Too much caffeine?

Went on The National's "At Issues" panel last night. Was maybe a little wired. (Haven't done the show in a while.) But this is a serious, serious matter: it's unthinkable to hold an election now, with so much up in the air. It's like asking the jury to return a verdict, before you've had the trial. I repeat my main arguments. Six months or a year from now, we will know, or have some idea, whether the Conservatives are ready to form a government: whether they have coherent policies, a competent team, a leader of Prime Ministerial quality. We will also know, or have some idea, whether the "new" Liberal government is as reform-minded as it claims, or whether it's the same old same old. And we will know, or at least have some inkling, who was responsible for Adscam, who knew how much, and what they did or did not do about it. Then and only then will the public be in a position to form a responsible judgment. (Chantal Hebert seemed awfully convinced we'd already found the guilty parties -- a line that fits neatly with the Martinite version of events. How does she know?) To force an election through now, barely three years after the last, without such basic information, is not democracy, but bonapartism: not a genuine exercise in consulting the people on who they wish to govern them, but a tricked-up vote engineered to produce a pre-ordained result. It is, as I said on the program, an assault on our democracy. And what mandate could either party claim, in the event? If the Liberals win, there's a risk we'll discover, too late, that they were all in it up to their eyeballs, in which case they will have won by trickery and have no mandate at all -- that's if they don't just barrack the committee and shut down the judicial inquiry, as they've been known to do before. If the Conservatives win, on the other hand, in an election that turns into a single-issue referendum on corruption, what mandate can they claim for the rest of their platform? No. We need time -- to get to the bottom of Adscam, to take the measure of three new party leaders, to know what and whom we are being asked to choose among. Your thoughts? UPDATE: Here's a transcript of the show. UPPERDATE: And the video is here, at least until the next show.