I kid you not. And I thought they didn’t believe in negative campaigning. Dan Gardner (talk about muscular writing) of the Ottawa Citizen reveals what’s at the core of Jumpin’ Jack Layton’s thought, Vladimir Ilyich he is not. No ringing call for “Peace! Bread! Land!”
New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton faces a problem that has plagued the left for 30 years: Nationalization and wealth redistribution have vanished from the intellectual climate.
Photograph by: Mark Blinch, Reuters, Ottawa Citizen…Layton elaborated. “If you look at the new approach to energy, for instance, it’s all based on decentralization, particularly around energy efficiency. My buddy Amory Lovins likes to talk about negawatts. If you can save a megawatt cheaper than you can produce one, then go out there and save it. And by the way, you’ll also create more work by doing that. And we’ve got lots of negawatts out there. We’ve got lots of homes, we’re moving into the heating season, and they’re turning up their furnaces, if we have people out there with caulking guns, insulation, and new tripleglazed windows, all over the country, people apprenticing, young people having jobs in their local area, you wouldn’t have to fly to the tarsands for a three-week shift or a two-week shift and then go back home for a week. You’d be able to work right there in your own community, upgrading the building stock.”
Now, I like triple-glazed windows as much as the next guy, but we were talking about global politics at a pivotal moment in history. This sounded like the third bullet point on page six of a really boring campaign brochure. Could there be a clue here about why the left is failing to seize the day?..
The piece is Norman Spector’s “The column I wish I’d written” today. Well chosen. As for the V.I. guy:
Nice threads, at least Jack has that in common.
Mark
Ottawa
Jack is an idiot. First, going to work for two weeks at the oilsands will probably earn the worker the equivalent of three months pay for a ’round town’ apprentice home renovator.
Second, the people who really need help fixing up old homes are usually the elderly, living on fixed incomes. I suppose in Jack’s world all these folks have lots of spare cash to pay for renovating their house, eh! But in the world I live in, these folks are scraping the bottom of the barrel to get by.
And third… even if there was lots of cash available for upgrading homes… how many times do you think a house needs upgrading? Once, in my world. So the question becomes… once all the houses are fixed, what do all these people trained to fix houses do?
Right, apply for a job in the oilsands…
[...] The Dippers’ Big Idea: Negawatts [...]
Can we not just have an end to this idiotic notion that communism is a viable option.
It has shown to be so against human nature that it is virtually impossible to get humans to comply.
Only the Borg have been able to do that and it took major cyborg implants to do it … not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Layton and the NDP won what, 37 seats? He gets more attention then his paltry seat count affords him. He’s propped-up by the media, not his abilities.
Heh – you pretty much had me at “Jack is an idiot”!
Maybe the CPC should finally stop trying to be all things to all people, kiss off those 37 seats (where the voters are all pretty much on government dole, have you been to the NDP ridings in Hamilton lately?) and come up with a USEFUL PROPAGANDA PROGRAM of their own.
Jack Layton is still in business with the frickin’ crazy, loony tune NDP whacko party because he is good at serving up propaganda to the media. The media -needs- column inches and TV soundbites, and they get that from Smilin’ Jack.
Lets face it, every single policy proposal from the NDP in the last 40 years has been complete insanity. Look at what Boob Rae wrought in Ontario, which still echoes to this day. They survive because they fling red meat to their nut case base (have you ever talked to these hard core NDPers? They’re f-ing crazy and not that bright) and because they feed the media machine.
The CPC’s current strategy is to strangle the media, which while satisfying isn’t really working all that great. When you freeze out the TV wankers none of the TV audience knows what you’re doing. The TV audience is certainly shrinking, but it is also still pretty large, particularly in places where people might be disposed to voting Liberal/NDP. Couch-Potato Land, if you will.
Now take a look at Rob Ford in Hogtown. He can’t afford to kiss off half of 416, he’s got to engage these morons. His first media event what’s he doing? He’s got Don Cherry in a pink jacket with flamingos on it, calling the Toronto city council a bunch of PINKOS.
Propaganda doesn’t -have- to be a lie to work. It just has to be loud, audacious, and right up in your face. All the CPC has to do is repeat, verbatim, the policies of the Liberals and NDP from the last 20 years, and then say WTF?!!!! really LOUD.