A new Tory operative, University of Calgary professor Tom Flanagan, recently weighed in on the continuing Human Rights Commission debates, predictably arguing that the Commissions should be sent to the junkyard, but adding the novel, anti-historical, ideological twist that the free market is a better cure for discrimination.
A trio of Canadian bloggers promptly leaped on these remarks: Dr Dawg, RevDave of Terrible Depths, and Dave of the Galloping Beaver. The latter provides some important background:
Flanagan was raised in Illinois in a politically conservative upper-middle class family. As he was coming out of high-school the US was entering a phase of its existence which can only be described as tumultuous. Flanagan would have been subject to the US Selective Service System after his 18th birthday. Except that, like Dick Cheney, neither volunteering for US military service nor being available for conscripted duty was in Flanagan’s cards.
As US involvement in Viet Nam expanded and the US Army started demanding more troops, the young
men of the priviledged conservative white community found ways to avoid military service altogether. Educational deferments bought a minimum of 4 years of time – if one’s parents could afford to keep their progeny in college, and Flanagan was a product of the social and economic caste that flocked to the universities as a means to avoid donning a uniform.
As the US draft cycled up and Viet Nam became the war of the less priviledged, Selective Service regulations were changing. As Flanagan’s educational deferment would have expired his recent marriage would have made that deferment permanent, until Lyndon Johnson issued an Executive Order rescinding exemptions for married men.
And then, if the stories are to be believed, another American, E. Burke Inlow, recruited Flanagan to the University of Calgary. And then Flanagan, a year after the draft age in the US was expanded to include married males to age 35, was on the other side of the US border.
When Flanagan came to Canada he admits to knowing nothing of the place. Yet here he was, just as the Viet Nam war was at full heat, the same place US draft-dodgers and deserters found safe haven.
Boris at The Galloping Beaver Who’s the carpetbagger?
“A new Tory operative, University of Calgary professor Tom Flanagan. . .”
Man, you better get some historical perspective before you make an utter fool of yourself. Seriously.
Sorry Rat, I don’t quite understand what you are getting at.
Flanagan has been a writer and professor of political science.
He worked briefly with Preston Manning in 1993, and then became friends with Stephen Harper, and worked on his campaign in 2004.
Would it help if we had a working definition and agreement of political operative?
Definition: Political campaign staff are the people who formulate and implement the strategy needed to win an election – political operative.
Rat might have been objecting to the adjective “new.”