Count Dizzy Strikes Again

Michael Ignatieff can't help himself. The smell of bitumen is simply irresistible to the man. He's so drawn to it he can't bring himself to say a bad word about the ecological catastrophe the world knows as the Athabasca Tar Sands. To the contrary, Iggy is Big Oil's man in the Liberal Party of Canada and they know in Iggy they've got a winner even if he's a dead loss for liberalism.

Yesterday His Igness put in an appearance at the University of Alberta trolling the empty Wild Rose Sea for Liberal votes. Perhaps sensing that the good folk of Alberta are possibly even less wild about him than progressives, he's reported to have encouraged supporters to go door-to-door, chanting, "Iggy ain't such a bad guy." He said that, he really, truly, did. He wants his supporters to go bleating that at strangers' doors. Cue the clown car.

Sticking with his theme that Alberta is the "driving heart" (or at least the lower alimentary canal) of the Canadian economy, the LPC's in-house gravedigger chimed, "We're going to be in a hydrocarbon future for a long time." He followed that up with the same, conditional bullshit. "The key thing is to make it sustainable -- to create an industry that has great working conditions for the people in it, that drives down excessive use of water and that gets CO2 under control." Perhaps while he's at it he can come up with the key to turning lead into gold.

Iggy admonished his supporters to stop considering Liberals the natural governing party. "We're now the official opposition. We can't go to the country and say, 'The timeout's over, give me the keys." Don't worry Iggy, they won't. Then again, given the utterly pathetic job you've done as leader of the official opposition, who would?