I like having older friends. Conversations can be fascinating, and they can be such a tremendous wealth of vivid historical insight into the eras before yours. Having dinner with a significantly older friend the other other night, I was, as usual, interrogating her about all sorts of stuff. Do you remember a time when divorce was still taboo? When did gambling start to catch on? Was it scandalous when you started wearing pants?

Yes yes, she replied, I’ve seen a lot. But not all social change takes 100 years to unfold. Can’t you think of a few major cultural shifts that have happened in your own lifetime?

It was a question that really got me thinking. I guess cultural and social attitudes have changed a bit in the 27 years I’ve been alive, though I feel anyone under 30 is instinctively disposed to pretend they haven’t. True social change is something only old people witness, after all.

Since then, I’ve been digging far into my earliest memories to try and dredge up revealing case studies of the past. If I ever live to be an old man, after all, it will be the memories of my youth that will likely prove the most interesting to others, since, as I mentioned in an earlier post, by the time we “millennials” die, I imagine our births in the 1980s or early 1990s will seem as quaint and distant as those of the late-era Victorians, when they died in the 1970s and 80s.

As the cartoon suggests, one of the main cultural evolutions I can honestly say I’ve witnessed thus far has been a steady lessening of what constitutes a “crude” or “offensive” act. I vividly recall that one of the first articles I ever read in the “adult newspaper” was an angry editorial documenting why Tiny Toon Adventures was among the “worst shows on television,” on account of all the gross-out humor and sass-mouth it contained. And of course anyone who grew up in the 1990s will remember the long national psychosis that followed the release of the original Mortal Combat in 1993, a game so monstrously gory that blood actually came out of characters when they hit each other.

To the extent I’m as square and squeamish as I am today when it comes to things like profanity and violence, I think a lot of it dates back to those heady days, when there were still significant social taboos against polluting the airwaves or video screens with content deemed morally subversive. Now, of course, when you look back at the first few seasons of The Simpsons the back talk seems positively heartwarming by modern standards. The once “wickedly subversive” Calvin and Hobbes is now venerated for its maudlin bourgeoisie sensibilities. Even last year’s re-release of good ol’ Beavis and Butt-head generated considerable skepticism that the duo were “edgy” enough for today’s teens.

Being gay, I suppose the other main social trend I’m obligated to acknowledge is the widespread revolution in gay rights that happened during my early years. In practice, however, I’ve always felt that the broader phenomenon of homosexual acceptance by mainstream society unfolded in such perfect sync with my own, internal acceptance that the larger societal evolution was barely noticeable until the conclusion.

I can certainly remember having no clear idea of what homosexuality even was until high school, and even then, it was mostly something discussed in a sort of confused, quiet way by even the most progressive teacher. Kids teased each other about things being “gay,” obviously, but it certainly wasn’t something I remember any of us being lectured to stop saying — as I understand today’s kids constantly are. Despite my own bias, I agreed with the majority on the student council that a “gay straight alliance” club seemed needlessly provocative and pointless in a small school such as ours, where obviously no gays existed. Now, of course, I just take it for granted that there should be openly gay people everywhere, but I do often wonder what it would be like to be a modern child growing up with the same knowledge.

But beyond gays and vulgarity, I’ve really had a hard time conjuring up conscious, surviving memories of social values that have visibly deviated over the last couple of decades. Asking other friends my age about the topic, I’ve found it’s a question that really has a tendency to stump. So I thought I’d open it up to you guys, my readers.

If we put aside the obvious spectacle of technological advancement (which, really is something every generation experiences in a broadly similar way) what would top your list of ways in which the 2010s are noticeably different than the 1980s or 1990s of your youth? I realize we all don’t have photographic memories and that evolving politico-cultural trends were hardly interesting to young kids in the first place, but in some ways that makes the whole question all the more poignant.

What left enough of an impact in your youth to give you the confidence to say “this is different now” in young adulthood?

It’s a testament to the power of social media and the increasingly biased way most of us choose to consume our news that the Canadian party system is now largely polarized on the basis of a false dichotomy that exists only in the fevered imaginations of the country’s most dogmatic left-wing ideologues. Jack Layton may have claimed that hope is better than fear, but vast quantities of Canadian progressives seem to be motivated by little else.

They scream passionate answers to questions no one is asking, and organize ferociously to quash proposals no one has offered. It’s a particularly creepy style of democracy-by-fantasy, but it may well be the new normal.

Read the whole thing here.

Well, Romney won the Florida primary, and along with Newt Gingrich the main loser was the American news media.

In a fantastic piece in New York Magazine last week, John Heilemann made the entirely accurate, but rarely heard observation that no one has benefited more from the inexplicable Newt surge than the press that’s been forced to endlessly cover and analyze it. A surprise pretender to the throne can always count on excited coverage in the midst of a coronation.

With Florida out of the way, there will be six primaries or caucuses in the coming month: Maine, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, Arizona, and Michigan. As a mostly moderate mix of states, several of which have strong personal ties to the former governor, almost all are expected to be easy wins for Romney. Already badly wounded by worsening national numbers in the lead up to this week’s vote, Gingrich will have to struggle mightily to remain competitive in February, which is very bad news for anyone anticipating another month of high-stakes political drama.

I suspect the press will work furiously to try and manufacture some anyway. The 11-states-in-one-day Super Tuesday primary fiesta, slated for March 6 of this year, is in many ways the Super Bowl of American politics, second only to the general election itself. And just as a one-sided wallop makes for a crappy football game — and even crappier ESPN ratings — a political slugfest with a predetermined conclusion is the last thing any self-respecting news outlet with an eye on the bottom line will be prepared to accept.

For several weeks now, primary coverage has thus adopted a consistently Romney-softening tone. We hear endless stories about his “liabilities,” in the form of his wealth, taxes, and cold-hearted business past, while the worst that’s said about Gingrich is that a lot of establishment Republicans seem to dislike him. For a candidate who revels in elite rejection, this is a bit like criticizing Rick Santorum for going to church every Sunday.

Frightened by the practical consequences of Romney’s inevitability, there’s an obvious effort afoot to handicap the field — and the evidence is getting harder to deny. Earlier this month the Center for Media and Public Affairs noted that Romney has received “by far” the most negative coverage of his campaign, and observed that the press has spent nearly six times as much time covering the supposedly “competitive” nature of the GOP primary as the actual positions of any of the candidates within it.

And who can blame them! As fellow political junkies, you’ve doubtlessly enjoyed the narrative the media’s been feeding us so far. You know, the one about the plucky Massachusetts moderate who has to battle with this vast cavalcade of evil crazy people before finally squaring off man-a-mano against Newt Gingrich, the evilist and craziest guy of all. Maybe you’ve even hosted entire theme parties based around the premise. I know I have.

The alchemy of transforming politics into entertainment has been so seamless and successful that most of us don’t even know who’s to blame anymore. When I wrote a recent article for the Huffington Post about why I prefer the open US primary system over cloistered Canadian leadership elections, many commenters blasted the United States for having an “American Idol” approach to picking its leaders, as if twice-weekly televised debates, endless attack ads, and Jon King’s magic touch-screen map were somehow constitutional obligations. Even when Gingrich himself points out how openly and obviously he is being typecast by the press for a villain role he never auditioned for, the commentariat’s only response is to change the script, and crudely scrawl “Gingrich versus the media” over the heading of Act III.

As spoiled gluttons of the 24-hour news buffet, it’s hard to deny that we viewers deserve a lot of the blame ourselves  Following politics has, in many respects, become a sort of fantasy football league for a certain subculture of the self-righteously smart, with all sorts of stats to track, calendars to memorize, trivia to recite, and TV specials to watch. Resigning democratic politics to an important, but minor part of one’s life — even one’s civic life — seems to require a degree of moderation and perspective most us have long since abandoned in exchange for the feisty drama of CNN and FOX.

As a political cartoonist, I obviously risk becoming part of the problem every day. The cartoonist has an enormous incentive to make politics more interesting, funny, and lively than it actually is, to say nothing of inflating the seriousness of the stakes and principles involved. The problem is one of self-fulfilling prophecy. I remember once reading the memoirs of a cartoonist who noted that the more exaggerated he would draw politicians’ hair, the more exaggerated they would proceed to wear it in real life, lest they fail to live up to public expectations. And so too, the more any agent of the press exaggerates the degree of conflict between candidates, the tightness of a race, or the importance of the outcome, the more likely it is that our politics will become precisely the sort of vitriolic, childish, reality show we all pretend to not want.

Is there a way to prevent politics from turning into entertainment, or is this just the inevitable byproduct of profit-driven news coverage in an ever-more competitive million-channel universe? Do you find yourself rooting for longer primaries and tighter races simply because you enjoy the drama? Both the right and left often complain that little of consequence actually changes from election to election, so is an overly sensationalistic press the only party to blame for the fact that so many of us continue to find politics so “interesting?” Let me know what you think.

There’s a certain weird problem that keeps popping up in the backgrounds of the men seeking to lead the forces of opposition to Stephen Harper. It’s happening so frequently, in fact, that I’m starting to wonder if it may be a symptom of some larger problem with the state of the Canadian left, rather than a mere quirky coincidence.

Thomas Mulcair, the Quebec MP who is currently the favored candidate to replace the late Jack Layton as leader of the federal New Democratic Party, is a dual citizen of Canada and France. This was a status he voluntarily sought following his marriage to the French-born Mrs. Mulcair (who is also, weirdly, a one-time failed conservative candidate for the French parliament) and he has gone through the effort of repeatedly renewing his French passport over the years.

Now that Mr. Mulcair sees himself as a future Canadian prime minister, his open willingness to declare loyalty to a nation other than the one he seeks to lead has raised more than a few eyebrows. In his typically passive-aggressive way, Prime Minister Harper has already made his own feelings on the matter known.

“Obviously, it’s for Mr. Mulcair to use his political judgment in the case,” he said last week. “In my case, I am very clear. I am a Canadian and only a Canadian.”

We may recall Harper offering similarly passive (and not so passive) put-downs to former Liberal opposition leader Michael Ignatieff, who, though not a dual citizen himself, had lived many years in both the United Kingdom and the United States, and openly self-identified as an Englishman and American during both periods of exile.

We may also recall that Mr. Ignatieff’s predecessor as leader of the Liberal Party, the now-long forgotten Stephane Dion, also faced a Mulcair-style controversy over the fact that he too held French citizenship, though in this case it came via his immigrant mother, rather than wife.

So that’s literally three opposition figures in a row, each facing a dual-loyalty scandal. Dion nipped his quite quickly, renouncing his French citizenship prior to the 2008 federal election. Iggy, whose problem was somewhat less resolvable, did not, and had to basically spend his entire election being hammered on the issue. Mulcair, for his part, has simply doubled-down, insisting he has done nothing wrong and has nothing to atone for.

There are two basic ways to interpret a leading politician who elects to hold citizenship in a second country, and in my view, neither of them reflect very well on the individual’s character or politics.

The first is the obvious symbolic problem. Canada may not be in the midst of war with France, but the two countries are separate, and have different interests, priorities, and goals. In cases where their interests clash, we expect Canadians — especially the prime minister — to side with Canada without having to perform any complex mental calculations beforehand.

Granted, when framed like this the issue seems far more melodramatic and dire than it’s ever likely to be in practice. We can only assume that a politician who seeks to become prime minister of one country and not another has established his hierarchy of allegiances pretty clearly, and to imply otherwise is to cling to a overly literal interpretation of the situation. But this too is problematic.

A hierarchy of allegiance reduces citizenship of any nation to a mere hobby or passing interest, something no more substantial than a lifetime gym membership or frequent shopper card. You take it as seriously as you want it. It automatically calls into question the allegiances of all other Canadian dual citizens, as well. Who’s to say a lot of them don’t have the same nonchalant attitude towards Canada that we expect Mulcair to have for France?

These varying levels of seriousness lead directly into issue number two, which is the larger question of why. In practice, the only real reason to hold dual citizenship — especially if one is, in fact, more loyal to one country than the other — is to pull some sort of scam, either financially or bureaucratically. Mulcair, for his part, claims that he sought French citizenship mainly so he can get through European customs faster, which, if true, really brings the idea of flags of convenience to new heights.

Many EU-Canadian dual citizens retain their passports in case they “want to work in Europe someday” and thus step over all those poor suckers who had to immigrate to the continent in the traditional grueling way. Others may retain their second identity because their second country has better tax rates, or a better pension plan, or better health care, or cheaper post-secondary education. Something to watch from afar until the moment is right to return to and milk for all it’s worth.

This sort of thinking represents a fairly perverse and greedy attitude towards the state; the idea that governments exist simply to offer goodies to those savvy enough to find them — loyalty, allegiance, and sacrifice be damned. In an era of deficits, over-spending, and an unsustainable handouts, this is a particularly troubling worldview for any politician on the left to be openly spouting, since it personifies so much of what’s been wrong with the last three decades of entitlement politics. If one buys into the idea of politician-as-role-model, then a worse example of personal restraint and self-reliance vis-a-vis the welfare state would be hard to find.

Dual citizenship is legal in Canada, and considering the difficulty in enforcing the alternative, probably always will be. It remains a policy without any obvious benefit to the country, however, other than lowering what are already very meagre bars to entry and residence, and reinforcing a permanent “ask what your country can do for you” culture. Mr. Mulcair is entirely within his rights to dig in his heels and demand to be judged by the same standard by which the law judges everyone else, but it doesn’t say much about his ability to be a Canadian leader of great principle or pride.

Legal loopholes are rarely the stuff from which inspiring political careers are formed, after all.

In a particularly dopey piece in the Globe and Mail this week, Gary Mason commented that “the Premier’s efforts to cast her Liberal administration in a bluer hue has had all the subtlety of football’s end-zone dance,” which is certainly the beleaguered party’s preferred narrative at the moment. Yet in terms of actual, real-world sightings of ostentatious conservatism, Mason could only spot two: Clark’s recent import of “a top federal Tory strategist as her new chief of staff,” and the fact that she recently sat beside Prime Minister Harper at her son’s pewee hockey game.

I certainly hope she didn’t strain something from all that reaching out.

Read the whole thing here, and be sure to leave a comment!

One reason why advertisements today are so much uglier, louder, and crasser than the classy advertisements of the Mad Men era is because ugly, loud, crass ads sell products better. In other words, advertising tried the high road and the low road, and ultimately concluded that the low road was better for the bottom line.

The same seems to be holding true for democratic politics, particularly in the realm of political terminology. In more mature times, terms like liberal, conservative, socialist, and communist actually had fairly finite, neutral definitions, meaning there was a right and a wrong way to use them just as there was a right and a wrong way to use adjectives like “new” and “improved.” When President Eisenhower described himself as a “liberal” in the 1950s, for instance, he was evoking the definition most commonly used by historians and economists, that is, one who desires a free society and free markets — literally, “one of liberty.” Now, of course, the term has been corrupted to mean something else entirely, essentially, “one who is liberal with things;” liberal with spending money, liberal with drugs, liberal with sex, and so on. “Socialist,” in turn, is now simply “more liberal,” while “conservative” or “moderate” is “less liberal,” or in some cases “liberal more slowly.”

All have become weapons of some sort. In these sound-byte times of ours, the only reason to identify another man as a member of some larger ideological pack or movement is to discredit him through association, and in a tight political race the more negative the association the better. So President Obama is called a “socialist” for no other reason than it ties him to a certain stereotype of discredited government in Europe or Cuba or elsewhere, while Governor Romney is a “liberal” because that reminds us of Obama.

Now, there’s obviously some modicum of truth in both designations — Obama clearly has some mildly redistributionist tendencies, and Romney’s political past was clearly quite permissive and non-judgemental — but the question becomes how far does one have to veer in either direction before you qualify for the worst label imaginable? If we’ve now decided that “socialist” is an acceptable tag for anything slightly more redistributionist than the alternative, then why not “Marxist” or “communist?” Why not “dictator” or “terrorist,” while we’re at it? If you abandon the pretence that strict definitions matter in favor of what’s “close enough,” why not just go all the way all of the time? After all, isn’t everyone a little bit terroristy, on some level?

These are not new complaints, of course. Back in 1946, in one of his most famous essays, George Orwell griped about politics and the English language noting, among other things that “the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable,’” and that terms like “democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.” The end result, then as now, was a political culture in which it was almost impossible for anyone to actually have a concrete idea of what anyone actually stood for, since, as Orwell put it, almost all attempts at political labeling were simply crude partisan attempts “to make lies sound truthful.”

Obviously, there is a genuine cleavage of opinion in contemporary western politics that falls into two fairly clean and identifiable camps. In all societies, there is generally a faction of the population who has something to gain from a stronger, larger, and more activist government, and a faction who benefit from being left alone. The former faction, likewise, tends to believe that human culture is constantly being perfected and horned, while the latter generally assumes we’ve already figured out workable answers to most of the important questions. Within both tribes there are extremists, moderates, and passives.

My question to you guys would be this: what do you think are the most accurate terms we can use to describe the political splits and movements we see today? Are “liberal,” “conservative,” and “socialist” meaningless slurs discredited beyond salvaging? Or do you think we all just need to get over ourselves a bit and accept that labels will always be a necessary part of making a complicated world easier to comprehend?

We all like to believe we’re unique snowflakes that no man can ever classify, I understand, and certainly there’s no modern phenomenon more tiresome and predictable than a young person who proudly declares that his opinions “don’t really fit into any box.” But does that mean every label always has to be an inaccurate insult?

The first is The Iron Lady, which is a movie so awful and poorly-made I simply cannot believe anyone approved its release.

Other reviewers have danced around this fact, but I want to put it as bluntly as I can: it’s not a movie about the life and times of Margaret Thatcher. It’s primarily a fictionalized, speculative drama about her life as an old woman, long since retired from politics, and the difficulties and frustrations she experiences as she mourns the death of her husband and copes with her own descent into senility.

There are flashbacks to her political life, certainly, and these are all the stunning clips you see in the remarkably deceptive trailers. But the Iron Lady is not even a movie that uses nostalgia as a simple framing device to tell a story of the past, in the way, say, Hoover dictating his memoirs was the frame of J. Edgar. The point of the flashbacks is primarily to reveal character and emotion, not history. The three main characters are Thatcher, her daughter, and the ghost of Denis, and the climax of the plot is the ailing widow gaining the courage to clean out her dead husband’s closet. It’s not even worth harping on about all the important political episodes the film fails to show because, again, that’s not even the point of this movie.

I think anyone who’s interested in politics and politicians has often wondered what life is like for former heads of state after they leave office, and how they cope with a life of anonymity and weakness after years as the most powerful and well-known person in their nation. In the extremely unlikely event she would have agreed to it, a documentary about post-politics Thatcher might have been quite fascinating, and perhaps a different director could have made a compelling little film about the sad retired life of some other foreign prime minister who’s considerably less famous and important. But to ruin what should have been one of the great bio-pics of our time with one of the greatest actresses of our time is simply inexcusable, and outright depressing in its carelessness.

Changing gears, entirely, this Christmas I asked my parents to buy me a new computer monitor. Get me a big one, I said, and they bought me a 27-inch Samsung, which cost them around $300. At the risk of sounding like a spoiled brat, it wasn’t very good, but that was more my fault than theirs. I had done absolutely no research into how monitors work, and since returning it I’ve realized that you actually have to be a pretty discriminating shopper in order to come home satisfied.

My monitor set-up. Dell Ultrasharp attached to a Macbook pro.

Unless you are willing to spend over a grand for one of those super top-of-the-line Mac Thunderbolt things, most monitors on the market today max out at a resolution of 1920 by 1080. Which really isn’t really that great. As this clever XKCD comic notes, that’s an amazing twice the resolution of your average smartphone. In practical terms, this means there’s a very clear limit at how big a 1920 by 1080 screen can get before everything  just starts looking stretchy, blurry, and pixely, and in my experience that’s somewhere around 23 inches. I guess if all you want to do is watch movies, a stretched display doesn’t matter much, but if you’re an artist like me, and sharp focus and crisp pixels are important, anything above 23 is going to cause more problems than it solves.

Color also appears to be something most monitors simply aren’t interested in bothering to do right in any serious capacity. Apparently if you take color seriously, you’re supposed to buy some manner of $60 color-matching contraption to calibrate your monitor, since merely fiddling with the “RGB balance” settings won’t do much. Again, this might not matter much to some, but using a double-screen monitor set-up, as I do, I find it incredibly irritating to pull windows from one screen to the other only for all the hues and shades to brighten or darken or yellow or whatever.

I originally returned the Samsung for a smaller model, then returned that second Samsung again for my current monitor, a Dell Ultrasharp 23-inch, which I am incredibly satisfied with. It  also cost 300 bucks, but has much better sharpness, color, and clarity than the 27-inch Samsung, and did not require any special ports or cables I didn’t already own. It’s also capable of swinging around to provide a “vertical display,” which I must say, has already become one of those how-did-I-ever-live-without-it-experiences, in terms of how much more user-friendly it’s made word processing and web-browsing.

But I ordered it online, and only on the recommendation of a particularly tech-savvy friend, which was unto itself fairly revealing of how needlessly difficult monitor shopping remains for a layperson like me. I suppose it’s uniquely frustrating because few things seem like they should be easier to select based on nothing more than looks than a big, shiny, glowing screen.

As I write this, Jon King on CNN has just announced that New Gingrich has swept South Carolina, and swept the Evangelical vote as well. The fact that this victory comes in the immediate aftermath of the revelation that Newt had actively pursued an “open marriage” with his second wife and current mistress-spouse makes me think that social conservatism is basically finished in America. The larger agenda of the so-called “Christian Right” has been effectively whittled down to only two identifiable policy positions — opposition to gay marriage and abortion — which can now be tacked to the campaign of just about any immoral hack in order to receive a pass. No higher standards need apply.

Gingrich’s success in this most Bible Belty of southern states only seems surprising or shocking or hypocritical if one assumes Evangelicals actually take their faith as seriously as they loudly claim to, which of course all statistical evidence suggests they do not. Polls have argued Born-Agains divorce just as much, if not more, than the national average, and have crafted bafflingly inane scriptural logic to excuse this, a sin that Jesus was extraordinarily explicit in condemning. They’ve also largely made peace with sex before marriage, recreational sex, sodomy (the heterosexual kind, at least), contraception, and a fair bit of promiscuity and adultery, too. In short, Evangelicals neither hold nor practice sexual standards that are that different than the godless American mainstream, just as they have long since ceased to care one way or another about other old-timey sins such as gambling, immodest dress, swearing, and pornography (fun fact! Did you know Gingrich is considered a founding father of online porn?).

The Republicans’ stalwart opposition to gay marriage and abortion that pundits so eagerly attribute to Evangelical influence is really best understood as a sort of vestigial so-con tail on what is basically a libertarian-plutocrat party for libertarian-plutocrats who may or may not also happen to be Christians. With homosexuality becoming increasingly tolerated in Evangelical circles (for the obvious reason that it’s arbitrary and hypocritical to demonize same-sex relations in their own epoch of anything-goes bedroom morality) it’s hard to think that gay marriage bashing is really an issue with any long-term legs. As I discussed in my review of the seminal book No Right Turn, it’s almost impossible for a conservative Christian in modern America to not have at least one gay friend, relative, or co-worker, all of which makes it that much harder to be particularly animated by the threatening “otherness” of homosexuality.

Abortion, similarly, has always been much more of a science and ethics question than a strictly religious one, and as our ability to observe and study in-womb development becomes more vivid and revealing, will likely continue to be. The issue already transcends the standard left-right dynamic (even atheist Christopher Hitchens was pro-life on scientific grounds), and its strength as an issue of polarization has just as much to do with unrepresentatively radical pro-choicers exerting control over the Democratic Party as the Christian Right’s hegemony over the GOP.

The end result of all this is more politicians like Newt Gingrich. But more politicians like Romney and Obama too, who also would have failed religious litmus tests in earlier eras where genuine so-cons held actual sway. If the 2008 election was seen as some critical evaluation of how far Americans had come on the question of race, 2012 certainly deserves equal historic status for finally settling the age-old of whether or not flawed personal lives can be disqualifiers. The Democrats already  made their position known some time ago, and now so too have the Republicans — their most religious, conservative faction and all. Case, evidently, closed.

Acceptance or indifference does not, however, automatically imply a lack of controversy. Whether or not we regard Gingrich’s many marriages — and the adulterous ways they ended — as particularly offensive or scandalous on some base, moral level, they do nevertheless imply a certain level of recklessness and arrogance that may be troubling in a purely secular sense. This is actually the great contradiction of liberalized politics: how does one pass judgement on serious personal misconduct without looking like a prude? The massive applause Gingrich received during Thursday’s debate for dressing-down Jon King’s “despicable” questions about the Speaker’s personal life revealed many Republicans are clearly swinging too far in the direction of self-righteous ambivalence, even if that entails nominating a true joke of a candidate in the process. They’re so over sex scandals they’ll make their flag-bearer a man who’s had so many he makes half the country’s skin crawl.

Whether we like it or not, elections are still about more than just ideas, and politicians are more than empty vessels who spout them. Personal trustworthiness, reliability, competence, maturity, and focus remain qualities as desired as fiscal responsibility or international knowledge, but also remain traits that are hard to measure through anything but a person’s decidedly human characteristics — including how they’ve handled themselves in trying private moments. In other words, it’s Newt’s cruel and egomaniacal conduct in handling his affairs that’s actually more worrying and revealing than the affairs themselves, and the single largest reason even a secular, liberal media can keep hammering him over it. And why they will eventually hammer him straight out of the race in the unlikely event he somehow bamboozles his way through the rest of the primaries.

Perhaps someday we’ll learn to transcend even this, and declare absolutely everything about politicians’ personalities off limits for judgement, just as we have for race, gender, religion, and (now) personal misbehaviour. But I’d be curious to know what kind of America that would be.

In contrast to the man’s constant waffling elsewhere, foreign policy is the only real realm of “Harperism” where the PM has never significantly recanted, ignored, or undermined his own past views — an occurrence only made possible by a shifting political culture that has moved foreign affairs to a conveniently low rung on the ladder of priorities. It’s the one realm, in short, where Harper still sounds like the unabashed right-wing Republican we were always promised (or feared).

You can read the whole thing here.

The Liberal Party of Canada hosted a big national convention in Toronto last weekend, an event frequently cast as the beleaguered party’s final chance to renew public interest in their faltering brand.

And it seems they were successful.

In contrast to your typical Canadian party convention, which tends to be little more than a gigantic self-congratulatory love-in in which absolutely nothing of use or purpose is discussed or decided, Liberal Fest ‘012 was uniquely notable for raising and debating a number of genuinely interesting issues, many of which will now help redefine the party itself. Even more admirable, in fact, was the party’s willingness to cast a critical eye towards the future of a few of its own sacred cows — an act of enormous symbolic importance that seemed to signaled the party has, at least in some small sense, actually taken last May’s rebuke from voters to heart.

Along with their trademark do-anything, say-anything to win opportunism, in recent years the Liberals have been known mostly for being the most leader-centric of Canada’s three major parties and the one most consistently hostile to any sort of parliamentary reform. In contrast to both the new Conservatives and the NDP, which trace their roots to populist uprisings against politics as usual, the Liberals have always sought to give politics as usual a fair shake.

Historically, the Libs have been the most passionate defenders of the unelected status quo on Canada’s Senate, the most jealous guardians of the sweeping powers of the prime minister, and the most outspoken champions of a rigidly disciplined House of Commons entirely subordinate to the whims of the executive. Tellingly, the most famous indictment of the Canadian system of government, The Friendly Dictatorship by Jeffery Simpson, was written from the vantage point of the ten-year Chretien administration which, in Simpson’s mind, had raised the traditional Liberal preference for checks-and-balances free one-man-rule to a truly grotesque level of horned perfection.

Inspiring, then, that the Liberals were willing to entertain a number of motions last weekend to begin chipping away at the very authoritarian infrastructure they had so eagerly  help construct.

The party became the first in Canada to openly debate abolishing the monarchy and replacing the Crown with a democratically-elected president, for starters, something Liberals have long feared as a possible check on prime ministerial power. Then there was a motion on limiting the party leader’s ability to hand-pick candidates for federal ridings (he can currently override the local party association’s nomination process whenever he figures he’s found someone better) and another one on removing his ability to veto policy resolutions passed by the party rank-and-file. All three of these failed, but hey, admitting the problem is at least the first step, right?

A significant motion that was passed, however, expanded the definition of “registered Liberals” to anyone who merely self-identified with the party, and in doing so broke with the standard Canadian practice of limiting party membership to only those who register and pay dues to the party bureaucracy — currently 1-2% of the Canadian population. Once interim-leader-for-life Bob Rae shuffles off, the next Liberal boss will therefore be elected nationally by anyone who wants to vote in the election — a true Canadian first.

Though this brings the Liberals closer to the American system, where one’s identity as a Republican or Democrat rarely requires more than stating a preference, the party also explicitly rejected a few other US traditions that some hoped would follow. A province-by-province primary election was voted down, for one, which must disappoint anyone hoping that the Lib’s first “open-to-all” leadership race would be a multi-month attention-grabbing media event on par with the current battle for the GOP crown.

Likewise, in a concession to the old guard, the new self-identifying Liberals or (“supporters” as the Party now dubs them) will not enjoy all the same powers as formal fee-paying “members,” and will instead occupy  a lower tier of what is now an essentially layered party. “Supporters” will only elect the leader, not local candidates or the party executive, and will not be able to vote on resolutions at future conventions — a move which ensures the open-membership idea can be easily revisited at some future Liberal gathering without all the noobs stacking the deck.

All this many appear to be thin gruel in the larger context of Canadian democratic reform, which, as this cartoon hopefully illustrates, is a topic that frequently remains ossified in debates many other countries settled in the 19th century or earlier, but I’m still willing to give the Liberals two cheers for their efforts. Large-scale political reform often begins with subtle cultural shifts, and expanding the franchise in something as vital as Canadian party leadership elections is a shift almost without precedent. Indeed, it’s probably the most meaningful reform any party has made regarding its internal affairs since party conventions themselves were introduced in the late 1940s. Should their experiment prove successful, it’s entirely likely the “supporter” model will be emulated by the NDP, Conservatives, and various provincial parties as well, and in doing so help finally give millions of Canadians — rather than just a tiny, fee-paying elite of campaign staffers, family members, and donors — a genuine say in picking the men and women who exercise so much influence our political system.

Of course, any mention of Liberal Con 2012 is not complete without at least some token mention of the party’s most controversial policy resolution of the weekend: a 77% endorsement of the complete legalization of marijuana. Though the idea is one the Liberals have flirted with for decades, 2012 marks the first time the party has ever endorsed it full-bore, going much further, in fact, than the mere “decriminalization” that’s usually discussed.

The  press, both at home and abroad, has offered much titillating coverage of the declaration for obvious reasons, though its actual long-term relevance to Canadian politics may be minimal — precisely because of the party reforms that did and didn’t get passed alongside it. As mentioned, the Liberals voted to retain the right of their leader to veto unpopular policy resolutions, meaning that come the time of the next federal election, no future Liberal candidate for prime minister will be automatically obligated to make pot legalization an official plank in his campaign platform. Mr. Rae, for his part, has expressed only cautious interest in the idea, in the typically measured fashion of a politician trying to square his own pragmatism with the idealism of his base. Should he ever try to run for permanent leader, however, one imagines he’ll have to come out of the closet far more solidly for one side or the other.

After all, there will be a lot more people listening now.