Dion in deep doo-doo. Is Michael Ignatief drooling?

Following the Liberal disaster in yesterday’s by-elections Stéphane Dion bravely asserted (quoting from memory): "...the Liberal Party is in a strong position to move forward..." [translation: "from here there’s no where to go but up."]

Naturally, there was a lot of analysis of results and what they meant for Dion’s future. Joanne captures the flavour, pointing to the angst of various Liberal bloggers, Paul Wells, Warren Kinsella, etc who in turn point to many others.

Also, naturally, there was much speculation about who would succeed Dion and when. Lawrence Martin even stokes a conspiracy involving Michael Ignatief.

Speaking of Ignatief - one of the above threads led to this Huffington Post item with American liberal David Rees’ hilarious deconstruction of Ignatief’s (in)famous NYT Iraq "mea culpa":

I expected a no-holds barred, personal excoriation. In fact, I assumed the first, last, and only sentence of the essay would be: "Please, for the love of God, don't ever listen to me again."

However....The first nine-tenths of Ignatieff's essay, far from being an honest self-examination, is a collection of vague aphorisms and bong-poster koans.... I refuse to believe this section was actually written by a member of the Canadian government, because that would mean Canada is even more "fuxxor3d" than America.

[Quoting Ignatief’s essay] "An intellectual's responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician's responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm. . . ."

Right off the bat, he's saying: "It was right for me to support the Iraq war when I was an academic, because academics live in outer space on Planet Zinfandel, and play with ideas all day. But now, as a politician in a country that opposed the war, I'll admit I screwed up..."

........[and on and on].

Hilarious, and worth recalling should Ignatief manage to take the Liberal helm one day.