Tie goes to the governor

I generally don’t try to declare winners or losers of political debates (well, not winners – I’ll regularly call out the losers). I know that my metric for judging these things will be different than many people’s, and I know that the leaders aren’t necessarily looking to “win”, they’re looking to advance some sort of campaign strategy. Nonetheless, a few days removed from the English debate, if I have to call a winner (which, I guess, I don’t), I’m giving it to the Prime Minister.

Each leader got some good points in. Each leader had a chunk taken out once or twice (or, occasionally, just looked silly). I wouldn’t say that Harper got in the best shots. but I think he emerged from the debate in the best spot.

Much has been written, including by our friend Richard, suggesting Stephen Harper “won” the debate because he came off as the most Prime Ministerial (is that even a word?). While I agree with that, I think the calm demeanour he wore brought more than just an air of Prime Ministerialship.

The other three leaders spent much time attacking Mr. Harper. Of course, they did. He’s the Prime Minister, he’s in the lead, they need to take him down. But through all of the attacks, Mr. Haprer stayed calm and stayed on point. This coolness had the effect of slightly diminishing the other three. They attacked and attacked, and the got nothing out of him. They made him look like the big dog, all the while appearing as chihuahuas.

A while back, my friend Max Fawcett suggested that there is a lack of stars in our political ranks. In many ways, the three opposition leaders lived down to that observation. Don’t get me wrong, I have a decent level of respect for them, and I think they all did fairly well in the debate, but through this dynamic of three wanna be Davids trying with all their might to take down Goliath – and failing – they undermined their own stature. If one of them – specifically, Mr. Ignatieff – had been able to attack Mr. Harper, score some points and then build off of that to advance their vision (and, no, raising the corporate tax rate is not a vision), they would have come off much better.

Still, this was no great win for Mr. Harper. It wasn’t a real win at all; it was just survival. He was fine, but he wasn’t spectacular. He protected his ground, but I can’t say he advanced very much. But, since he’s the Prime Minister, and since he’s in the lead, he wins any such stalemate.

Moral Sanity: Speaking Clearly about Russell Williams

Re Russell Williams Final Victim: His Wife

I get annoyed when individual motivations are routinely reduced to some quack popular culture psychology. People are intelligent and do what they do for their own reasons.

The Russell Williams case, however, is a fascinating example of feigned moral sanity; a highly organized and respected Colonel who clearly had a lot of demons lurking in his closet.

How are we to speak of such individuals without laxing into the default rhetoric of some personality disorder or simply swearing them off as “monsters”?

Unfortunately for his victims, let alone the trajectory of his own life, Williams, like so many, allowed his pride to stand in the way of his repentence. And by that I mean we can readily assume he made compromises, compromises throughout his life he shouldn’t have made. He stood on the pretense of his ambition and ability when he should have been facing the darkness and taking out the trash.

It’s one thing to attribute individual behaviour to some psychiatric disorder, its quite another to speak to how individuals are capable of intelligently counteracting the pathology or onset of it.

A significant part of the tragedy here is that someone with so much promise could become such a monster. An important lesson, I suppose, that having a lot of ambition is not always a good thing, especially in the absense of a firm foundation of humility.

Why he did what he did is between Russell Williams and God, but in doing it he managed to hide who he was actually becoming from those who knew him best.

Now, granted, Russell Williams seems the text book definition of a sociopath; not too many can claim to have known him all that well, especially given what we now know. But what about his marriage?

From Macleans we learn that Williams confessed to make his wife’s life a little easier. As Friscolanti writes:

It was way too late, of course. His wife’s life was already shattered—solely because of him—and a belated burst of honesty wasn’t going to soften the shock. Her entire world was suddenly a lie. The man in her bed was someone else.

Later that night, the confessed killer wrote a note to his devastated spouse. “Dearest Mary Elizabeth,” it began. “I love you, Sweet [illegible]. I am so very sorry for having hurt you like this. I know you’ll take good care of sweet Rosie. I love you, Russ.”

Did he truly love her? Does he still? Can someone so absolutely evil—a man who sticks duct tape over a woman’s face, and films her last breath—be capable of love? A man who loves his wife doesn’t spend their wedding anniversary breaking into another woman’s house. A man who loves his wife doesn’t celebrate Valentine’s Day by trying to pry open a neighbour’s basement window.

And a man who loves his wife doesn’t sit at their home computer and watch video footage of Jessica Lloyd’s final few hours—knowing her heartbroken family is praying she walks through the door. “He would have absolutely no idea what the word love really means,” Debra Lloyd, Jessica’s aunt, said during Williams’s sentencing hearing last October. “He certainly couldn’t have loved any of his own family members, because now they have to live with his crimes and shame.”

No one more than Mary Elizabeth Harriman.

This raises an observation worth considering with repect to marriage and Williams relationship with his wife: is there love in the absense of an abiding responsibility for WHO YOU ARE and HOW who you are will effect WHO THE ONE YOU ARE WITH will become themselves?

The text book definition of eros, if there is one, is no. Love demands that we be genuine, that we do not hide who we are for the sake of using another toward some fraudulent end.

By his own admission, Williams felt some responsibility to make his wife’s life “a little easier,” but that amounts to very little by way of love given the enormity of his betrayal and deception.

I’m glad Friscolanti points this out because a large part of speaking clearly about moral sanity has to do with speaking clearly about love.

To borrow a quote from C.S. Lewis:

St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.

Speaking clearly about Russell Williams requires that we identify how a man with the pretense of great virtue is lacking where it matters most. It’s one thing to typecast him as a sociopath or a monster (monikers he deserves!), but we should not neglect how his great undoing could have been avoided by better choices to override his pride and ambition with some humility, by learning what it means to love.

Rapists Should Go To Jail

By now, I assume we’ve all heard Liberal candidate John Reilly’s argument (and quick reversal) that not all sexual assaults are the same, and not all of them warrant jail time. It’s easy to just publish a visceral reaction to what were, at best, clumsy words or, at worst, a really contemptible policy stance. However, I think there are a number of layers to this story that warrant investigation.

After the outcry emerged, Andrew Coyne tweeted (in two separate tweets):

But it’s a good issue for Tories, cynically/strategically. ie a lot of the same people denouncing Tories for their jail-em policies also… lined up to denounce the judge in Manitoba for being too lenient with a sexual offender.

Another pundit (sorry, I can’t find the tweet) noted that the apparent Liberal policy (I think it’s changed a couple of time during this campaign) of attacking the Tories’ prison-building plan, but not proposing to repeal any of the tough-on-crime laws was silly.

As someone who denoucned the Manitoba judge and opposes the tough-on-crime stance, I’m prefectly willing to admit that if you’re not going to build prisons, you can’t plan on jailing more and more people… unless you want to re-create The Devil’s Butcher Shop. Still, it’s a bit of stolen base to criticize people for wanting to jail rapists, but not wanting to expand our prison population. [Read more]

Ron Paul, the next US president

Earlier today, Ron Paul’s son, Rand Paul, the recently elected Senator from Kentucky, told Politico he believes his father will run. “I get every indication from looking at his schedule and hearing what he’s doing that I think he probably will,” Rand said. “But that’s his decision to make.”

In April of 2010, a Rasmussen poll found that Paul was in a statistical dead heat with Obama. The current president edged out Paul by 42 points to 41 in a hypothetical 2012 matchup, according to the survey. Irate Democrats accused the polling organization of gaming its results.

In February, Ron Paul won the CPAC presidential straw poll for a second year. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney came in second.

I can see it happening.