Dear National Post: Welcome to the party.

I just knew that, after my post on the topic, the Post would come around sooner or later:

Harper has learned well

It would be wrong to call Stephen Harper's latest adventure with the truth -- his claim to have "delivered" on the health care guarantee he promised in the last election, when the whole world can see he has not -- a lie. What distinguishes a lie, after all, from other species of falsehood is that it is intended to be believed. I do not think Mr. Harper is so far gone as to believe his own guff, and it is scarcely more probable he thinks anyone else would...

Campaigning for election in 2005, Mr. Harper promised to establish maximum waiting times for five "key treatments and procedures," and to hold provinces to deliver care within that time, or pay for patients to be treated elsewhere. That "guarantee" was to be in place by the end of 2006. And, what is more, it was to be done without further infusions of federal cash, the provinces having just received $41-billion from his predecessor the year before.

So now here it is 2007, and Mr. Harper announces that the provinces have agreed to guarantee just one procedure out of the five promised; a guarantee that in several cases amounts to no improvement on current performance, or remains far in excess of medically advised wait times, or both; a guarantee that appears to lack any enforcement mechanism, that does not kick in until 2010 and that will cost an additional $600-million in federal cash annually.

The National Post -- part of your unhinged, deranged, moonbat liberal media. Right?

IT'S TIME TO KEEP SCORE: For the sake of posterity, I want to start two lists. The first will be those Blogging Tories who, against all odds and like Andrew Coyne, demonstrate some principle and accept that Stephen Harper's latest wait times "guarantee" is just so much smoke amd mirrors, and nothing short of total bullshit.

Simultaneously, I want a list of Blogging Tories who are just hootin' and hollerin' about how terrific their Dear Leader is for "fulfilling" one of his campaign promises. You can leave links to either of the above in the comments section, and I'll move them up to the appropriate list. It's time to see what kind of collective delusion we're dealing with here.

I'll even start things off.

[UPDATE: As the Globe and Mail points out, the provinces appear to have taken the easy way out, selecting for their wait time guarantee that area whose target they already meet. In short, Harper is shelling out money for nothing. Your Conservative-managed tax dollars at work.]

=== Blogging Tories who still have a grip on reality:

• Mathew Siscoe:
  

  
  1) Andrew Coyne is at it again, and as usual he's pretty much bang-on. It was the conclusion I came to in 2004 after the election, which then caused me to become disillusioned with politics and move to Korea.
  

  
  

=== Eh ... not so much:

• Jarrett Plonka:
  

  
  Reasons to believe the Tories are right
  
  1) The Conservatives' wait times guarantee is scoffed at for not doing enough... Which, by the way, necessarily suggests "not enough more than the Liberals." It's a bizarre when the opposition insists that you be an extremist incarnation of yourself, but hey, whatever works.