Rumours, rumours

An anonymous blog poster is circulating the rumour that Dion will drop out at the next debates to support Kennedy. That makes no sense for many reasons, so I’ll pay it no more heed. It was far from the only rumour circulating on the blogsphere today. The more interesting one is Brison to Ignatieff.

Is it going to happen? Hey, who knows. They seem to have some common ground around Afghanistan, less in common in other areas. But in case he does, I’d like to get a head start by providing Scott with some material he could use for his endorsement speech. Here’s a few clips I was able to find (I’ve bolded some of the highlights he may want to use):

Michael Ignatieff was portrayed Wednesday as a gaffe-prone amateur by at least one Liberal leadership rival after the presumed front-runner was forced to clarify his latest controversial comment.

In the most pointed broadside yet against the acclaimed academic, Scott Brison said Ignatieff's repeated miscues suggest the rookie MP has poor political judgment and insufficient experience to lead a national party.

"These gaffes are damaging to a leadership campaign but they will be terminal to a national general election campaign," Brison said in an interview.

Brison's attack was prompted by what he called Ignatieff's "gaffe of the week" -- a refusal to commit to running in the next election if he doesn't win the party's leadership.

Here’s some more:

However, Brison said that in nine years in politics he hasn't made as many "retractions and clarifications" as Ignatieff has made in just nine months.

Brison compared Ignatieff to Stockwell Day, who jumped from provincial politics to become leader of the now-defunct Canadian Alliance without any experience at the federal level.

Day's tenure at the helm of the Alliance, which eventually merged with the Progressive Conservatives to form the Conservative party, was short-lived and disastrous.

Brison said Ignatieff is "smarter than Stockwell," now Harper's minister of public safety. But he added Ignatieff faces an even steeper learning curve, having spent almost 30 years out of the country as an academic and journalist.

Brison took Ignatieff to task for other recent so-called gaffes, including telling the Star that Canadians "live and operate in a heartless world and you need leadership that understands that."

"When you see the world as being heartless, that helps someone justify ruthless acts," such as Qana, Brison said.

He also chided Ignatieff for saying that Canada's peacekeeping tradition "died" with the genocide in Rwanda.

Brison said that remark could only come from someone who's spent 30 years outside the country and fails to appreciate how important peacekeeping is to Canadians and to Liberals in particular, who view party icon Lester Pearson as the father of peacekeeping.

He also scoffed at Ignatieff's recent admission that he's not sure he's "up to the price you have to pay" to succeed in politics.

"If you go in to have heart surgery and the surgeon says, `I think I'm ready to do this but I've never done it before,' you're probably going to look for a surgeon who's done it before," Brison said.

To be clear, I thought Scott’s broadsides here were WAY over the top. They’re his words though. Really, I’d love to see Scott go to Iggy just for the sheer entertainment value of trying to walk all that back. I'd say that just for that reason I don't see it happening, but this is politics, far stanger things have happened.

Anyway, the silly season is upon us folks. Hang on for the ride!

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