War Memorial idiocy

Canada Day in downtown Ottawa has traditionally been an excuse for one hell of a party. Thousands of people crowd Parliament Hill and the surrounding area, including Wellington Street and the largest nearby open space, which just happens to be the National War Memorial. The build-up to the fireworks at 10:00 p.m. includes busker acts and the sales of vast quantities of sausages and ice-cream, not to mention every Canadian-flag-stamped knick-knack and gew-gaw you can imagine. People with painted faces hoot by, everyone sports red-and-white clothing, and the mood of the crowd is, to put it mildly, celebratory.

Do people imbibe alcohol at this event? Does a bear defecate in the woods?

By late evening, after the fireworks, signs of wear and tear are more than evident. Too much sun and booze are taking their toll. Some people, not to put too fine a point upon it, are starting to behave like idiots. Yesterday's Ottawa Citizen featured one of these on its front page, with a huge headline--"A National Disgrace." Below the fold, a short article about the imperilled 1.3 million people of Gaza appeared. I'm amazed it made the front page at all.

Today, we are informed that the Ottawa Police have made cracking this case "a priority." David McGuinty, Liberal MP for Ottawa South, described the miscreants as "the worst of the worst society has to offer," right up there, one supposes, with Paul Bernardo and Clifford Olsen. Stephen Harper, for his part, phones a local yak-radio station to express his personal concern, although he did so, I must say, in a calm and understated manner. Needless to mention, the vets are, well, up in arms. They want guards and a fence at the Memorial. And then there's the folks at Small Dead Animals.

Here's the inimitable Kate McMillan, kicking off the discussion:

There was a time when a public assault on the memory of war dead would have been quickly addressed by witnesses taking the offender into the street for a discussion with closed fists.

Today they take digital photos. Mark up another victory for the left.

Whoa...come again? "The left?" How did that get in there?

But, typically, her winged monkeys take up the refrain. A sample from her overflowing combox, excluding the predictable calls for various forms of street justice, caning, shooting and drafting:

[T]he social engineering leftists excuse it all with the great mantra 'they wuz drunks at the times sose they arentsk responsibles for dere actshuns.

Be clear, this kind of behaviour is the perfectly predictable result of decades of liberalism which tried to substitute self esteem on a platter for high expectations and self discipline.

This type of outrageous behavior is the legacy of your friends in the Liberal Party, who brought in the "Hug a Thug" principles into our criminal justice system.

AS for the punk. What do folks expect after Trudeau turned education from learning centers into self esteem camps. This is the logical result.

Kate's not the only one to understand it to be a leftist action. I do, too. Only an imbecile leftist would deny that it has nothing to do with their dogmatic ideologies, namely to be anti-war, to expose their gonads in public (like in "pride" parades), and to piss anywhere they so desire as if it's an inalienable natural human right. No genuine conservative would do such a thing.

Enough. That last piece of free association is particularly ripe. Since when do leftists wear bowling shoes, ferchrissake?

I write this as a person whose father was at the Falaise Gap, and as someone who has laid wreaths at the National War Memorial. I am disgusted, not only with a bunch of yahoos with full bladders who desecrate a monument endowed with tremendous national significance, but with those who seize yet another opportunity to try to score cheap political points. Frankly, I can't tell who are the bigger idiots. There do seem to be more of the latter.

Want to stop public urination after a Canada Day party where there is, in the packed downtown area, literally no place for most people to go, in both senses of the word? Post Port-o-Potties, not police, as I said over at SDA. Voilà, problem solved. Except some don't want the problem solved: they simply want to punish offenders, as responses to this suggestion indicated. It's the typical sado-politics of the Right.

On the public stage, the thoughtless action of some young drunks will continue to assume the dimensions of a national tragedy. But there's nothing wrong in that. What the yahoos did was outrageous, they will be found out, they will be charged, and a lecture will be read to them from the bench, not to mention in countless newspaper editorials and blogosphere postings. Their behaviour was the catalyst for another national reaffirmation of those who actually went to war instead of partying, and who died on foreign soil.

The idiots cracked that one open with their drunken carelessness, all right, and emotions of all kinds have come to the fore, expressed perhaps theatrically, in various over-the-top chest-beating commentaries, but nonetheless, for the most part, sincerely felt. People can't be blamed for having largely conventional forms of expression available to them when they feel deeply about something, and there is no doubt at all that many, probably most, Canadians feel deeply about the National War Memorial and what it stands for.

But to use this occasion to engage in Left-bashing is impossibly narrow, petty and spiteful. These commentators don't even have drunkenness as an excuse. They are engaging in their own insulting behaviour to veterans, and abusing the memory of the fallen, for their own partisan purposes. And for that they deserve exactly the same public pillorying that those other yahoos are now in the process of getting.