You're tempting us, Ms Wente

Now, I know that many are feeling just a touch annoyed at Michael Ignatieff for giving Stephen Harper an opening to look -- well, not good, but smooth -- on what we politely call the national question, but dinna fash yersels, lads and lassies.

I come bearing glad tidings of great joy to all Canadians (or at least anyone who is forced to read the Globe and Mail as her local paper). There is an upside to all the posturing our parliamentarians have been doing this week. We have finally discovered the first good reason known to humankind to resurrect debate over Quebec's formal (or, as Mr Ignatieff would have it, "officialized") status in the constitution.

In her column in today's Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente writes:

Mr. Harper may be many things but he isn't bone-stupid enough to try to fiddle with the Constitution. And that's a good thing, because the next time the C-word gets back on the national agenda, I'm out of here.

Ooh! Somebody stop me. Get the duct tape. I'm not sure I can control myself.

The rest of the column is Wente's standard turgid smart-mouthery. I need my friend Stephen to help me count the clichés, tired metaphors, and mixed platitudes. Really: I don't understand why she writes so scornfully of Ignatieff. She is rather like him in many ways, in the coarseness of expression so evident in his public comments this year and then in their shared naïve idealization of the United States:

Sometimes, I try to explain our national arguments to the Americans, but they don't get it. They know exactly who they are. They never have a crisis of identity, and they spend very little time complaining that all the other parts of the United States are trying to rip off their part.

Run that by me again? Red states/blue states? Civil War? Originalists and federalists and unitary-executarians versus, ah, democrats? Paranoid isolationists versus crusading imperialists? Martin Luther King? Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta? This is a country with a "unitary" sense of identity? Been reading a lot of John Yoo and David Addington lately, have we, Ms Wente?

But no. I won't do it. Yet. I won't trek down to Front and Spadina and start yelling "Constitution! Constitution!" I mean, that might look too much like "a giant step down the slippery slope," as Ms Wente so curiously puts these things. Just tape me to my chair for a few hours and let me read about Uzbekistan, and I'll be ok.

Thanks for some of my own smart-mouthery to deBeauxOs and lagatta at breadnroses.ca.