Joe Who?

It is a mystery why the media have given so much play to Joe Clark's declaration in favour of the Liberals, given that a) he has said much the same thing before, and b) he is entirely irrelevant. Mr. Clark led the Progressive Conservatives to their worst-ever popular vote showing in 2000, just barely over 10%, where they remained, more or less, ever since. When the time came he was repudiated by 90% of his party in the vote to merge with the Canadian Alliance. So Clarkism represents, at a rough estimate, somewhere between 1% and 2% of the population. His decision is revealing enough of the man, however. Everyone else in the two parties has had to put a large amount of water in his wine -- everyone, that is, except Mr. Clark and his followers, such as Sen. Lowell Murray, those loud exponents of compromise and tolerance who are utterly incapable of compromise and supremely intolerant of anyone's views but their own. If the party will not follow them, they will do their level best to destroy the party. Hence Clark's taxonomy: David Orchard is a great Conservative, but Stephen Harper is "dangerous." Messrs Clark and Murray are examples of that uniquely Canadian type, the fanatical moderate (Robert Fulford's term, I believe), for whom the answer to every question is to take the middle path, regardless of whether a) there is a middle path, b) there is anything to recommend the middle path as policy, or c) today's middle path is likely to remain in the middle for long. In their vanity and illusions, their bitterness and vivid self-importance, they are the direct descendants of the Bourbons, who famously had "learned nothing and forgotten nothing." The Liberals at least make no bones about the opportunism that underlies their lack of principle. But only the Red Tories could make lack of principle into a principle. UPDATE: Now he's endorsing Ed Broadbent. Question: How was this man allowed to pass himself off as a Conservative all these years? Should we now conclude he was in fact a double agent?