Incompetent rage
“I don’t like rage,” said the leader of the official opposition, Pierre Poilievre, the exact same Pierre Poilievre who got elected leader of his party by the very rage he’s now denouncing.
He’s like Judas Iscariot, minus the charm.
I suppose it was to be expected. He’s pretty obnoxious as a politician but he is not stupid. And unlike would-be speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, who as I type has already lost an unprecedented six rounds of voting, unable to get a majority of the votes because apparently selling your soul to Donald Trump was never a ticket to victory for anyone except Donald Trump himself, Poilievre knows when it’s time to look like you know how to throw in the towel.
As Michelle Goldberg wrote in a scathing column for the New York Times, “it’s been grimly amusing to see that the party of insurrection can’t even manage the orderly transfer of power to itself.”
Grimly amusing but not especially surprising. Rage just doesn’t do anything except destroy stuff. And anyone who’s in the game to play it successfully, and who has enough brains to know the difference between being one of the raging fools and using them to your advantage, knows when to call it quits.
Like Poilievre is doing. Or trying to do. It remains to be seen whether, like McCarthy’s fair-weather Trumpist friends, the convoy types to whom he owes his job decide to ruin the conservative leader’s political life by shitting all over the rug.
If they still retain that capacity. After blowing a lot of hot air at the inquiry into the use of the Emergency Act a few short weeks ago, the organizers of the convoy changed the location of their second coming (as it were) from Ottawa to Winnipeg for February 2023 before cancelling the event altogether without much by way of explanation. Unless it’s still on maybe? It’s really hard to tell.
When your movement can’t even organize a second riot, the least that can be said about it is that it lacks a certain competence to do, well, anything.
In the real world, people who want to govern have to focus on policy and procedures and tactics and such. They have to do the work of governing, not just shout memes on trash radio. All that we’ve seen so far from the 2010 Tea Party enthusiasts to today’s convoy dullards via the Trumpist lunatics who can’t even deal with a majority in Congress, strongly suggests the rage bunnies are unwilling or incapable of actually accomplishing anything worth writing home about.
And no, I don’t feel sorry for them one bit.
