Today's By-Elections

Sayeth the Globe and Mail:

"If the Liberals lose Vaughan, is will be interpreted as a sign of leader Michael Ignatieff's inability to capture the imaginations of voters"

Is will be?  Is shouldn't be; the problem is even more fundamental:

Iggy can't capture the imagination of his machine.  The folks who show up for no damned reason except to see Liberals get elected don't want to show up.  Without capturing their imagination, Iggy loses their ability to deliver voters to the polls.

Tories aren't in a real, if still long-shot, bid for Vaughn because Harpermania has caught on with Sally Leftovers or Marty Metro-rider.  His machine, however, does get all tingly every time the Harper calendar shows up at their doorstep.  The machines are the difference.

For Iggy, the problem is Paul Martin disease (which, funnily, John Turner had too, we just didn't have a name for the disease at the time).  When someone from the blue Liberal flank takes charge of the Liberals, the party flounders.  No matter how trendy the eye-glasses or whispy the haircut, you need to be a lefty Liberal to have a shot at enduring.

Blue Liberalism trips up Blue Liberals because it is an intellectual fraud - a base of conflicting pillars assembled by equal parts fashion and emotion without any consideration for logical design.    A Blue Liberal leader can't speak coherently for more than a season because the his (her, one day) position isn't coherent.  So they end up having many, many priorities or making fake-bold statements like "Canada will be the bestest country in the world by 2017."

Back to the main point: if the Globe and Mail is allowed to make moronic whopper mistakes, so is Tarkwell.