More Reasons Not To Vote for The Green Party

I'm excited about voting on October 10 for two reasons. One is that I'm a political geek who gets a thrill out of civic participation and I haven't voted for a while, since I was living overseas. I also love the game of politics - the back and forth, the attacks, the counter-attacks. As Hunter Thompson said, it's better than sex. (And he should know, because he did a lot of drugs, which instantly grants authority on all political matters)

I'm excited about this election, even though we are swimming in a rather shallow pool. McGuinty has done a mediocre job, and there's that broken promise thing, which is a good example that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Or at least those who don't pay attention to recent events are doomed to cock up the same way.

Voting Liberal has always struck me as eating at McDonald's late at night. You're hungry, everything else is closed, and it will do. At least you know what you're going to get but soon after you finish there's that sense of mild regret, vague dissatisfaction and being bloated. You're not hungry anymore but you're not fully satisfied and there's that recognition that you'll be in this situation again and make the same mistakes.

Not that John Tory is mounting a good counter-insurgency. I was with him for a while (as my personal demons wrestled with the prospect of voting for the same party that had Mike Harris in power) until his little goof with 'the theory of evolution'. (Good political theatre witnessing the backpedaling of his staff. This is the stuff I love.)

Being a disrespecting, disputing son of a bitch, I don't think the government should give money to any religious schools, no matter the faith. (And yes, my two brothers went to Catholic school, but that was because it was closer to our house than the pagan public school that I went) If you want to set up a school and teach that an invisible friend has control over your day-to-day life and that aliens seeded the earth eons ago which lead to humanity, than sure go ahead, but don't suck at the public teet for the funding. Have a bake sale or a bingo or a stone an adulterous woman raffle.

NDP? Are you kidding me? The ghost of Bob Rae still haunts Ontario.

And then there's the Green Party, which seems to be trying hard not to get my vote. The recent plan to add six more public holidays is an obvious ploy to get votes and as an obvious ploy, it's rather good, as long as you don't read the fine print. We are behind in the number of public holidays compared to other countries but I don't understand the comparison to Europe. Spain has the most public holidays and it's hardly considered an economic powerhouse, except in the lucrative bull-fighting cape industry.

My main problem with the Green Party is that they come off as a bunch of self-righteous elementary school teachers. And I don't mean the strict authoritarian hard-ass elementary school teacher (why are those always British?) but the loopy, floral dress wearing 'children are the future' elementary school teachers who show films in class about Inuit throat singers and make students build paper-mache bird feeders.

From Frank De Jong, leader of the Green Party in Ontario:

"It gives people more time to spend with family and gardening and cleaning the house and that makes people feel awful good about themselves and then they feel better at work," party leader Frank de Jong said yesterday in an interview.

If he had a real job he would know that the day back at work from a holiday is the worst day -- the holiday is over, back into the rush hour commute, the splitting headache from the 24 of Moosehead that you drank while eating three pounds of BBQ ribs.

Who ever is running the Green's provincial campaign must of gone to the same school of political savvy that the federal campaign operatives went to. They should have pulled out the over-sized hook and yanked him off stage by the neck. But, they let him continue:

But Mr. de Jong offered little insight on the economic impact of half a dozen new holidays.

"This was our decision when we wrote the platform that this was an appropriate number. These are, I suppose, arbitrary decisions of the platform writing team," he said.

"No, it's not based on anything. How do you quantify these things and how do you figure out what is the optimal number of holidays for a human being? That's too hard for the Green party to ascertain. We'll leave that to loftier academics and such."

Loftier academics and such? What do you mean, smart people? Aren't these the same academics who keep telling us that the world is burning up because of global warming? You know, all those eggheads that produce the evidence that justifies the existence of the Green Party.

I also like the admission that these are just arbitrary decisions of the platform writing team. They, what, rolled dice to see how many days off we get? Why stop at 6? Why not 12? Every weekend a long weekend!

I expect Mr. de Jong to appear in his next photo shoot wearing a shirt that says "Hey, don't ask me, I'm just a politician!"


Lof