Conservative bloggers appear to recognize that the real revolution in Canada was not a conservative revolution, but rather a disgust with the Adscam corruption scandal going on there. As such, there is the possibility that the Democrats could do the same thing in the United States.

Plamegate appears to most people outside of the beltway, I suspect, as nothing more than inter-party squabbling (to many people inside the beltway as well, probably). Plamegate itself was calling wolf piled on calling wolf: that our concern about Iraq was that they had nuclear materials when the real concern at the time was that Iraq was trying to acquire nuclear materials. Even Plame’s inquiry showed that they were.

Abramoff could be a scandal, but the Democrats will need to explain two things: (a) why this scandal matters after all of the non-scandals from the past, and (b) what is the difference between Republicans taking money directly from Abramoff and Democrats taking money that Abramoff directed to them.

While I’m sure that there is one, I can’t explain the difference myself, other than that the Democrats were smarter than the Republicans. But a platform of “we’re smarter when we take bribes” isn’t going to win the anti-corruption vote in the way that the Tories won it in Canada.

The Democrats also appear to have a strategy of jumping from scandal to scandal, hoping that something sticks. Sometimes this can work, but the danger (besides the danger of crying wolf) is that they won’t recognize when they’ve found the right scandal. If the Abramoff scandal has legs, they’ll need to not switch to the next non-scandal, such as the NSA spying program.

The NSA spying program is another example of crying wolf, and in a way that really hurt the discussion about the benefits and dangers of the program. It could have been a scandal; it’s something that most people might support on a limited basis but would be uncomfortable with as it was applied by the administration. Unfortunately, it’s been so overblown by Democrats that once people find out what really was going on, they’re going to just say “fuck it” and forget that they would have been uncomfortable with it if it had just been explained correctly the first time around.

Canada itself has some work ahead of it. We had something similar happen in California a few years ago. We were heavily in debt because of incredibly bad decisions by our Democrat governor and our Democrat-dominated legislature. We elected a Republican governor to do something about it without raising taxes. When it turned out that our Republican governor wanted to solve our spending problem by undercutting the power of two of the most powerful money-pits in the state (teachers and prison guards) and cutting the power of the legislature to ensure its own re-election, we told him to fuck off. Having heard the message of the people, he is now acting pretty much like Gray Davis did a few years ago: borrowing and spending.

I wonder how much of Canada’s rebellion will resemble California’s: once they discover what it means to reign in a corrupt, out of control government, will they turn right back around and tell the Tories that they didn’t really mean it?