Scamada, I stand on guard for thee.

Since the tragic events aboard the Canadian submarine HMCS Chicoutimi I have been deliberately silent, not from a lack of opinion or passion. I find myself in this odd place where anger comes out not as reasoned discourse but as a deeply, bellowing, impotent diatribe. The more I try to write, the more I am overwhelmed by the extent of the betrayal from those of us who tend the home fires towards those "who stand on guard for thee". Make no mistake, my rage is personal. This could have been my beloved daughter or sons. Lt. Saunders was a beloved, irreplaceable son, husband and father. My heart goes out to his wife. The worst nightmare of a parent is to lose a child but there another nightmare for a parent and it is this; to tell your children that their father is dead. My youngest son still cannot look bare to look at pictures of his father, so they remain hidden away, awaiting the day he when he can bare to look.

Christie Blatchford in today’s Globe and Mail has articulated far more coherently the general direction of my rage than I am able too:

"As Prime Minister Paul Martin was at Halifax airport last Sunday to greet the body of Lt. Saunders, so yesterday was Defence Minister Bill Graham at St. Andrew’s United Church for the final farewell.

They are always there, in their fine dark suits, faces appropriately grief stricken. Whenever young men and women of the Canadian Forces die in the service of their country, federal politicians are there to preside over the corpse, just as they have for decades presided over the systematic reduction of a once-magnificent fighting force to its skeletal remains. That undoubtedly they genuinely feel badly, that absolutely they ought to be present, that Canadians and Lt. Saunders’s family would be wounded if they were not there – none of this reduces the breadth of their galling hypocrisy, or the rage that the sight of them invokes in me."

[…]

"The fact remains that Mr. Graham is the head of the Defence Department and under his watch and out of his mouth a dreadful, short-lived and false reassurance was offered to Canadians and in particular the families of the crew members. Oh, I understand why he was at Lt. Saunders’s funeral; what I cannot comprehend is where he found the stomach.

And was it not only six years ago that Mr. Graham’s predecessor, Art Eggleton, bragged in a National Defence news release of the four used submarines Canada was buying from Britain that they were "a great purchase for Canada, giving our navy a vital capability at a fraction of what it would otherwise cost"? Perhaps they will turn out to be functional, but let no one ever cast their purchase as anything other than what it was – the bargain-basement find of a nation baldly looking to equip its military on the cheap.

Why? Because the government can, and it can because in this country, defence spending is seen by influential players within the Liberal Party, and increasingly among Canadians themselves, as inherently immoral."

Yet adscam, golfballscam, flagscam, gunscam, and more scamadams than I can bare to list were wasted by our Liberal government while providing the necessary funds to adequately provide for those who freely give up the treasure of their lives to live out our ideas and provide for our safety is inherently immoral. When you consign your fate to the Liberals, you become merely a bystander in your own existence.

So, who among the Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee Liberals - will be the first to threaten to file suit against Ms. Blatchford?