CIVITATENSIS

The Oracle at Delphi didn’t always get it right. It understood that some of man’s fate is in his own hands, as Machiavelli acknowledged in Chapter 25 of The Prince two millennia later.  Fortune only governs half our actions when we exercise our skills.

One has to give some credit to Lawrence Martin here for acknowledging mistakes, though he denies that the mistakes are  his:  he does not grasp the proper relationship between fortune and skill.

Martin manages to summon enough continence to stop the venom inside his pen from flowing, ever so momentarily, to acknowledge that the prime minister has surpassed his expectations.

Moreover, Stephen Harper has proven him wrong. In large part, this is, Martin also admits, because the Liberal opposition leader has turned out to be Dion the Second, only worse.  But Martin refuses to entertain the notion that it might possibly be in some part the result of the prime minister’s skills.

A year ago, I forecast that, in 2009, we would probably see the end of Stephen Harper. Yep, he would be having such a dreadful time with the brutal recession, a new opposition leader and a liberal tidal wave from the south that he would likely step aside, pass the torch.

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In 2009, he has put all the year’s suppositions to rest. The recession didn’t bury him; it buoyed him. Michael Ignatieff didn’t bury him, he buoyed him. The Barack Obama tide never hit.

The venom does eventually drip. Martin blames fortune for the prime minister’s success as much as he assigns to her his own divining failures. Damn fate for  interfering with Martin’s superior  visionary abilities.

It couldn’t be that Prime Minister Harper has abilities that Martin, having blindly decided that only Jean Chretien had political skills, could not possibly see.

It is rather unskilful for Lawrence Martin to blame fortune for his blind shortcomings. It reveals his weakness and inability to adapt and counter the random effects of fortune upon his own actions and divinations.

Fortune might not take kindly to such spurious accusations from an Oracle wanna-be. And since Martin’s visionary skills are rather thin, he may not be able to envisage and contain her ravaging power when she finally unleashes it upon him in punishment for assigning to her the weaknesses ensuing from his own myopia.

They came, they didn’t see much, but  the voting  public punched them in the nose.  The aggressive Liberal strategy of taking the government down, come what may, didn’t pay and it is slowly morphing into keeping away and trying to say and do nothing –for now.

Mr. Donolo appears to have adopted a strategy of “taking the Liberals out of the news.” Mr. Ignatieff is not as visible as he once was; Liberals - notwithstanding the eruption in the Star earlier this week - are not in the news as much, either.

A good strategy, said Mr. Nanos, as it puts some distance between the autumn and what he expects to see as a recalibration of where the Liberals are at in 2010.

It should work well for them in the quiet days of the Xmas holidays. Quietness, however, will be contingent on whether they go into further disarRae, as the Chretienistas continue to work on pushing Iffy out of Stornoway and advance more people loyal to their own faction.