Joe Clark book takes on Harper government's 'almost adolescent' tone

The man has a point. The current governing lot are stuck in the rootin-tootin' George W. Bush international relations mindset. They probably think that it's a cool place to be, even.

Not really. Clark is still the guy, thanks to his refusal to budge on the inevitable PC/Reform merger, that kept Chretien in power for a few years longer than he should have been. The guy is like the Al Gore of Canada. Never really did anything but fail but still managed to move upwards.

His time in the spotlight was just a bit before I became a political junkie, but my impression of him is still a guy I'd like to have a beer with, but the intensity of the redness of his red Tory position would hurt my eyes.

But his bitterness about the Conservative/Reform successes after he had been punted sort of disappoints me.

.. a very intelligent man, he was up against another very intelligent man at his point in history. He was not responsible for the downfall of the "Red Tories". Brian "Muldoon" takes credit for that and Kim Campbell took the fall.

I'm sure the 5 people that buy the book will be mighty impressed.

Joe was the last decent PM we had. Decent in a moral way. And I like that he was willing to be up front about a tax increase, not play to the morons. Bring back the real Tories, instead of the slimesuckers we have now.

I so regret that I got on the Trudeau bandwagon at the time. I always liked Bob Stanfield (how can you not like a guy who's gonchies you wear. - Oh, wait, that sounds wrong), but he wasn't hip enough for times. Canada made a big mistake when they rejected him based on that phony pic. Same with Clark - I laughed at him like everybody else, but in retrospect I saw what a decent guy he was. Guess that's why he couldn't be PM for long - go to the pig sty, you're going to get mud and shit on you.

Clark was also fool enough to try to govern with his minority like he "had a majority". As a result his government lasted a shorter time than the reviled Stephen Harper's minority did. Despite this total lack of wisdom on Clark's part, not to mention his apparent inability to do basic math, it's Stephen Harper (the allegedly reckless ideologue and never-compromise tyrant) who gets all the slander and rotten partisan commentary thrown at him while ol' Joe "1+1=3" Clark has been regarded as some wise sage. Factually there's no real reason for the media to go running to Clark every time he decides to drop off some bomb of wisdom, but apparently there's some myth about him that requires regular servicing and attention so having to put up with some commentary from him (which for some reason is always aimed at his fellow conservatives and never at the Liberals or Dippers) is just one of those things that has to happen. Kind of like how the US media, during both the Bush Jr and Obama years, goes running to losers like Gore, Kerry, McCain, Palin, or Romney when they feel the need to give a sitting President who actually won an election his weekly savaging.

double

I think what people are looking for is a right-of-centre economic platform without the anti-government, small-minded recklessness of the Harper government. This government is basically a dance between the PMO and the media, because it is constantly in election mode.

Stanfield losing was a disaster IMO. He was the first politician to lose because he lacked charisma and a TV presence. And Trudeau was so damned pretty and cool and neat. But we did pay for that shortsightedness.

And yes, Kim Campbell got screwed.

Harper is rapidly achieving my personal double doom status. He is drifting left economically and hard right socially. If this keeps up he will transform into a Tea Partier as they are now.

There's no evidence of anything that would indicate Stephen Harper isn't a solid centrist in an old school British Tory/Dwight Eisenhower sense of the word. He hasn't allowed a single bit of social conservative nonsense to pass and he's kept the economy on the solid middle ground between the TeaBircher insanity in the US and the socialist shitshow the NDP always wants to see happen. He's certainly no Red Tory like Joe Clark is but he's also nothing like whackjobs in the US like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, or any of those other insane hate-fuelled misanthropes are.