Necrescent Rex Murphy Slams NDP for Seeking to Replace Leader

View here:

http://www.cbc.ca/thenational/indepthanalysis/rexmurphy/story/2011/11/24/thenational-rexmurphy-112411.html

You would almost think his privately ordered Sea King dropped him off at the wrong port.

Still, good to see Rex really back.  Cough, cough, dribble.  Rex sure did take that opposition to task (never one to touch sitting Conservatives, Rex), calling out the NDP for having too many people in the leadership race while they should have been making hay in the House.

Oh, I see.  The NDP should have had a dessicated, candidateless “race” like the one that brought Jim (who’s got a chair, give me 50, give me 100, who’s got a, there’s a 200, who’s gonna give me 3?) Prentice, and traitor Pete and electric Steve together.  Or a Liberal coronation in which, in the end, a looney-tune candidate named Martha Hall-Findlay actually did use her ludicrous candidacy as a springboard to being a respected, durable MP.

Or maybe Rex, the Conservative fartcatcher, knows something we don’t know.  Rex’s boy, Harper, promised fixed elections (anyone who doubted Steve wasn't bilingual. . .).  No matter to you that Steve cut and run from that promise before the ink was dry (just great strategy, in Rex’s mind), but the next election is supposed to be _some years off_ (save another prorogation, which would give Rex another opportunity to exult at the genius of his paymaster).  If the next election is many years off, and if the Tories have a majority, and if the NDP is the opposition, then why would the NDP not want to have a big wide-open race right at the beginning?  In his desperate ideological attempt to heap calumny upon the NDP, Rex said the NDP was leaving the field open to the Liberals.  With an election years off.  That Rex, he *does* know something simple non-Conservatives don’t know—Rex clearly has it on the inside that Steve-O will prorogue again at first chance to shore up the fake “election dates” promise, a la Putin.

Triumphally touting the Conservatives, Rex observes that the NDP, by having a leadership race, gave the Liberals “oxygen” and “centre stage.”  So comical is Rex’s evidenceless assertion that, when one looks around in vain for support for it, one can’t even find his Tory cohorts sifting his excreted husks for repacking.  They were all a bit lost on that one, studying the ground for traces though they might.  By having an actual leadership race, Rex concludes, the NDP (years from an election), have given the Liberals a “critical break” at a “crucial time.”  Those resurgent Liberals, united behind everyone’s favourite, Bob Rae.  Makes you wonder what Rex would think up if the Liberals were the Opposition.  No doubt makes Rex, too, after a fifth of Jameson’s.

I guess the amazing thing about ideologues is that they never have to account for themselves.  Let’s set it up, here and now.  Today is early December, 2011.  Next time we have an election, I invite everyone to reflect on Rex’s reference to a “critical break” at a “crucial time.”  Again, of course, Rex is just mailing in his pure ideology; his public pay stub probably reads: “Tory hack: hired for Harper.”

It’s true—there have been so many entrants into the NDP leadership race that it does start to look a bit silly, and opportunistic.  One can clearly see that the NDP is thinking, “hey, we’re the govt in waiting, and I (insert candidate name) want to make sure that I’ve got a high profile when we stand on the promised land.”  Kudos to those veteran NDP caucus members who have stayed out.  But look at the NDP field so far: there really aren’t that many also-rans.  The race as it stands now shows a vibrant, eager party with intriguing and ambitious and talented people jostling for position, just like the ’84 Liberal race (the fog of that actuality would find Rex on a dory, facing outwards, desperately yanking at himself for Tory inspiration).  Still, when you look back on the ’84 Liberals (Chretien, Whalen, Munro, Macdonald, MacGuigan, Turner, etc. etc.), they do seem a rather seedy and opportunistic and old and male and establishment bunch.  The cherished right-wing media where Rex finds his home criticizes the NDP candidates for all singing from the same hymnbook, but strangely neither Rex nor his media pals ever apply that reasoning to their own treasured favourites.  Could it be that Rex wants to go up in a government ‘copter to shoot fish before he passes on?  Heaven knows he’s given enough service, on his knees.

*If* Rex could set aside his partisan politics for just an instant (he can’t, of course, for he was bred into it from diapers, and he’d never eat for free at Ruth’s Chris again), and set aside for even an instant his slanted, triple-hooked morality, then he might actually hail an engaging leadership race.  Anyone reading will note, for example, that I have been able to refer to several, just in this post alone.  No matter which party they involve, leadership races, for better or worse, often provide some of the best and only fora for contemplation of our nation’s present and future policies.

The Tories have clearly shown that they are driven by ideology and ideology alone—build the prisons, and those who have uncommitted crimes will come—so why not see what a host of aspiring politicians, astonishingly younger and more diverse and more gender-balanced than the Tories—have to say? 

Rex would never eat really high on the hog again, despite being pensioned off on the public CBC teat.  Oh Rex, we pay for your rants you probably wrote when you were a curly-headed rowing lad.  You’ve got your pension and you are not well, not well.  Go away and let someone capable of latitudinal thought take over. 

zr