Hey Liberals - Lick Your Finger, Stick It Up In the Air, Way Up

There was a time you didn't have to tell a Liberal how to read the winds of change.   Of course that was before they (were) moved from Sussex Drive to Stornoway to Motel 6.

Change, however, is very much in the air whether it's in the Middle East, Europe or even the United States.

The Right is losing its grip.  An entire generation, more even, is saying "enough" and demanding their own New Deal.   They've seen what the Right pulled on their parents and grandparents ever since that half-wit president and his handlers took over three decades back.   They've witnessed the massive, unearned transfer of wealth, security and dignity from the working classes to the new aristocracy and their corporate masters.   The usurpers stole their wealth, stripped their political power, pilfered their jobs and pensions - but did they also have to make off with their dignity to boot?

To those who foresaw the Occupy Wall Street movement the surprise isn't that it happened but that it took so long to show up.   This was "Casting Bones and Reading Entrails 101, a beginner's introduction to making sense of the obvious."   Hell, the signs were all there, everywhere.   Environmental calamity, concentration of wealth, class suffocation and the dismembering of opportunity, the unfettered rise of corporatism and the financialization of economies.  You had to hold your nose to avoid the putrid stench of decaying society.

And what were the Libs doing all this time?  Why they were giddily traipsing behind their own Pied Piper, Iggy the Impossible, as he led them out into the deserts of the Right in pursuit of Stinky Steve Harper.   They Z-Igged when they should have zagged only to discover that the Canadian voting public wasn't willing to follow them, wasn't interested in a Conservative-Lite option.   Ignatieff and his Ontario cabal of handlers sucked what fragile life remained straight out of the Liberal Party.

And now?  Who knows?  Even under the leadership of Rae the party languishes, drifting along dispirited and irrelevant, waiting and hoping for a new Messiah to replace the last failed Messiah.  Rubbish.  What would any truly first-rate leader want with this atrophied, impotent relic of a political party?  What remains worth salvaging?

Oh, but what about the namesake, the Liberal Party's own Gandhi?  Please.  Of the great Pierre's three sons, the one who alone might possibly have emulated his father rests at the bottom of a very deep and cold mountain lake.  No, look elsewhere if you want the voting public to somehow again take your party seriously.

But, perhaps, the Liberal Party needs a fresh coat of paint if it is to attract the leadership it so sorely needs.  A fresh coat of paint in the form of a rededication, fresh and bold principles and policies that speak to these urgent times.   Dedicate the party to environmental remediation and adaptation.  Commit to social equality and fairness.   Restore media diversity and freedom.  Restate the limits of corporate influence and power and harness them to the service of the nation and people.  Reclaim Canada for Canadians.

A time of struggle and change is upon us.   Great challenges lie ahead.   The Liberal Party risks being overtaken and buried beneath these events.   Tomorrow is no longer an option.  It's sink or swim.