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COMMENTARY
January 14, 2006
The decency deficit
While it has been a subject for exuberant mockery among some liberal Democrats, I was appalled, this week, to learn that Martha-Ann Alito, wife of the U.S. Supreme Court nominee, was driven in tears from his Senate confirmation hearing. She had been listening to senators such as Ted Kennedy accuse her husband of concealing the most ghastly and extraordinary views -- of being a closet racial and misogynist bigot -- on the basis of some ridiculously fluffy guilt-by-association. When a Republican senator was reduced to clarifying that Sam Alito was not a bigot, Mrs Alito could take no more. She had soon composed herself, however, and returned to sit by her husband’s side.Now, Ted Kennedy is a special case -- a man whose own sense of decency was established when he left a young woman to drown, after driving his car off a dike bridge at Chappaquiddick, and spent the rest of a long night with his cronies, trying to figure how to spin it with the police and the press, rather than reporting what had happened. We discover what a man is, when we see how he acts in desperation. It is amazing to me that a man like Mr Kennedy could continue to be elected to public office -- as a dog-catcher, let alone as a Senator -- but it would seem the electors of the State of Massachusetts present another special case. Senator Kennedy does not make me angry, he makes me sick. I am probably made of sterner stuff than Mrs Alito -- I am a boy, after all. But it is worth imagining what it must be like, for the entire Alito family, to face the sort of allegations made by such a man. As Senator Graham later explained, after apologizing on behalf of the Senate committee to Judge Alito and his family for what they were being put through -- you must also wonder what calibre of nominee will expose himself to this kind of questioning in the future. I think of Mrs Alito -- of the many Mrs Alitos -- as I look at the vicious and deceitful Liberal Party attack ads now being aired on Canadian television. They go lower than anything previously seen in Canadian politics. Much lower. Each one (including the anti-military one, that continued to run in French after being withdrawn in English) was personally approved by Paul Martin -- a man who is actually our prime minister. A man who is coming to resemble Ted Kennedy more each day. The Liberals insinuate that the Conservatives have a “secret agenda”, that Mr Harper secretly harbours the desire to starve the poor, to enslave women, to oppress racial minorities, to be a puppet in the hands U.S. President Bush, and to put jackboot soldiers on Canadian city streets. (Look at their ads: I’m not making this up!) Like the charges of bigotry against Judge Alito, the slanders against Mr Harper are so self-confuting, that they can only appeal to an audience which is itself ignorant and possibly indecent. But they do more. Who could wish to run against the Liberals, when you see what they are capable of doing? When you realize that, no matter what you do or say, or have ever done or said, you will be slandered and demonized to this degree? (Yet, stand we must.) And what if this “attack strategy” is shown to work? What if it does succeed in arresting the popular flight from the Liberals, or even in lifting them back over 30 percent in the polls? What does that say about the Canada that has been created in the Liberals’ own image? Once again, I don’t feel angry, I feel sick. Even though I have nothing whatever to do with these ads, or any part of the Liberal campaign, the very sight of them makes me feel dirty, tarnished, used, insulted. And the thought that Canadians might fall for such a thing, makes me feel ashamed. How dare they allege “hidden agendas”? The party that never campaigned for same-sex “marriage”, just received a study it had the Justice Department commission on the benefits of legitimizing polygamous “unions”. They will never campaign for that, either. We need more than a clean start with a new Conservative government. We need a Liberal Party brought so low, that it must rebuild from the ground up. A party capable of disowning its immediate past, and the indecency of Paul Martin. Our own decency depends upon this. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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