More than a few supporters of the Conservative Party are worried that we’re going to be done in this time in the same fashion that we were in 2004 – concerns about the power of a Conservative majority and a negative Liberal ad campaign. Frankly, I doubt if either is going to be enough to stop Stephen Harper’s trip to 24 Sussex now. Indeed – they might work in our favor. The Canadian people have seen just how dysfunctional minority governments are and, frankly, I doubt if the Liberals are trusted by their own mothers at this point.

What we are witnessing here, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, of Canada’s Ancien Régime. They may be back some day (indeed, they probably will be) but not in this form, and not just quite yet. Remember when Edwin Edwards said that the only think that could sink him would be being caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy? Well, at this point, I daresay that either of the above scenarios would probably be help M. Martin in shoring up certain elements of his party’s base.

I know that we’re winning, in part, because I’ve started to receive hysterical e-mails from Liberal supporters accusing me of providing living proof of some supposed Conservative ‘hidden agenda.’ Heh. We know who Stephen Harper is. He’s a relatively cautious technocrat with generally libertarian tendencies who will, as Prime Minister, carefully work to keep his coalition of dissonant and discordant groups together while gradually working to shift power and resources from government to individuals. The odds of him listening to my advice are about the same as those of my dating Rachel McAdams (though, if you’re listening, Rachel, I’m in the book). The only people who take my advice are Satan and Dick Cheney.

Anyways, it’s clear to me (if you’ll pardon the language) that at this point the leadership of the Liberal Party is either high on drugs or somehow otherwise simply out of their fucking minds. There’s no other reasonable explanation to be found for Paul Martin’s bizarre decision to announce his plans to amend the Constitution in the middle of a debate or the outright insane Liberal ad (quickly pulled) which seemed to claim that, if elected, Stephen Harper would institute a military dictatorship.

Hilariously enough, they’re stilling running an ad on the military matter – only in French. Quebec, of course, is the one place where armed Canadian soldiers have actually been used domestically: against the FLQ (on the orders of Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau) and during the Oka Crisis (when Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa invoked his right to request the use of the Army “in aid of the Civil Power”). That sort of stunt might work in certain parts of the Third World (Arafat in English: “I want peace” vs. Arafat in Arabic “Death to the Jews), but I somehow doubt if it’s going to fly here. The Canadian media may, upon the whole, be stupid and lazy, but they’re not that quite that stupid and lazy.

Of course, I’m actually pretty sure how the military ad fuck-up came about. It’s not like they released one ad today – they released twelve (more on that in a second). From the look of the ads, they appear to have been made quickly using a single template over and over and over again. The odds are good that they probably generated several dozen ads in a rapid period of time and didn’t study them nearly closely enough. I’m not going to speculate on whether or not the people writing the ads were intoxicated, but I’m not going to rule it out altogether either.

Speaking of which, has anyone else ever heard of any political party releasing TWELVE ads in a single day? I sure haven’t. It reeks of desperation. It reminds me of when, after it became clear to me that I was losing a High School Presidential Election (hilariously enough, to someone who has since gone on to be a relatively senior Liberal) I produced five hundred attack posters in a half-dozen different designs and put them up in a few hours. It didn’t work then – and I doubt if the television equivalent will prove of any greater utility.

The Liberals ran one really great negative ad in 2004 – the ad with the gun pointing, the woman huddled in the corner, and the Aircraft Carrier. It tied together the various threads of attack against the Conservatives – and it worked. These ads, by contrast, are shrill, hysterical, and often blatantly inaccurate. My personal favorite is the ad which refers to Harper’s now-widely quoted mid-1990’s speech to an American Think Tank as being “secret” and goes on about how the speech was “off-limits to press and public.” What they naturally fail to mention is that the speech is now known because it was ON THE THINK TANK’S PUBLIC WEB SITE. Heh. You can fool most of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time – but I doubt if even people who still believe in the Tooth Fairy at the age of forty-five will fall for this.

Another one of the ads is about the “undisclosed” contributions to the Harper leadership campaign. This ad more or less implies that Harper is some sort of covert American agent, bought with American cash. Of course, they fail to mention that he’s already disclosed everyone who donated more than $200 to his campaign. I somehow doubt that there are tens of thousands of $199.99 US Postal Money orders that were covertly sent to his campaign by sinister American interests without anyone knowing about it.

The Liberals are goners, for now. This fiasco is going to dominate the news tomorrow and possibly the day after that, which will carry us through the weekend. One week’s not enough time to overturn a party with both a ten point lead and strong momentum. The only thing which could restore Liberal fortunes at this point would be if Pierre Trudeau were to return from the grave (am I the only one who half-expected them to embalm him and put him on display in a massive mausoleum?) with the promise of the secret of eternal life.

What remains to be seen is how hard they will fall. That regicide will follow the fall of the Ancien Régime is already a given. As went the heads of Charles I and Louis XVI, so will King Paul’s head be on the Liberal chopping block as early as the evening of January 23rd. The question is what, beyond that, shall happen? Shall we have, as Britain did, an interregenum followed by a restoration? Or shall drive our enemies to the ends of the world and salt the Earth where their homes once lay? Our freedom will not be assured by a simple time-out for tyranny, yet the total defeat of the foe seems an impossible task.

We must remember, as Churchill once said, that our goal isn’t merely to win the battle – but to win the war. Let us therefore go forward together, again in the spirit of Churchill, sure in the knowledge that January 23rd will not be the end, nor the beginning of the end, but, rather, the end of the beginning.