Reply #6: but apparently you can't [View All]

[iverglas]

Is it the educational system? Maybe the churches? Whose failure can explain such unreasoned and incivil discourse?

Quite obviously the accusation of "corruption" is a lie, since there is no evidence of corruption against Liberal party candidates.

Quite obviously no one has established that anyone made any accusations of corruption AGAINST LIBERAL PARTY CANDIDATES.

Perhaps you'd like to notice that not even the questioner on whose words you state you are relying made any allegation that accusations of corruption had been made AGAINST LIBERAL PARTY CANDIDATES, let alone offered anything to substantiate such an allegation, let alone offered anything to substantiate the allegation that it was FALSE.

If you are willing to say that "the accusation of 'corruption' is a lie", you really ought to be able to tell us WHO MADE that accusation, and WHAT IT WAS, not to even mention WHAT SHOWS IT TO BE A LIE.

The "false accusation" is that of corruption. It is now shown to be a lie, because he could not provide an answer to the simple question of "how do you justify that?"

Now maybe you could tell us how he should have answered if the questioner had asked him whether he had stopped beating his dog. That one's a real simple question. Want to take a shot at it? Stopped beating your dog yet?

How was he supposed to "justify" doing something that HE HAD NOT DONE, and that the questioner had not even attempted to SHOW THAT HE HAD DONE?

Pretty simple stuff.

It certainly is. That's the beauty of demagoguery. It's very simple indeed to smear someone by subtly planting ideas in people's heads without ever saying anything that can be proved to be false.

The questioner never said that Jack Layton had made false accusations against anyone. And yet you seem to think that he did. And you seem to think that the thing that the questioner never said was proved by something that Layton didn't say. One might hope that most of the electorate isn't quite so simple as to fall for the questioner's nasty right-wing tactic, but one might hope in vain.

Here's the question:

Given these facts, how do you justify the constant repetition of the word "corruption" in reference to your Liberal opponents, and do you feel that false accusations like that harm our democratic process?

Here are the facts stated by the questioner:

The Gomery Commission states that Paul Martin should be "exonerated from any wrongdoing for carelessness or misconduct," and no Liberal candidate is implicated in the sponsorship scandal.

In regards to the NDP allegation of an income trust leak, information detailed on the CBC website strongly supports that market speculation is the culprit rather than any leak.

Here is the "fact" that the questioner needed to state and prove before he was in the position that a rational, decent person would need to be in to allege that Layton had made "false accusations" by asking him ANYTHING about any "false accusation":

That Layton had accused someone of corruption who had been shown not to be involved in corruption, or, at the least, against whom there was no evidence of corruption.

Now if you can show where the questioner established that "fact", or even where I can find any other evidence of that "fact", you'll have done what I asked in the first place.

The Liberal Party did not cease to exist when Chrétien resigned as its leader, and the Liberal Party was not reborn as something brand new when Martin became its leader. The Liberal Party is an entity that has been demonstrably corrupt in its present incarnation.

By the way, and although not relevant here because there is no evidence of any accusation of corruption having been made against Martin that calls for any evidence anyway: what exactly would you call Martin's shenanigans with Canadian tax law while he was Minister of Finance -- you do know about that off-shore tax haven stuff, I assume; how he arranged our tax law to maximize his own profits -- if not corruption? That was the poster child for corruption, that one: a member of the executive branch of a government making policy/law for his personal benefit and against the interests of the country he has been elected to govern. Don't try to tell me that any accusation of corruption against Martin -- IF ANY HAD BEEN MADE -- would have been false.

Just in case you missed all that:
http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/domino/reports.nsf/html/20021211ce.html

Department of Finance—Tax arrangements for foreign affiliates have eroded Canadian tax revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 10 years.

...
In 1992, we expressed concern that tax arrangements for foreign affiliates resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced tax revenues. Following our Report, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Accounts held hearings and made recommendations to the Department of Finance Canada in 1993. While legislative changes have been made, we are still concerned. The Minister of Finance's Technical Committee on Business Taxation also examined the issues and reported on them in 1997.

The report of the Technical Committee noted that Canada's rules have allowed foreign-owned multinationals to shift debt into Canada and have encouraged tax planning mechanisms that erode Canadian tax revenues. We observed transactions where foreign-owned Canadian corporations incurred over $3 billion of debt to finance investments in third countries. The interest on that debt is deducted from Canadian income before taxes. It results in a loss of revenue for both federal and provincial governments.

We also observed a transaction, for example, where a foreign affiliate of a foreign-owned Canadian corporation was used to move $500 million in capital gains from Canada to Barbados tax-free. In 2000, Canadian corporations received $1.5 billion of virtually tax-free dividend income from their affiliates in Barbados (compared with $400 million in 1990). We noted that Barbados and Malta changed their tax rules to bypass our law—to accommodate foreign affiliate investments. Tax arrangements for foreign affiliates continue to erode Canadian tax revenues.

- Auditor General of Canada, 2002

Martin was responsible for the legislation that allowed all that. Martin used that legislation to avoid Canadian income taxes.

Martin should probably be grateful that the whole thing is too complex to even mention in an election campaign, because if anyone tried to, a question from the audience about "false accusations" would be all the voters needed to breathe a sigh of relief that now they didn't have to try to figure it all out. Yup, just another false accusation, that's it. Nothing to see here.

Meanwhile, I'm still seeing nothing to support an allegation that Layton has made any false accusations at all, so I'll be calling that one a false accusation.


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