First casualty of war: TRUTH, in politics on both sides of 49th

Mulcair’s comments on environmental sustainability and the Alberta oilsands have been deemed by the Conservatives to be a threat to national unity, and now he and his gang are labelled a bunch of carbon taxers.

The one constant to the attacks is repetition. (From Tim Harper's piece in the Toronto Star, excerpted below)
The dishonest attacks on Mulcair sound hauntingly familiar to the McConnell school attacks on Obama, "our primary purpose is to assure that Obama is a one-term president"...
24-7, 12-month campaigning, fundraising and personal vicious and fabricated attacks on the opposition have all repaced governing on both sides of the 49th parallel.
We no longer have functioning governments in two of the most "advanced" "democracies" in world history. What we have are political assassination squads who are in constant campaign-fundraise-personal-ambition-motivated extensions of their military, only this time the enemy is not Al Qaeda, nor Iran, nor North Korea, nor Pakistan, nor Libya, nor Syria...it is the "members opposite".
Government has tragically devolved into a caricature of itself, on both sides of the national boundary between the U.S. and Canada, and the people, the economy, the pride of the countries and the respect for those in leadership are all suffering a kind of entropy that will be very difficult to recover.
And we are all complicit in this latest chapter in our own governance.
We gobble the sound-bytes as if they were true, when Disney could have written them all, without even turing on the television. We tell jokes about how bad the government's behaviour, and that of most of its members, really is and then we refuse to demand better.
Previous generations would never have either expected or tolerated such behaviour from leaders like Peter Lougheed, Pierre Trudeau, William Davis or John F. Kennedy or Dwight Eisenhower, and turning the governance of Canada and the U.S. into assassination squads will push most self-respecting and potential candidates out of contention, because they will not subject themselves to the embarrassment.
This is not "entertainment" because it involves policies and decisions that will have impact on our grandchildren, for decades, and those policies will be very difficult to reverse. And we are watching the first casuality of war "truth" being slaughtered like a helpless animal, right before our eyes.
Call me haughty and self-righteous, if you like, but I am disgusted by the tone, the temper and the complete disregard for anything ressembling "reality" in the political wars.
By Tim Harper, Toronto Star, September 18, 2012
The Conservatives have apparently sentenced Tom Mulcair to death by talking point.
As a means of dragging him to the political gallows, the talking points can be absurd or disingenuous, but they must be ubiquitous.
The opposition leader and his caucus have, in the past months, been called “job killers’’ in the country and, in a golden oldie trotted out Tuesday by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, subversives who have headed south of the border to undermine the Canadian economy.
Mulcair’s comments on environmental sustainability and the Alberta oilsands have been deemed by the Conservatives to be a threat to national unity, and now he and his gang are labelled a bunch of carbon taxers.
The one constant to the attacks is repetition.
In the two days since the Commons returned, MPs, ministers and the prime minister himself have popped up from their seats, all of them resembling a message track Jack-in-the-Box, spouting “carbon tax.”
Tuesday, they planted a backbencher to ask Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz about the perils of the phantom NDP carbon “tax,” other backbenchers jumped to their feet to make statements in both official languages on the carbon tax, with one, Scott Armstrong from Nova Scotia, virtually coughing up his party’s emailed talking points whole before question period.
Harper even took the unusual step of switching from French to English in answer to a question from Mulcair so he could blurt out “carbon tax” in English.
Why?
No one outside this bubble is talking about a carbon tax, the government is not the opposition and we are still three years from an election.
The answer is, of course, it is has worked for Conservatives in the past, and they are, frankly very good at an attack strategy that can be described as shoot, reload, shoot, repeat until the landscape is scorched.
It has worked on the Liberals in the past, but we have now moved into untilled fields.
The NDP has never formed a government at the federal level, but it has also never had to fight back against attacks to this extent.