Extremism in the pursuit of moderation is no virtue

There's a lesson in the Clark tantrum, however, for Conservative sufferers of the nobody-here-but-us-moderates neurosis: You can do as much as you like to show off how unextreme you are, how unencumbered you are by serious policy differences with the Liberals, how desperate you are to curry favour with the CBC/Globe/Star nexus, and you will still be labelled as far-right religious wackos -- sometimes by fellow Conservatives. You do not make an accusation disappear by conceding its validity. UPDATE: In the last few years, through various makeovers on the way from Reform through the Alliance to the "new" Conservatives (to quote the English, though strangely not the French version of the Harper ads), the right has more or less adopted the Progressive Conservative position, which is to say the Liberal position, on a host of issues: immigration, bilingualism, multiculturalism, abortion, etc. Lately it has ceased talking about referendums, serious spending cuts, or privatization. Harper now says he would not have sent troops to Iraq, but would only have offered "moral" support. Meanwhile, the Liberals are now saying they are open to the use of private providers within the public health care system, and will not enforce the Canada Health Act upon recalcitrant provinces -- positions they had earlier denied, and had even earlier pilloried the Alliance for suggesting. Question: What distinguishes the "new" Conservatives from the Liberals? Will the Conservative platform amount to a pledge of cleaner government (trust us) and lower taxes (paid for out of the "hidden" surpluses the Liberals aren't telling us about)? To be clear: I'm sympathetic to the Liberal consensus on a lot of these issues. In some cases I'm even to the left of them. But I don't view the conservative position as shameful, or something to be hidden from sight, and I want to see voters who hold these opinions properly represented. Quite frankly, I'd like to have to agonize before voting Conservative. If I can't have a party that embodies all of my views, I'd like the choice to be between, on the one hand, a strongly federalist, socially liberal and fiscally cautious (if not conservative) Liberal party, and on the other hand a decentralist, socially cautious (if not conservative) and strongly free-market Conservative party, with democratic reform as the wild card. Instead, it looks increasingly like a choice between a Liberal party that, because it is divided, stands on all sides of every issue, and a Conservative party that is united on precisely the same basis.