Correct, and you are missing the whole point of my argument. I'm not debating a wide set of policy issues. I am making a very simple argument:

1. Jack Layton was willing to support a corrupt government for a change in the budget
   
2. Jack Layton previously promised that he would support a government only in exchange for a referendum on proportional representation.
   
3. Jack Layton is therefore a liar.
   

I also make the following assertion:

• Jack Layton has, in my opinion, a too low a threshold at which a corrupt government can buy his support.

If Mandos wants a deeper policy debate on the merits of the N.D.P. amendments to the Liberal budget, we can have that debate as well. But that's not what I'm currently trying to argue.

The very heart of my critique was, of course, the problematic nature of this very mode of political analysis and the problematic language that Mustafa used to expound it. Previously, his language presumed notions of "accountable government" and "supporting corruption", and thus imputed motivations to Jack Layton without actually exposing what these motivations are. This last post simply expands on the presuppositions he makes, but still makes the same assumptions about motivations.

It isn't the merits and nature of the specific policies that the NDP obtained in the budget that are at issue for me. Mustafa may be right, he may be wrong, that's a separate debate. It's Mustafa's analysis of the political calculation that Jack Layton made that reveals the poverty of that manner of thinking. "Too low a threshhold at which a corrupt government can buy his support." The language of buying and selling, just as the language Mustafa used before, empties the discussion of political content, substituting for it a facile moral outrage at what is actually an artifact of our representative system of democracy. Issues that are voided: what more Layton could have gotten, whether it served Canada to have an election at that point, whether it served the NDP to have an election at that point, and so on. This is all buried under the discourse of buying and selling.

In another blog-brawl, I have discussed why I believe this thinking is destructive to political progress in Canada (the argument continues a few posts after that one). In a nutshell, individualistic moral outrage is substituted for any analysis of the systemic deficiencies of our politics, economy, and so on. Individualistic, as it becomes simply a matter of leaders and their personal moral predilections: trustworthy vs. untrustworthy, for example. Rarely is politics, under our system, really driven by personal moral predilections alone: the predilections are themselves often tendencies generated by systemic conditions. I'm big on using correct language: we won't have significant political progress in Canada until we can talk clearly about the systemic conditions. But if we stick to Mustafa's discourse, we can't.

On another note, Mustafa says,

They may be contingent, but they are not the same. And so my motivations for the two do differ. I am angry that the Liberal government survived because it subjected Canada to an extra 8 months of Liberal rule. I am disgusted at Jack Layton since he can be brought off at what I consider to be a cheap price.

If I were to say that I like to eat, and that my favourite passtime is eating chocolate cake (neither of these is true, BTW), you would be correct to point out that these are contingent: my favourite passtime cannot be eating a certain kind of food if I dislike eating. However, the two statements are not the same and neither are the motivations. In particular, chocolate cake has lots of sugar that stimulate taste buds to send positive neural responses that are separate from the neural responses created by having a full belly.

(It's not true that you like to eat, Mustafa? This connaisseur of fine comestibles feels sorry for you!)

The analogy is, anyway, bad. The Liberal government survived because Jack was "bought off." You are motivated to write about one only because of the other, and the outrage is thus rather difficult to separate, except maybe in some politically circuitous sort of abstract way. If we were to force the cake analogy into this framework, you'd have to be discussing your motivations for talking about cake with reference to your enjoyment of eating. Or we could be talking about some kind of strange abstract "untrustworthiness" of Jack in some weird political meta-world. Who knows?

I have probably left my readers with the impression that I think that the government should have survived then. I actually didn't then, and I think recent events have confirmed my feelings in that regard. I think it was a tactical error on the part of the NDP. But I don't go much further than that.