You hate to say “I told you so” to a guy like Bono, especially on the urgent issues he’s fighting for:
Rock superstar Bono is irked by Martin’s refusal to meet a long-stated standard for foreign aid increases.
“I’m annoyed,” the U2 frontman says in an exclusive interview to be aired today on CBC Radio’s The House.
“I’m bewildered, really. I’m disappointed. I can’t believe that Paul Martin would want to hold up history.”
Sorry, but bringing history to a grinding halt is exactly what the Martin years months have been all about. Delaying, temporizing, fiddling… (I’m desperately trying to avoid saying “dithering”)… dawdling, dallying, vacillating, shilly-shallying…
Ottawa’s landfills groan with the weight of Paul Martin’s discarded priorities, from the democratic deficit to childcare to helping the developing world. Bono is simply the latest to discover that Mr. Martin’s commitments are not, in fact, even better than the real thing.
(Only the churlish and uncharitable would suggest that Bono try the allegedly more traditional route to getting the Liberals’ attention — leaving an envelope full of cash on the seat of a Montreal restaurant.)
The remainder of this post was going to be a series of even moretiresome riffs on U2 song titles — “Don’t give up hope; Martin moves in mysterious ways,” “In the quest for a sincere commitment, Bono still hasn’t found what he’s looking for”; “What more can you expect from a government that’s running to stand still?” — but instead I’d like to go back to a comment Bono made a while back:
Under a flurry of media questions during a news conference at a downtown hotel, Bono conceded the obvious election campaign optics of his endorsement.
“Of course you’re being used. Yes I’m being used. I want to be used. That’s my job here – to provide applause when somebody does the right and courageous thing and to provide criticism when they don’t.”
Now, a year and a half after his November 2003 appearance at the Liberal leadership convention, Bono’s still holding out hope:
“Six and a half thousand Africans dying every day of a preventable disease like AIDS is not a cause, it’s an emergency.
“I implore this prime minister. I think he’s a good man, and I think this is the moment to be a real leader.”
I truly wish I could muster any reason to believe his hope is well-placed. And I have to think it’ll be a long time before Mr. Martin and Bono share a Liberal Party stage again.
