But it may also be inventing the cures. Taube has to explain the conservative scene to ideologically-deprived Canadian readers, so the clarity of his analysis blazes a useful trail for Americans.
Some details are debatable, of course.
The Alliance's predecessor, the Reform Party, first appeared in the 1988 federal election amid even more ridicule than its U.S. namesake today. It got only single-digit percentages of the vote. But they had spurned their base and gone whoring after alien voters from another language bloc. In all this, Taube is precisely reflecting the Beltway Right consensus and indeed the Bush campaign, with its parade of caged conservatives. Taube, who is Jewish himself, mentions but does not really emphasize that the neoconservatives are, anomalously given the overwhelming attachment of American Jews to the political Left, a predominantly Jewish faction.