[LINK] Some columns from The Globe and Mail

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's opinions page is filled with interesting columns today.

• From Lawrence Martin comes "This campaign will come down to one geeky guy", concerning the possibility for Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion to do well. "[A]anyone with half a cranium bets on Team Blue [Conservatives]. The only hesitation in so doing is that Mr. Dion has shown himself to be a serial defiler of the odds. He has shredded them no less than four times. The first was when he took down the allegedly overpowering Lucien Bouchard in the unity debate. The second was when he was turfed from the Liberal cabinet after Paul Martin took office but scraped his way back in. The third was when he pulled a global agreement out of the hat as chair of an international environment conference in Montreal. And the fourth was when he came out of a lunar module to win the Liberal leadership race. [. . .] Somehow, the pale professor has been able to use his naive and nerdy unimpressiveness to his advantage."


• Margaret Wente has fun in "The culture wars are baaack!". "For a while back there, I thought the culture wars would not be a big deal in this election. We had two serious men of substance who had vowed to grapple with the serious issues of the day - the staggering economy, America's shattered moral leadership in the world, the health-care mess, loose nukes, stuff like that. Silly me! It turns out the real issues are abortion, evolution v. creationism, the role of God in public life, why Sarah tried to get her no-good ex-brother-in-law fired, what's up with her mother-in-law, and whether she herself was pregnant when she got married."


• As Jeffrey Simpson points out, "John McCain as a maverick is so yesterday' "So forget the image of Mr. McCain as a maverick. He used to break with the party occasionally. But as he zeroed in on the nomination, he became more of a fundamentalist Republican - another way of saying that he now epitomizes orthodoxy rather than radicalism, sameness rather than novelty. And, sadly, a politician who's learned little from the fiscal, ethical, foreign policy and social policy failures that produced what his own party's platform calls 'public disgust.'"


• Noah Richler, in "Didn't we see this movie?" points out that American political life has been stealing scripts already written from popular culture (did Bristol see Juno at one point?) and wonders if that might be one reason why (among others) the Canadian government is cutting back on funding to the artistic community.