Category: Americas

Some in the media have elected to piss and moan (surprise, surprise) about Prime Minister Harper having decided on the course of having “suspended news conferences for the duration of the election campaign.”  They act like he’s somehow gone and shut them out.  Poor babies.

I disagree.  I think there is really only one interview left to give in this campaign, and the PM damned well gave it:

… this just about sums it up.

… When you TOO blatantly whore yourself off. After all, it’s one thing to put your own sorry self up for bids but it’s another altogether to ask everyone else in the boat with you to bend over and grab their ankles.

BOHICA!

On the off chance that you haven’t heard, the more devout amongst the Green Gaggle® are getting themselves righteously pissed off at Ellie May’s bullshit.

Back when Ellie was pissing and moaning about not being allowed to hang out with the cool kids at the leaders’ debates on the TV, damned near every conservative (and even quite a few lefty) commentor, blogger, journalist and other bipeds pointed out that it would amount to nothing more than allowing the Lieberals to have not one, but two reps at the debates. The Greens are a kook fringe; most of their “support” comes from the fact that they’re where some folks park protest votes and that’s it. Period. They had no business at the debates (neither did the Blocheads, but that’s another rant).

Despite denials, verybody and their gerbil knew that Ellie’s gang was a wholly owned asset of the Librano$. Everybody, that is, except apparently some of the people who were running for office under her party’s banner:

ORILLIA – Green Party Leader Elizabath May is confusing her own candidates with talk of supporting Stephane Dion for prime minister, says the Green candidate for Simcoe North.

Valerie Powell is equally incensed at the Liberals, who she says are engaging in “old political tricks” by trying to appeal for Green voters at the last minute.

May is “making it definitely confusing, and a lot of a Green candidates are really upset,” Powell said at the Orillia Farmers Market today, where Dion showed up at a rally to back the local Grit candidates. “It’s confusing for us as candidates.

Confusing?? You’ve been sold out,plain and simple. What’s so confusing about that? :?Idiot.

OTTAWA — Elizabeth May has “sold out” her Green Party candidates and volunteers with her call for strategic voting in close ridings, a former deputy leader of the party says.

David Chernushenko, who lost to Ms. May in 2006 for the party leadership, said her comments will confuse and likely demoralize her supporters in the final days of the campaign.

“Every candidate deserves to be fairly considered for a vote, and I don’t believe in strategic voting and I don’t believe that any Green candidate, volunteer or donor should be sold out,” Mr. Chernushenko said in a phone interview yesterday.

Asked if that is what he believes Ms. May has done, his answer was yes.

Well, at least he gets it.

Ah yes, Brainfartgate© (Hey, why the hell not? Nobody else has bothered to give the damned thing a name, have they?), the gift that just keeps on giving.

Seriously, I couldn’t have more fun with a train wreck on TiVo.  In Smell-O-Visionâ„¢.

You’ve heard the fart, you’ve seen the noses wrinkle, now let’s see what else we have in Santa’s great big sack…

• Ol’ Steve’s on the hapless bugger like a pit bull on a mailman:
  

  “His answer is, in French and in English, ‘I don’t have a plan. Yes, I criticized the prime minister, but I don’t actually have a plan other than a carbon tax. Please elect me so I can develop one.”‘

• Dion calls Harper a great big meanie.
• Dion plays the “I’m disabled and don’t speak English” card:
  

  He also pointed out that he has a slight hearing problem and that he was doing the interview in his English, his second language.

• Some bozos jumped on that bandwagon (NP? WTF??):
  

  But spare some empathy for Mr. Dion. It’s the end of a grueling campaign, the man has admitted to a hearing impairment and the question was open to interpretation while being phrased in Mr. Dion’s second language.

• Steve (Janke-not-Harper) isn’t buying that line:
  

  The question was not really that hard to understand. Sure, it was bit more complicated than “What’s your favourite colour?” or “What’s the average air speed of an African swallow?”

• Andrew (no apparent relation to Harry) Potter over at MacLean’s wants to shoot the messenger:
  

  This is worse than the Chretien face-paralysis attack ad. CTV just won Dion the election.

Damn. I knew they had an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, but this kind of bullcrap is ridiculous:

Two campaigners for Windsor West Liberal candidate Larry Horwitz were arrested on Tuesday after they shoved pamphlets in the faces of people at a grocery store.

[…]

According to the police report, a store employee noticed one of the campaigners push a pamphlet so aggressively at a customer that the customer snatched it and threw it back.

When store staff asked the campaigners to leave, they refused.

“They said, ‘No, I have a right to stay here,'” McNorton said.

Police were called — but even after the officers arrived, the campaigners didn’t relent.

“Our guys approached them and asked them to leave the premises, as their activity was disrupting the business and the management requested that they leave,” McNorton said.

“They responded by shoving a piece of paper in the officer’s face.”

The campaigners reportedly said they were protected by the Canada Elections Act, and that only the RCMP could stop them from campaigning.

[…]

“Common courtesy is if someone is not interested in what you’re trying to tell them, you just leave them alone,” McNorton said.

“They felt that they had a right to be able to do what they wanted in relation to promoting the election, even though it was on private property. And that’s the key issue here — It was on private property. The store has a right to do business.”

Yup, listen to us whether you want to or not, the law means what we want it to mean, whatever we want to do, yadda yadda yadda.

Last word:

University of Windsor political science professor Lydia Miljan said the incident “destroys” Horwitz’s public image, and she was surprised his campaigners would adopt such tactics.

“It’s just bad optics to be annoying people when you want their vote,” she said. “It sounds like they’re awfully desperate.”

No shit, Sherlock. Ya think?

… Just keeps on giving. And I’m lovin’ it.

As more and more people are finding out about The Absent-minded Professor®’s little deer-in-the-headlights moment on CTV the other day (even the Red Star couldn’t clam up about it), they are starting to get a really creepy feeling at the thought of this guy running the national till.

As if that wasn’t good enough, little Grit tadpole Geoff Regan had a chance to put the whole thing to bed and totally blew it. He could have said something like, “yeah, that was embarrassing; but the poor guy’s jet-lagged stupid these days, so what can you do, eh?” That could have been the end of it right there. People would have just assumed that Dion’s all tuckered out from dashing back and forth across the country for a month now and just had himself a brainfart. Could have happened to anybody.

But nope.

When Duff pointed out that this was reminiscent of Bob Stanfield and the football (best analogy so far, BTW), Regan fell back on the favourite HypoGrit tactic of ad hominem faux indignation, so beloved by them whenever they’ve been caught piddling on the rug and don’t think they should have their noses rubbed in it.

“Mister Dion has mentioned before that he has a hearing problem and that’s clearly what happened here,” he harrumphed. “I don’t think that we should spend a lot of time talking about someone’s physical impairment.”

When Duff quizzes him if it’s an impairment or just “a failure to comprehend,” Regan first sulks in silence, then tries to play dumb, and finally just goes all to hell in a handbasket amidst trying to deny that he just said what he just said when Duff calls bullshit on him.

Does it get better than this?