The Liberals are Having a Party

Watching Michael Ignatieff address the Liberal Party convention last night was easily one of the most fun moments of my entire life, at least in the political sense. But let me first off say that Mr. Ignatieff is an excellent speaker, an obviously intelligent man, and worth listening too, at the very least. But it wasn’t anything Ignatieff said himself that compelled me to sit down at my keyboard and actually type something. It was the obliviousness of the audience and their inability to read between the lines on so many of his remarks, demonstrated by the knee-jerk applause to every pause in his speech, that spoke volumes to me.

It was particularly funny, because so many in that room look to Ignatieff as the next Pierre Trudeau of sorts. Yet based on their reaction to him, and some of the things he said, are seemingly unaware that this man supports the US-led war against Iraq and Ballistic Missile Defense.

There was a funny point in his speech where he started to talk about Canada’s decision on BMD, to which the audience suddenly broke in to drown him out in applause. It was funny because Ignatieff was visibly annoyed by this knee-jerk reaction as he was trying to make a broad appeal to the Liberal Party to make decisions in the best interest of Canada, and not out of spite for Americans. He was to trying to make the point, very diplomatically, that we should not pull out of land and sea based BMD over some blind fear of the weaponization of space. The Young Liberals in the room clearly had no grasp of the point he was trying to make and cheered him on like some rock star.

Something tells me, that had many of the people cheering him had the cognitive capacity to actually understand the points this guy was making, they might not have been cheering so loudly. Well, either that, or they are a bunch of lemmings.