Spinning La Belle Province

Pictured: CTV Global Media — Bought and paid for by the Conservatives!

Our good friend “Trusty Tory” wanted me to check out this video of today’s Mike Duffy Live program (which I missed, darn it), presumably so that I could enjoy the spectacle of CTV’s corpulent, chrome-domed clown prince of political spin gleefully rubbing his flabby grubhooks together and mordantly chortling, not only over the woeful state of disrepair the Liberals find themselves in with respect to the province of Quebec (e.g., Paul Martin’s riding of LaSalle-Émard has no money and no candidate! Outremont has no candidate!), but at the juicy prospect of a supposed “civil war” within that particular wing of the party.

Yes, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Mulroney has been completely forgotten and the “big blue wave” is rolling in again! And this is news on what planet? It’s a well known fact that the Quebec wing of the party has been an absolute trainwreck for years now for a variety of reasons and that support from the Bloc has been decaying as the romance of separatism inexorably fades away. Dion can’t count on anything outside of Montréal and even those ridings can’t be considered entirely “safe” anymore. Likewise, much the same can be said of Duceppe’s former strongholds. And so Duffy presents us with the completely obvious scenario that the entire election might hinge on the Conservatives winning big in Quebec. Well duh!

If that actually turns out to be the case, which by no means is an entirely certain thing, there will be a delicious irony of sorts in seeing the party that started as a populist movement in the West that shared much in common with grassroots separatist movements joining forces with disaffected Quebecers, many of them former separatists also it has to be assumed, to form the next government of this country. That seems like a rather unlikely and potentially quite volatile mix to me, but it could work I suppose. One has to wonder however what it is that unites them ideologically speaking… is it perhaps a foggy kind of “autonomist” position that both camps seem to find quite attractive, or is it simply the desire to be in power and rake in all the privilege and federal pork that naturally comes with power?

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A Timely Reminder

A few commenters have astutely noted with some bemusement how hopelessly lame the “mainstream media” has proven itself to be of late (well, of late… oh, like say, the last eight years, but more specifically the past several weeks), so perhaps it’s appropriate to wheel out this lovely old chestnut from Bill Moyers Journal wherein he explored with Jon Stewart the paradoxical question of why the supposedly “fake” news has more veracity and courageous integrity these days than seems to be exhibited for the most part than the vacuous bilge churned out with almost relentless stupidity by the irredeemably compromised scribes that inhabit the fourth estate.

Let’s hope that our own resident court jester, Rick Mercer, returns quickly from his summer hiatus to skewer our pols (left, right and centre) with his rapier wit and incisive commentary, mitigating in some small way the pompously inane clowning of more “serious” so-called journalists that otherwise dominate the broadcast airwaves.

Another Weasel Bites the Dust

How completely unsurprising.

Now, what about the PM’s “special adviser on South Asia and the Middle East” who also crossed the floor (despite Harper having decried that dishonorable practice in the past) so that he could produce a very expensive colouring briefing book for the Dear Leader, the findings of which he had originally promised in earnest to share with the public, but then were mysteriously buried in a bulging “top secret” vault in the PMO as part of the government’s whole super-duper “transparency” agenda.

The Revolution Won’t Be Televised

Well, not by the Republicans anyway. Seems they took Joe Trippi’s famous dictum quite literally. I suppose it might have been a tad inconvenient to have an actual anti-Washington truth-teller at the RNC, what with the elderly John McCain and his callow new sidekick busy pretending to be change-agents. That must be why the Republicans had to ban him from speaking at their convention, even though he came in second or third in 20 states (unlike Rudy or Frederick of Hollywood who were given key speaking roles) and wouldn’t even acknowledge most of his delegates in the farcical nominating roll call.

Raw Story has the video of Paul’s appearance on The Colbert Report yesterday.

“You say you did not speak at the Republican National Convention because you do not feel welcome there,” Stephen Colbert suggested.

“No, I did not. I don’t like to be pushy,” Paul replied modestly, before flashing a wide grin.

“But just because you weren’t welcome, that’s no reason not to speak,” Colbert objected. “I mean, certainly Bush spoke, and he was not welcome.”

“Could you have gotten a slot if you’d played ball with those guys?” Colbert continued.

“Yes,” Paul replied

“What would it have meant to you?” Colbert asked. “What would you have to have given up?”

“Everything I believed in,” Paul stated.

“So, just like everybody else,” Colbert commented, adding, “Listen, you want to play with the big boys, you got to play along.”

“I would have had to do this,” said Paul, raising his hands as if to kowtow and intoning, “‘I accept everything in your platform and I love John McCain.’“

“What’s your problem with that?” Colbert asked. “When you’re a Republican, those guys are known for their discipline. … It’s a war, sir.”

“I didn’t feel too badly about it,” Paul affirmed. He added conspiratorially, “There’s a few members of Congress who say, ‘Would you help me out, because I’d like you to support me and send out an email and give me an endorsement.’”

More on Paul’s “Campaign for Liberty” here.

Jumpin’ Jack Obama!

So, Jack Layton is going to try and hitch his orange wagon to the campaign of Barack Obama by stealing his thematic “vision of hope” and making it the centerpiece of the NDP’s efforts to displace the Liberals as the official opposition, is he? Well, this should be très amusant, I’m sure.

On CTV’s Canada AM morning show today Layton’s phoniness was pointed out when he made a great show of peeling off his jacket at an Obama-ish “town hall” meeting, apparently due to the heat in the room, but it was noted that his shirt sleeves had already been rolled up in advance. Tsk, tsk… such transparent copycatting.

But more seriously, Layton claims that the Democrats’ environmental policy is “identical” to that of the NDP. Maybe that’s true, but I suspect that may not be something to be all that proud of. We’ll be checking into it…

RNC: McCain Nomination Speech

Okay, well I finally got around to watching it. Ho-hum. Kind of funny that his big crescendo at the end was drowned out by the audience that had been told to stand up but did so before the candidate called on them to “stand up!” Anyway, here’s one of the highlights from the speech:

CNN analyst Jeffery Toobin pronounced McCain’s speech to be “shockingly bad” and “very, very boring” amongst other critical comments. But then he would do that, wouldn’t he?

On Fox News, Charles Krauthammer called it “very strange” and described it as being an “oddity” — not exactly the unqualified endorsement on would expect. Actually, his comments were pretty astute.

”John McCain was re-branding his party as the party of change,” one CNN commentator said after the speech. “Re-branding” is of course a much-used phrase in marketing, but you can’t actually make something true just by saying it’s true. As Bill Clinton said at the DNC, on the two signature issues of this campaign — the economy and foreign policy — McCain’s positions are virtually indistinguishable from those of George W. Bush.

McCain: Medical Center Mix-Up

Seems McCain’s staffers can’t tell the difference between the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, California. Now that’s incompetence we can believe in!

Update: This just keeps getting funnier and funnier.