The NDP does the right thing

...abstain. I blogged about this option earlier. It was the only thing to do.

I can't add much to the arguments I posed the other day. Perhaps the NDP is making too much out of the EI issue, although the reform proposals will provide Christmas relief to many. They will be supported by the Liberals, too, last I heard, so no high-horsing from that quarter, please. But the fact is, this battle between the Red and Blue wings of the Librocon Party is just not our fight.

Would Ignatieff have taken this oh-so-brave tack had he thought that both of the other opposition parties would vote with him? If the NDP had begun to rise for the Aye vote, he and his caucus would have passed out in fright and shock on the spot--and the Tories, with the distinct possibility of a majority in their sights, would have burst into song. It was all meaningless, macho posturing. And Canadians, jaded as we are by now with what passes for politics on the Hill, can see through that sort of thing with our eyes wide shut.

The pliant Libloggers, though, have already been handed their talking points. Abstention is always wrong under every conceivable circumstance, they seem to be saying, but that blade, as they should know, cuts both ways, and it just doesn't have the same keenness, in any case, as voting with the Conservatives 79 times.

Here are the latest poll results, boys and girls, as if you needed reminding. There's still no defining election issue, no sense of who Ignatieff is or what he really stands for, and now you've got that nasty civil war in Quebec as well. No surprise, then, that the cheerleaders are reduced to praising his speech in the House--wow, he rawks--although it was only a compendium of the Harper government's faults that the majority of Canadians can already recite from memory. And most of them were Liberal faults when they were in power.

Thank us, Liberals. Send flowers. Because the NDP saved your sorry hides today, and we didn't have to stand up with the government to do it. A third position? No: a second. Abstention was the only way to go for a party that wants to set itself apart from the cynical theatrics of Librocon infighting. And the NDP achieved just that today.