From Mark Steyn.

The Conservatives have won, though it looks like it will be a coalition government. And it looks like Belinda will keep her seat, so she may have some bargaining leverage to keep her cabinet post if she wants to ditch her new-found Liberal friends and become a Conservative again.

Also, this will give Alberta and Saskatchewan a lot more clout in Ottawa.

Arnold Kling talks about folk Marxism, and its unfortunate hold on much of the public, particularly in Europe, but also, sadly, in the US.

Under folk Marxism, the oppressed class has inherent moral superiority to the oppressor class… Class membership trumps individual character in determining moral standing. It should be no surprise that this belief could lead to tyranny and wanton murder by government. It should be no surprise that this belief has failed to improve the lot of those regarded as “oppressed.” It inverts Martin Luther King’s call to judge people by the content of their character.

Even when Marxism does not lead to tyranny, it retards economic growth, as the stagnation of continental Europe indicates. If you believe that the poor are oppressed and the rich are oppressors, then your impulse is to penalize work, risk-taking, innovation, and saving — the engines of economic progress.

Well, at least the Canadians are on the verge of throwing off their true oppressors today.

…Joe Biden, usually a fixture on Sunday morning, wasn’t on any of the political talk shows. Maybe he’s figured he already said enough on television this week to last for a couple weeks. The questioning from Chris Wallace or Tim Russert would have no doubt been amusing, and not of much value to his presidential ambitions. I suspect he’ll lay low for a while, and hope that people forget.

…Joe Biden, usually a fixture on Sunday morning, wasn’t on any of the political talk shows. Maybe he’s figured he already said enough on television this week to last for a couple weeks. The questioning from Chris Wallace or Tim Russert would have no doubt been amusing, and not of much value to his presidential ambitions. I suspect he’ll lay low for a while, and hope that people forget.

…Joe Biden, usually a fixture on Sunday morning, wasn’t on any of the political talk shows. Maybe he’s figured he already said enough on television this week to last for a couple weeks. The questioning from Chris Wallace or Tim Russert would have no doubt been amusing, and not of much value to his presidential ambitions. I suspect he’ll lay low for a while, and hope that people forget.

For busting the pork. I’m not now, and never have been a Republican, but I sure hope that they can get their act together. It would be nice to have at least one serious political party.

Polls indicate that the Conservatives have a chance of getting a majority in the Canadian parliament. At the least, they may be able to get a governing coalition by peeling off just a few members, rather than having to do a grand deal with the Block Quebecois. As is the case down here with the Democrats, I’m less thrilled with seeing the Tories win than I am in seeing the Liberals lose big. Sic semper tyrannis corruptis.

I’ll bet Belinda Stronach is having a big-league case of buyers’ remorse now, for her thirty pieces of silver. What a difference a few months makes. Maybe she and fellow turncoat Jim Jeffords can start a club.

On the other hand, if it’s that close, she’ll no doubt be one of the MPs that they peel off to form their majority. She knows she doesn’t have much future with the current Liberals, and we already know what she is–it will just be a matter of haggling over the price. Simply letting her keep her current cabinet position would probably suffice, considering the alternative.

…that Ted Kennedy is satire challenged?

The 1983 essay “In Defense of Elitism” by Harry Crocker III included this line, read dramatically by Kennedy: “People nowadays just don’t seem to know their place. Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they’re black and hispanic…”

The essay may not have been funny, D’Souza acknowledges, but Kennedy read from it as if it had been serious instead of an attempt at humor.

“I think left-wing groups have been feeding Senator Kennedy snippets and he has been mindlessly reciting them,” D’Souza said. “It was a satire.”

Emphasis mine.

Well, I can understand why. I mean, the guy’s practically a walking (well, staggering) gasbag parody of himself.

Just ask her:

The great thing about Joe Biden during the Alito hearings, the reason he is, to me, actually endearing, is that as he speaks, as he goes on and on and spins his long statements, hypotheticals, and free associations–as he demonstrates yet again, as he did in the Roberts hearings and even the Thomas hearings, that he is incapable of staying on the river of a thought, and is constantly lured down tributaries from which he can never quite work his way back–you can see him batting the little paddles of his mind against the weeds, trying desperately to return to the river but not remembering where it is, or where it was going. I love him. He’s human, like a garrulous uncle after a drink.

In this, in the hearings, he is unlike Ted Kennedy in that he doesn’t seem driven by some obscure malice–Uh, I, uh, cannot, uh, remembuh why I hate you, Judge Alioto, but there, uh, must be a good reason and I will, um, damn well find it. When he peers over his glasses at Judge Alito he is like an old woman who’s unfortunately senile and quite sure the teapot on the stove is plotting against her. Mr. Biden is also unlike Chuck Schumer in that he doesn’t ask questions with an air of, With this one I’m going to trap you and leave you flailing like a bug in a bug zapper–we’re going to hear your last little crackling buzz any minute now!

Actually, she’s not very impressed with the denizens of the upper house. Me, neither, but that’s nothing new.

[Update at 11 AM EST]

More Biden love from Jonah Goldberg:

… He says interesting things, from time to time. I think he makes a fair point here and there. He was correct, for example, that Congress needed to have a real debate over the war. I think he has some obvious verbal intelligence. But, again, what’s fascinating — and what might be distracting some folks from seeing his underlying-yet-occassional smarts — is that he lets his ego and vanity get in the way. The man loves his voice so much, you’d expect him to be following it around in a grey Buick, in defiance of a restraining order, as it walks home from school. He seems to think his teeth are some kind of hypnotic punctuation marks which can momentarily disorient the listener and absolve him from any of Western civilization’s usual imperatives to stop talking. Listening to him speechify is like playing an intellectual game of whack-a-mole where every now and then the fuzzy head of a good point pops up from the tundra but before you can pin it down, he starts talking about how he went to the store and saw a squirrel on the way and it was brown which brings to mind Brown V. Board of Ed which most people don’t understand because [TEETH FLASH] he taught Brown in his law school course and [TEETH FLASH] Mr. Chairman I’m going to get right to it and besides these aren’t the droids you’re looking for….

So says Rich Lowry. He’s right, but of course not because there’s something uniquely corrupt about Republicans per se (though there is something uniquely hypocritical about their corruption, because they were supposed to be the party of smaller government, and present fewer opportunities to seek rent, as George Will eloquently points out). It’s because Lord Acton had it largely right–power does indeed corrupt.

The Republicans should view this as an opportunity to get back to their small government roots. Unfortunately, they probably won’t. Not that I’m inclined to vote for Democrats in preference, of course, because we know they’d be even worse. There is a “culture of corruption,” but it’s a culture of power, not of party.