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COMMENTARY
July 18, 2009
The good news
Confession of a rightwing Christian newspaper pundit: there are mornings (yesterday was an example) when I look over the headlines in the newspapers, and Internet, and think: Where do I start? A hundred fresh horrors to choose from: Surely it is time to despair.One should never despair. A good Catholic will stop at desolation. "Despair" is not a passive condition, a mere reaction to events -- as my reader will learn from the moral theologians -- but instead a quite voluntary abandonment of all hope in salvation. Whereas "desolation" is merely an emotional response to the appearance that everything on the current horizon is -- (and here my reader must insert some powerfully vulgar expression, unsuitable to the chaste columns of a family newspaper). Indeed, in this country, in the near future, despair might become a capital offence. Francine Lalonde's private member's bill, now before our House of Commons, will make it entirely legal for a doctor in Canada to prescribe lethal "medications" to terminate your angst-ridden 18-year-old, the moment he asks for it. The notion that "perhaps we should hesitate before we proceed with the slaughter of another human being" was swept away by our courts in the case of abortion (in 1988). We may now reasonably foresee a vast new field of murderous carnage becoming accepted as a glib fact of life. Do not waste your breath arguing that Ms. Lalonde's bill will never pass, because it is too radical, and that some Canadian compromise will be found, in which we agree to kill only troublesome oldies and the painfully ill. The thin edge of the wedge has long since been inserted, and our progressive elites have seen the online poll in the Globe and Mail. They know that Canadians are "ready" for euthanasia; that we will make no bigger fuss over that than we made over same-sex marriage; and that anyone who does make a fuss can be isolated and demonized as a warning to the others. Either we take our pill through Parliament, or our legal elites will contrive to administer it through carefully orchestrated court cases. Meanwhile, the Quebec College of Physicians has advanced the cause (of doctors killing patients) by gratuitously slurring the distinction between intentional murder and palliative sedation. (Fear all policies that begin in euphemism.) This is just one issue, however, and I turn to it after reviewing the myriad extraordinary developments in the United States. To make a long story very short: it is now crystal clear that President Obama's campaign assurances of moderation were obfuscatory. He is transforming U.S. policies, from established centrist to extreme left, right across the board, through about two dozen radical "policy czars" commanding bureaucratic agencies beyond the practical diurnal reach of a Congress that his party anyway controls. This is a clever revolutionary tactic, because when any of these czars makes a policy decision that blows up politically, Obama himself can play the "moderate" again, negotiating a middle way between the czar in question, and any potentially Democrat constituency that might be offended. Meanwhile his public relations team tells us, "Don't call them czars!" and the mainstream media dutifully oblige. It would take a book, not a column, merely to survey the current horrors. One little example: Patrick Leahy and Harry Reid have embedded Canadian-style "anti-hate" or "thought crimes" legislation in the current U.S. defence appropriation bill, so that senators who don't want it must also vote to cut off funding to the troops. Count on this legislation being used to stifle their political adversaries, in America at large; just as "human rights" codes are used up here to chill the opponents of the Left's various social engineering schemes. From Trudeau's Omnibus Bill of 1969, forward, I have found, consistently, all my adult life, that this is how the Left operates: in the slimiest and most deceitful available way, in order to short-out public discussion and manufacture the fait accompli. And I cannot think of an exception: not one piece of leftwing legislation that I can recall, in the last 40 years, in Canada or the U.S., that was placed before a legislature plainly with adequate notice and no administrative tricks -- except, perhaps, in "try the waters" private-member bills, such as Francine Lalonde's. Rejoice and be exceeding glad. Or at least, let us be fairly cheerful, for in the longer view, God continues to work through nature, and what is unsustainable cannot be long sustained. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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