Enough already

Babble on.

I spend far more time defending our American cousins from the more unenlightened here north of the border than I do criticizing them, so I feel I've earned the right to say this to our blogging friends in the U.S.: enough with the unjustified bragging, already.

As Michelle points out, Ed Morrissey is the hero in this. Morrissey should win a journalism award. While cynics may be justified in saying that Morrissey won’t get anything but a cold shoulder from press prize committees (ie, he didn’t “get Nixon,” he’s helped get a Liberal) this bias may be fading. Many Canadians know what Morrissey accomplished by insisting on the truth and by providing a forum for discussion and genuine dissent.

With all due respect to Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, Austin Bay, and Captain Ed Morrissey, Captain’s Quarters did not bring down the Canadian government.

What I said back in November bears repeating:

Let's start with the overblown idea that putting Gomery inquiry testimony out in the public sphere a few days early way back in April triggered the election this week. As I mentioned at the time, the publication ban was a temporary one - if Gomery has really and truly wanted to bury it, he would have heard the testimony in camera. And that was eight months ago. Since that time, Gomery's inital report has been published (the fact-finding portion - a second report with recommendations to prevent a recurrance of this sort of abuse of power will be forthcoming in the early spring), and it actually exonerated Paul Martin. Much of the information was already available back when another non-confidence vote was taken, and the Liberals won that one (although they shouldn't have been allowed to - they lost the confidence of the House of Commons a week before the vote, and only survived it by bribing a defector from the Conservatives with a juicy Cabinet post).

If the government's defeat had been precipitated by Adscam testimony, it would have gone down long before now.

In fact, it's not the scandal that triggered the election at all. Jack Layton's nineteen-seat NDP party propped up the Liberal government in exchange for $4.6 billion in budget concessions back in June. They tried to extort even more out of the government earlier this month, and when they were rejected, they decided to pull the plug...

I enjoy reading every single one of the American sites I reference above. But I exhort each of these pundits to please, please, please stop saying a blogger was responsible for anything the Canadian Parliament or the Canadian voter did this year. You're doing your American readers a disservice by misinforming them, and you're hurting your own credibility with Canadian readers.

Get this straight: if the Liberals had caved in to NDP demands in November of this year, we'd still have a Liberal government tomorrow.

Nothing Captain Ed or anyone else said about AdScam would have made the slightest difference. It's about time everyone stopped saying it would have.

Babble off.