Harper Flip-Flops Like A Liberal

Even in the unlikely event negative tactics eventually shift to positive, the nasty ads only Conservatives can afford will have largely completed the compare-and-contrast exercise by the time pre-election sabre-rattling becomes a campaign sword fight. Put in historical as well as tactical perspective, fair's fair. When Liberals were rolling in dough and wallowing in power's privileges, first Jean Chrétien and then Martin went to equally extreme lengths to demonize Harper as well as his Reform and Alliance predecessors. Who can forget the infamous Liberal ad featuring a handgun and the inflamed suggestion that Harper would end gun control, not just abolish the gun registry? Or who has erased all memory of fear-mongering about Conservative two-tier health care, dark-ages social policies, or denying a woman's right to choose? What Liberals did then, Conservatives are doing now. Starting with a vaguely recognizable kernel of opposition policy, Harper and friends are fertilizing the fields of public disinformation in hope of a bumper ballot-box harvest. In that way, legitimate concerns over Conservative backsliding on the appointment of judges and, say, the treatment of Afghanistan prisoners, are presented as Liberals dissing the police and worrying more passionately about protecting the Taliban than Canadian troops. http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/199619

Note: http://www.thestar.com/...