One Lives In Hope That One Day, Canada Will Have A Proper Socialist Party.

Anything would be better than Jack Layton's Afghan Fantasy: "That Jack Layton’s trippy prescriptions for the ills that ail Afghanistan are less a persistence of noble left-wing internationalist traditions and more along the lines of black-leotard interpretive dance from a post-modern alternative universe will not be a surprise to anyone who has followed the NDP leader’s pronouncements on the matter. . . In all my visits to Afghanistan, the one firm conviction I have reached is that Afghanistan’s democrats need less 'help,' not more, from the country’s neighbours, and more help, not less, in the form of hard-headed solidarity and objective support from proper democracies like Canada. It may cause people like Mr. Layton to reach for their patchouli oil and smelling salts, but that solidarity must include young men and women, in uniform, with guns."

At some point, I just gotta say: I give up. First the NDP howled and hollered when Canadian soldiers were sent to Kandahar because the Yanks were still running things down there with their silly "Operation Enduring Freedom" - It should be NATO! After NATO took over and Canada was leading ISAF in Afghanistan and the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team (a rebuke to the Americans, in fact) it was all "This is a George Bush style seek and kill mission! Bring the troops home!" Then we were told that Canadian soldiers shouldn't be doing "development" and "aid" work. Now that Canadian soldiers are getting out of the bang-bang down in Kandahar, we have Jack Layton complaining about the "military" aspects of the troop-training role we've taken on at the UN's request and at NATO's request.

I mean, imagine that. There is still a "military" aspect to what our soldiers are doing in Afghanistan. A "military" aspect, if you don't mind. Soldiers. Doing things that are, like, "military."

I said I wasn't going to blog for a while, so I will tell myself this post doesn't count because it's just something I'd already written for the National Post and the good people at the Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute. But I will not be blogging for a while. I will, however, happily trigger the auto-delete function to keep lumpen stoppists out of the comments box here. I'm fed up with them. If you think I'm channeling my inner Felix Dzerzhinsky about this, tough.