Political Profiteering
Well, Michael Ignatieff is quite the meddler. He sees potential opportunity everywhere. A chance to alert the public to his presence by his unqualified successes at identifying problems and solutions unique to his cerebral capabilities So elevated in cerebral status, it would appear, that they float above the heads of lesser-endowed ordinary people, simply incapable of catching the wind of his brilliant overtures.
There goes another one, waving in the wind of opportunity. Look at me! Superb material for a prime-minister-in-the-making. A surfeit of ideas and values that will, given the opportunity to mount them and make them public policy, greatly advantage Canada. Loutish commoners looking in from the outside simply think of these brilliant ideas as gauche, pretentious politics.
And so, the latest to come our tired way is the re-elevation of Michaelle Jean to Governor General of Canada. Another year, a two-year extension? Her five-year appointment runs out in September. And while it is generally hoped that she will gracefully step down in mid-summer to allow the timely investiture of a replacement, she has made it known that she would prefer to stay to the end of her mandate, September.
Which will enable her to greet Queen Elizabeth II on her upcoming visit. Nice opportunity, that of a lifetime, to usher the Queen of Canada around town. Going out on a royal bang, as it were. We've had a few of those bangs, as when she considered herself to represent the Queen-in-absentia in a manner never before recognized. To the manor most certainly borne.
But give her her due, she has been, after all, a good representative of the Crown in Canada.
Her choice hadn't seemed, at the time when former Prime Minister Paul Martin selected her, particularly choice. All the more so when it was revealed that she and her good husband seemed entirely too comfortable with la Belle Province's separatist crowd. How far from a monarchist could one get, after all? That, however, is dim history.
What is not so dim in history is her most recent foray to Africa where she visited, among other African states, the Republic of Congo, the true epitome of a failed, repressive, depressing, human-rights-oppressive state. Hard on by the genocidal state of Rwanda. Where Madam, sitting beside the President of Rwanda, expressed profound and deep regret at Canada's failure to rescue Rwanda from self-slaughter.
Doubtless Rwandans heard Governor General Jean's moving avowal of Canada's and the world's failure to prevent Rwandans from butchering one another en masse as a tribute to the singular well-adjusted society that it represents, a vindication of their aggrievement at the world at allowing themselves to massacre 800,000 helpless Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the space of three months.
The president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, must have felt great satisfaction at that mea culpa. When he was Major General Paul Kagame, military commander of the Tutsi-led Rawandese Patriotic Army, he was passionately, violently and inextricably involved with his own brand of mutilating, killing savagery mounted against Hutus.
The precise distance between the current president of Rwanda in genocidal terms has never quite been adequately measured, as compared, for example, to that of Jean Kambanda, the Hutu extremist interim prime minister of the 'genocidal' government, sentenced to life in prison at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Otherwise, and for the most part, Governor General Michaelle Jean has more than risen to the occasion in representing Canada abroad, and at home, as well. Her sense of occasion, her kindness and her personal style have served her well, and us also. She followed the lead of another excellent Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson, and built upon that success.
Governor General Michaelle Jean, to her credit, might have been a disaster, and she most definitely was not.
Like another Governor General selected from the Province of Quebec, another woman who was also a journalist and who had also, like both Adrienne Clarkson and Michaelle Jean, worked for the CBC, who was, in fact, an unmitigated disaster. Jeanne Sauve's self-entitled hauteur and distance from Canadians did nothing to endear her to the public.
Michaelle Jean has had her time in the limelight and her capable and feeling investment in her role is widely appreciated and she, as a person, highly regarded. It is, however, time to move on, and she is aware of that reality.
Why is this reality beyond the cognitive ability of Michael Ignatieff?
There goes another one, waving in the wind of opportunity. Look at me! Superb material for a prime-minister-in-the-making. A surfeit of ideas and values that will, given the opportunity to mount them and make them public policy, greatly advantage Canada. Loutish commoners looking in from the outside simply think of these brilliant ideas as gauche, pretentious politics.
And so, the latest to come our tired way is the re-elevation of Michaelle Jean to Governor General of Canada. Another year, a two-year extension? Her five-year appointment runs out in September. And while it is generally hoped that she will gracefully step down in mid-summer to allow the timely investiture of a replacement, she has made it known that she would prefer to stay to the end of her mandate, September.
Which will enable her to greet Queen Elizabeth II on her upcoming visit. Nice opportunity, that of a lifetime, to usher the Queen of Canada around town. Going out on a royal bang, as it were. We've had a few of those bangs, as when she considered herself to represent the Queen-in-absentia in a manner never before recognized. To the manor most certainly borne.
But give her her due, she has been, after all, a good representative of the Crown in Canada.
Her choice hadn't seemed, at the time when former Prime Minister Paul Martin selected her, particularly choice. All the more so when it was revealed that she and her good husband seemed entirely too comfortable with la Belle Province's separatist crowd. How far from a monarchist could one get, after all? That, however, is dim history.
What is not so dim in history is her most recent foray to Africa where she visited, among other African states, the Republic of Congo, the true epitome of a failed, repressive, depressing, human-rights-oppressive state. Hard on by the genocidal state of Rwanda. Where Madam, sitting beside the President of Rwanda, expressed profound and deep regret at Canada's failure to rescue Rwanda from self-slaughter.
Doubtless Rwandans heard Governor General Jean's moving avowal of Canada's and the world's failure to prevent Rwandans from butchering one another en masse as a tribute to the singular well-adjusted society that it represents, a vindication of their aggrievement at the world at allowing themselves to massacre 800,000 helpless Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the space of three months.
The president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, must have felt great satisfaction at that mea culpa. When he was Major General Paul Kagame, military commander of the Tutsi-led Rawandese Patriotic Army, he was passionately, violently and inextricably involved with his own brand of mutilating, killing savagery mounted against Hutus.
The precise distance between the current president of Rwanda in genocidal terms has never quite been adequately measured, as compared, for example, to that of Jean Kambanda, the Hutu extremist interim prime minister of the 'genocidal' government, sentenced to life in prison at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Otherwise, and for the most part, Governor General Michaelle Jean has more than risen to the occasion in representing Canada abroad, and at home, as well. Her sense of occasion, her kindness and her personal style have served her well, and us also. She followed the lead of another excellent Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson, and built upon that success.
Governor General Michaelle Jean, to her credit, might have been a disaster, and she most definitely was not.
Like another Governor General selected from the Province of Quebec, another woman who was also a journalist and who had also, like both Adrienne Clarkson and Michaelle Jean, worked for the CBC, who was, in fact, an unmitigated disaster. Jeanne Sauve's self-entitled hauteur and distance from Canadians did nothing to endear her to the public.
Michaelle Jean has had her time in the limelight and her capable and feeling investment in her role is widely appreciated and she, as a person, highly regarded. It is, however, time to move on, and she is aware of that reality.
Why is this reality beyond the cognitive ability of Michael Ignatieff?
posted by Pieface | 6:58 PM
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