First Andrew Coyne (of all people), now the FP’s Jacqueline Thrope:

“The argument has been a minority government can’t make bold moves, but bold moves a majority may make.”
Now, I’ve been railing against that and other cowardly thinking for years, but I’m neither a policy wonk nor a party hack. I’m just a nobody blogger who admits to being more interested in Principles than practicality.
Sadly, much of the “conservative” blogosphere reflects the Party’s unprincipled, unimaginative tendency. Lots of boring number crunching, and poll analysis and half-baked strategy, from bloggers with an awfully fluid/threadbare idea of what “conservative” means. It’s all about “getting elected.” It’s a game or a horse race and you just want your “team” to win. It’s like the World Cup but with neckties.
How’s that working out? We’ve now got a “conservative” PM who you know doesn’t believe in Global Warming, pretending to believe in Global Warming and pretending not to notice that we notice that he’s lying. He wants us all to buy a certain kind of light bulb now. Politicians — “conservative” politicians — are telling us how to decorate our homes, people. Hello??
But for the timid, grasping, careerist wonk bloggers out there, dying to get tapped for a Party job one day, none of that matters. (Why so many of them are male, and so many of us mouthy, outrageous, say-anything, more idealist bloggers are female remains a minor mystery…)
(I’m obliged to add, however, a word of congratulations to our boys for not going the way of so many US and UK pundits on “our” side: the popular conservative talk radio guest/author who hired a hooker to suck his toes, or to suck hers, I try to forget; the far greater author who liked to be spanked — yes, I know, he is British after all, and if he’d been the “top” I wouldn’t have cared, but the position of men in the Movement should never be prone; the presidential candidate who wanted to install his mistress in the mayor’s mansion; the other one who dumped the mother of his children, the one who kept the family together while he was in the Hanoi Hilton; the soon-to-be candidate prone to getting b-js in parking lots with other men’s wives… And remember (if you can bear it — I mean, have you ever seen Boris Johnson?) the “Sex-tator” Scandal. Thank you, one and all, Canadian boys, for keeping your pants zipped in public.)
Anyway, Jay Currie (I’ll forgive him for being a libertarian — for today) has actually come up with an ok conservative platform — one that contains actual conservatism and not the Liberal Lite pap we’re tied to now.
Not all of this is laudatory, and certainly much is as far from “conservative” as one can get (legalized drugs and prostitution — ladies and gentleman, does “doing your own thing” really sound like a “conservative” principle to you? Really? Really??)
And I’m going to pretend that Jay just forgot to credit my idea from earlier this year, of paying every status Indian in Canada a million bucks to shut up forever.
Otherwise, worth a read and a discussion.

More

Normally, when someone pleads to the judge “I had drugs on me by accident!” my BS-O-Meter spikes. Of course, normally the person asking the bench to suspend disbelief isn’t an anti-narcotics consultant involved in the collection and disposal of tons of illicit drugs on a daily basis.
If information surfaces next week that shows Bert Tatham was using his official position as cover to mastermind a vast international drug-smuggling cartel, I’ll eat my words. Until then, I can think of no reason that Canadian diplomats, the United States State Department, the government of Afghanistan, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime shouldn’t aggressively intervene on this man’s behalf.
By this standard, Canadian soldiers making a connecting flight through Dubai last fall could have been charged as well, for the heinous crime of soldiering downwind.
Update: Bert’s brother comments over at my blog:

I’ll ring in. I’m his brother. He was there working on a contract through the US state dept. He was leading a team of Afghan nationals to help farmers find other crops to grow in place of Poppy. Not eradication.
He was carrying 2 year old, dried and previously lanced poppy flowers as artifacts from his work there. 0 narcotic value. In hindsight a bad idea of course.
He was on occasion called by the Afghan police to witness the burning of confiscated drugs. These burns were very noxious as one can imagine. Hash is everywhere there and passed about freely and often shows up in food even. He is baffled as to how the small chunk got on him but not hard to imagine as a mistake. He laundered his clothes very carefully prior to leaving.
…
I would also add that he regularly briefed and advised Canadian forces brass on the “bad guy” activity in the region.
so yes, he is one of our boys.

Rod Dreher:
“The US media, by and large, gives the leadership of the Muslim community in America largely uncritical treatment, and accepts their duplicitous words at face value. In ‘Islam vs. Islamists,’ we meet a French Muslim filmmaker living under government protection after having not once but twice gone undercover to document Islamist radicalism in Europe, including the ‘double discourse’ of Islamists saying one thing to a non-Muslim audience, and quite another when talking to Muslims. I’ve seen a related phenomenon in person on several occasions, in which Islamist leaders mouth soothing banalities about peace, love and tolerance, but get angry when you point out contradictions between their self-serving rhetoric and the reality of what they believe and advocate. Watching the film last night, I gasped at the grainy clip of several women being stoned to death — aired after an Islamist imam in Canada said that adulterers should be stoned to death. I’ve heard the very same thing come out of the mouth of a Dallas lay Islamic leader, twice. (…)
“To be perfectly honest, the film does not give any indication of how widespread the more liberal interpretation of Islam put forth by Dr. Jasser, Sufi Sheikh Hisham Kabbani and others is. One of them interviewed, can’t remember who now, said that the great majority of US Muslims just want to get on with their lives, and reject the violence espoused by a radical fringe. But — and this is important — he said that their political views are based on an Islamist perspective, which blames America and the West for everything wrong in the worldwide Muslim community, and which wallows in conspiracy theories.”

“I had to go to Canada, Toronto, to renew my work visa, about 8 months ago. And I went through Minnesota and I stayed with a niece of mine. She came to Canada about 9 years ago from Zimbabwe. She’s married, and she has 4 children. All four children were born in Zimbabwe in southern Africa. She was telling me — she told me this story herself.
“One day in the kitchen, her children were all very excited, because there was a big ice-hockey match, between a Canadian team, and the Sabres, I think, in Buffalo. And they were all very much, of course, for the Canadian team. They were saying, ‘Mama, we are really going, we are really Canadian, we really want the Canadians to win!’
“And she said she brought all the kids into the kitchen, and said, ‘Listen. Don’t you ever forget. You are not Canadians. You are Muslims.'”