Removing the NDP From The Game Board

Last April 25th I wrote this post about why I had that I had quit the NDP.

At the time I quoted NDP MP Pat Martin saying regarding the NDP game plan, " "We want to do to the Liberals nationally what we did to them in Manitoba: remove them from the game board."

Today, less than a year later, that same Pat Martin is singing from a different hymn-book.

Today he's saying that the party may never be anything more than a fringe player and that one of their options for maintaining some kind of future relevance may be a coalition with the soon to be off the game board Liberals. He assumes this is because the NDP has become a party that has bored people "...into a kind of stupor..." and that "...nobody has any idea what we stand for anymore".

Bored into a stupor didn't become a synonym for royally pissed off did it? Maybe while I was on vacation?

Nobody knowing what you stand for hasn't become polite speak for enabling the most right wing government we've ever had, has it? Or maybe it has come to think of it.

How about this, Paddy me lad?

You're in danger of becoming little more than a perpetual fringe player because your party's traditional base is composed almost entirely of people for whom the existence and continuation of Canada as a progressive socially tolerant democracy is an article of holy writ.

A great many of those people feel betrayed by the leadership and caucus of the 2006 New Democratic Party. No one would have imagined it possible that the NDP would not merely tolerate the hardest right government in our shared history but would work in concert with that government against the party which has several times in our history joined together with the NDP or it's precursors to bring to Canadians the most enlightened social legislation on the North American continent.

Jack and the rest of you threw out the party's history and several of the party's traditional political alliances on a roll of someone else's dice that you didn't even bother to check and make sure weren't loaded. You're like a country boy who comes to the big city for the first time and loses his wallet and car with all his luggage to the first fast talking bridge salesman he meets.

Is this indicative of the qualities of judgement voters might be looking for in a governing party?

Feh!