Stephen Harper's Craftiness? 不好。

This just in from the venerable Bourque.com, which also limelights as the worst-designed news website on earth:

Liberals plan for snap election:

Want new leader installed if Harper calls surprise fall vote Party says
`we have to be prepared' for PM's `craftiness'

The short and skinny of it is that the Liberals are preparing for a snap election, which is all fine and dandy, and that they chose to announce this by having their President say a bunch of dumb, desperate nonsense about one of the more effective minority PMs this country has had in recent memory, love him or leave him (and trust me, I'm closer to the latter on this one).

When will the Liberal Party of Canada realize that vilifying Stephen Harper — or at least casting him as that "crafty" fat kid in your kindergarten class that always managed to steal everyone's crayons and eat everyone's candy — won't help them a single bit when it comes to:

A. Securing leadership funds
B. Securing leadership votes
C. Securing people who care

?

Granted, insofar as they force us to tackle the possibility of failure before it has even occurred, contingency plans are well worth developing. Contingencies force planners to anticipate failures, revealing flaws in their top-shelf plans. So long as hubris hasn't run amok in the War Room, this can work wonders for avoiding embarrassment.

More importantly, contingency plans also give planners a set of documents with which they can cover their asses when things go wrong and, to quote a Vietnam War flick I vaguely remember watching, we all wake up in a world of shit. As any moron can decipher from watching the Iraq war unfold, a good plan B can mean the difference between simply having shit thrown at you once in a while, and/or being forced to eat steaming lumps of it for breakfast, everyday, for four years.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the Liberals are crafting little plans to handle everything, just in case. Well, actually, it comes as a surprise that the Liberals are planning for anything at all — but I digress. A contingency plan, in this case, and as it is in all cases, is a good idea, shit not included.

This, however, is a bad idea:

"We don't trust Harper," [Mike] Eizenga said. "He's displayed a certain craftiness. He's got bad policies, but his political craftiness is something we have to be wary about."

Successful political hacksmanship, it is often said, has more to do with technique than it does brute force. Our dear friend Mr. Eizenga, president of the Federal Liberal Party of Canada, is apparently no master bladesman. Instead, he's decided to use his mitts and go digging about in the same sort of muddy pit of partisan tomfoolery that Daily Show host Jon Stewart once accused Crossfire hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala of sleeping with on a nightly basis, to much amusement. Stewart was right. And you can extend that accusation to a plethora of political talk shows — Hannity & Colmes, The O'Reilly Factor, Hardball, Glenn Beck, etc. Most of which, Eizenga excluded, stay south of the border.

Stewart's lesson: calling out your opponent with names and slurs and painting them in ridiculous oral caricatures doesn't score you any points. It belittles the audience, and tells them nothing of your own ideas beyond the fact you'd like to pursue your political agenda by starting schoolyard fights using taxpayers' dollars. Think about it: if name-calling were a successful tactical manoeuvre, neither George W. Bush nor Kim Jong-Il would still be running things on either side of the Pacific.

What does generally score points, I am told, is something called juxtaposition — criticize your opponent's ideas, of course, but then present your own. Otherwise, you're effectively no better than the classroom smart-mouth who calls out the teacher now and then — can he teach?

More importantly, would you vote for him?

Two steps the Liberal Party will need to learn, regardless of any contingencies, snap elections, or crafty conservative trickery: criticize your opponent's ideas, then present your own. Then present your own. Liberal Party, repeat after me: then present your own...