Truth is stranger than fiction

Even The Thick of It wouldn't have dared come up with this storyline.

Liberal leadership race

The preliminary machinations in the Liberal leadership race are not filling me with joy. In fact the oinks and snuffling around the trough are already deafening. Besides that principled bastion of privilege, Belinda (I've never met a party I shouldn't be leader of) Stronach, the latest rumoured candidates are David McGuinty, brother of the Ontario premier and yet another member of the Liberal hack McGuinty dynasty, and - God help us all - Bob Prichard, former dictator for life of the University of Toronto and now CEO of Torstar corporation where he is regarded by his senior colleagues as a complete lunatic whose idea of work/life balance is issuing class reading lists to the other members of the board and scheduling conference calls for 7am on Sunday. Mercifully, and it's about the only positive I can find, the assortment of machine politicians from the Maritimes trough seem to have withdrawn. For all his faults, Michael Ignatieff is starting to look awfully good though it would be unwise to dismiss the possibility that the Liberals are stupid and cynical enough to elect another porker lawyer from the Quebec trough.

What a bunch...eh!

Hmm

Nukes and Iran

I'm beginning to wonder whether it might not be time to scrap the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty. It clearly hasn't worked. The original four nuclear powers have now been joined by, as a minimum, Israel, India, Pakistan, China, North Korea, Brazil, South Africa and probably others. Certainly any of the other industrial countries could create nuclear weapons in no time at all if they chose to. So what purpose does the treaty serve? It seems that its main function is to provide a platform for American posturing. The current furore over Iran is essentially artificial. The US (and for that matter the Security Council) have acquiesced in the acquisition of nuclear technology by a bunch of countries. The fuss over Iran has less to do with nukes than it has to do with general American dislike for Iran. (Fair enough, Iran is awful but so is North Korea so was apartheid South Africa). So what, precisely, would be the downside of scrapping the NPT?