Shades of Mister Dithers

It's clear that some of the great Obama charisma has rubbed off on me, to the detriment of the Leader of the Opposition, Count Ignatula, who has suffered a terrible drumming from some pinko journo by the name of Michael Stickings at the British newspaper, the Guardian.

Stickings leads off his hatchet job by saying, "Naive and egotistical, Canada's Liberal leader isn't the saviour his supporters believe him to be." What did the poor man do to deserve this treatment?

Sticking goes on:

"Why did Ignatieff do what he did? Because he has no interest right now in bringing down the government and thereby being compelled to share power. Because his political career has been about his own glorification, about his desire – for it seems to be the only reason he entered politics in the first place – to be prime minister. He may generously be called a chameleon, a shifty academic difficult to pin down, but perhaps more accurately he ought to be called an egotist who is sure of his own superiority and who seems to lack any real passion for the country he intends to lead..."

And on...

"With an air of haughty detachment, an arrogant sense of entitlement to leadership, limited charisma, Bush-friendly positions on key foreign policy issues, hardly any record on (and relatively little knowledge of) social and economic issues and next to no experience in the political trenches, Ignatieff is hardly the saviour so many Liberals delusionally think he is."

I must say I don't disagree on this point. The saviour is Prince Justin.

And on...

"To me, though, he has never seemed to be much of a Canadian, and certainly not enough of one to be our prime minister. It's not that he has spent so much of his life overseas – mostly in Britain and the US. It's that he has seemed to aspire actively to be anything but Canadian, and more specifically to be American. Which is fine, in a cosmopolitan sort of way, but he comes back to Canada with an air of condescension about him, as if he has seen the world and conquered it and has now decided, with the coaxing of a party eager for him to lead it back to the promised land, to sully himself in the world of politics supposedly on our behalf but really because he just wants to be prime minister, so great would it look on his resumé, a capstone to a long and successful career."

And on...

"Today's Canada is very much Trudeau's Canada, the Canada of Trudeau's vision, for better and for worse. Trudeau was, like Ignatieff, an intellectual, but, unlike Ignatieff, he obviously cared deeply about this country and sought to leave his mark on it, which he did. Ignatieff may feel "passionately and proudly Canadian", and there may be a bold vision behind his egotism, somewhere, but he has a lot to prove before he should be considered anything more than an opportunist, if not a self-absorbed charlatan."

What can I say. This is an ugly pathetic hatchet job on a good hearted Canadian politician, and I condemn it utterly.

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UPDATE: Apparently this Stickings pig used to work for Bobama Rae.