have stated how sickened they were by NDP attempts to hijack rallies for partisan purposes, and since you chose to have this piece of misplaced anti-Iggy furor as your Nat Post signature this week, where it plays into the hands of the anti-CAPPers by attacking the leader of their principal opposition, incites divisions among pro-democrats, and does so in the most public forum available to you, it is hard to see how this was honest ignorance and not vile unfounded demagoguery, designed to undermine CAPP, worthy of Harper. Maybe not. Maybe you are just another useful idiot of the Right, another of its objective allies. But having skimmed some of your previous writings, that's hard to believe. I have been a much more bitter critic of Iggy than you, for longer, but fair is fair: he done good, and better than NDP. You should be absolutely ashamed of yourself for doing the worst possible thing at the worst possible moment.
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