ALBERTA LIBERALS HOPING MAYANS WERE RIGHT

(The following contains scenes of pettiness, infighting, stupidity, self-inflicted violence, and absolutely no sex. Viewer discretion is advised)

As I write this, we’re nine days and counting to the end of the Mayan calendar. It means that December 21, 2012 is the end of the current Mayan long-count period. Another long-count period for the Mayans begins on December 22. It’s just like at your house – on January 1, you’ll go to your kitchen take down the calendar that ended the night before, replace it with a brand new one, make a few resolutions that you will break within days, and carry on from there.

Some people fear it’s the end of the world (Clearly, I’m not one of them). Not surprising. Name something – anything – and you can probably find at least a small group of humans who fear it. Spiders. Kittens. Chem-trails (and don’t even ask what they are, because anyone who fears them will be happy to chat you up with that conspiracy theory until, well, until you’re praying for the end of time!). Some people fear commitment. Some people fear success.

And that brings us to the Alberta Liberals.

Pictured here is a Mayan pyramid – one of the few things in the Western Hemisphere that has been standing longer than the Alberta Liberal Party’s string of consecutive election defeats. Sadly, I cannot deny that I spent six years inside that tent before concluding that:

• The Alberta Liberals cannot be repaired because:
• They don’t want to be repaired.

Now, I’ve written here before on the topic of somehow uniting the not-conservative vote. But for today, let’s not worry about how or whether that might ever work. Let’s merely focus on the efforts of two Alberta Liberals –Calgary-Buffalo MLA Kent Hehr, and former party executive director Corey Hogan – to actually put the concept on the table for a rational discussion among adults. In response, the party president threw them under the bus. Read it here and be amazed.

I left my crystal ball in the car last night, and this morning it’s all frosted over. I cannot begin to predict which will come first: the uniting of the not-conservative vote, or the end of time.

But I can tell you this: turning on one of the only MLAs it has and as much as publicly inviting him to leave for daring to suggest it think outside the party brass’s cozy little box is a sign of the Alberta Liberal Party’s deep and abiding commitment to irrelevance and to its own extinction.

Oh, about the Parental Advisory at the top of this rant that said “..and absolutely no sex.”? That’s because the Alberta Liberals are a lot like giant pandas – dwinding in numbers, and too cranky to make more of their kind.