Look Out, Radioactive Man! It Looks Like the Liberals Are Exploding Again!

If the "Eugene Forsey Liberal" is anything to go by, it would appear that the Canadian Liberals are right back to the sort of bitter acrimony that the Ignatieff victory was supposed to end for good.

Conniving, lying, anti-democratic traitors to Canada who send young Canadians to die in hopeless wars for their own political ends and to please their perceived colonial masters.

I have worked in aid of Bob Rae. Many of my friends and family have. Over many years. Never again.

Even knowing politicians, I never thought Rae & Iggy were the treacherous lying scum we now know to be. Bob Rae is right about one thing. I and many others, after all these years, remain naïve, by comparison. Thankfully.

Harper must go. Ignatieff must go. Rae must go.

That is all.

This is a shocking story. Canadians want out of Afghanistan, even more so than Americans do. They believe that they've done their part, and know that their country has sacrificed more lives—as a proportion of their population—to this mission than any other in the world. While all the other countries in NATO are bailing out, leaving Afghanistan to the Americans, it looks like Canada is going to stay as "trainers".

(Of course, Vietnam was originally about "training" as well. I don't put too much stock in that, and neither should any of you.)

If this had been some ill-conceived political move by the Liberals, that would be different. Sure, it would be stupid, since you can't outflank Republican-style conservatives like the Canadian Conservatives on the right. But that's not what happened here. What happened is that the Liberal leadership negotiated an extension to the mission that neither the Liberal caucus nor the Liberal party as a whole had any appetite for. The Liberals clearly want their soldiers to come home. But the leadership doesn't.

And Bob Rae? BOB RAE? Seriously? I'll admit that I don't know as much about the man and his history as some, but everything I've seen suggests that this is not his sort of game. He's always been the relatively honest, relatively progressive leadership figure in the Liberal party. What the hell is progressive about secret negotiations with the Conservatives? Did he look at what happened with Obama on health care and shout "ME TOO!", charging into the fray without a thought to the consequences?

Is he just getting tired of being in opposition and decided he wanted to contribute to government policy SOMEHOW, even if the government is odious and the method of contribution suspect?

In any case, we're (again) seeing the value of pseudonymity here. "Eugene Forsey Liberal" would probably be risking his association with the Liberal party if he said any of this openly. Even Whatzisname Kinsella is getting with the program, which may be even more surprising than the Rae thing. (Though Jason Cherniak's unfortunately "snotty" response to Kinsella's rage over this decision may have something to do with that.)

I suspect we'll see more "Forsey"-style posts as the days go by. Anonymous sources are already leaking how unhappy the Liberal caucus is about this. Forsey's post is all over twitter, too, linked by angry Liberals and jubilant New Democrats alike.

Unless Rae and Ignatieff can convince their party otherwise, this is only going to get worse.

Steve Paikin: Class Act

As seen here, ripping up Whatzisname for playing the censor.

Paikin is the host of what is, quite probably, Canada's most respected current affairs show, The Agenda. I've seen it (episodes are on their website), and though it isn't flashy, it's excellent. It also has a tendency to book controversial guests: one of them, Kathy Shaidle, is a notorious anti-Muslim agitator online. I saw the episode, and she wasn't very good, and her writings aren't very good either.

But, since she's also very much anti-Liberal, this didn't suit Whatzisname one bit. So, well, I'll let Steve tell it:

It was with a considerable amount of surprise that I received an email from Warren, the public affairs consultant and Liberal Party operative, the day our program was set to air.

Warren has been a guest on The Agenda several times, and, in fact, had been a guest with Kathy Shaidle on The Agenda in 2007.

Warren told me that he planned to blog about our “outrageous decision” to “give Kathy Shaidle a platform, and for provincial tax dollars to indirectly fund same.”

He asked whether we had any comment to make and whether Kathy was being paid to appear (she wasn’t).

Warren then included in his private email to me a lengthy list of things Kathy had said about other ethnic groups, mainly Muslims.

Here's what he sent, alleging Shaidle had said or written all of these things...

[here follows a laundry list of valid-but-irrelevant complaints]

I told Warren that if he was looking for an official comment from the program, it should come from our communications department or our executive producer, so I forwarded Warren’s email to Dan.

Later that same day, I received another email from Warren informing me that he was emailing the Minister of Education to ask her to pressure us to “unbook” Kathy Shaidle, and that if we didn’t, there would be significant consequences for TVO and The Agenda. He did, indeed, email the Minister.

Well, now we’ve got a different story, right? Now, it’s no longer a story about the appropriateness of our choosing Kathy to appear on the program. Now it’s a story about a well known Liberal Party operative threatening us (with what? We didn’t know) unless we did what he said.

That’s a very different story and as a result, we naturally refused to “unbook” Kathy. We do not take our marching orders on whom to put on or take off our television program from anyone, but most assuredly, not from partisan political operatives with personal grudges (Warren’s tangle with Kathy, I’ve learned, goes back awhile).

So if Warren’s ultimate goal was to deprive Kathy of a “platform,” his approach failed spectacularly.

Throughout the course of the day, Warren and I emailed back and forth a few times. Much to my surprise, I found my private emails to him quoted on his blog. I found that to be a violation of etiquette and surprising for someone who, I would imagine, understands the value of private conversation.

The show went ahead. Kathy Shaidle didn’t insult Muslims – or anyone else. Some viewers have suggested she appeared angry and defensive but she was not the ogre Warren demanded we take off the public’s airwaves.

After the program, I emailed Warren once again, offering to talk to him at his convenience about the day’s events. He declined, saying “the damage has been done.” What that damage was, he didn’t say.

At this point, I was unclear as to whether my efforts to communicate with Warren were really about resolving a difference of opinion, or simply providing content for his blog.

No doubt.

I've been doing this for a while. My numbers aren't as high as they were, but I've never really cared that much about that. Read it or don't. I certainly don't pull Kinsella's numbers. But even if I did want to pull those kind of numbers, there's no way that I'd pull a stunt like this to get them. Not only does this hurt his credibility, but it damages the credibility of the man he works for, and the sense of entitlement in his "I'M GONNA EMAIL THE MINISTER!!" tirade reinforces every negative stereotype about the Liberal party and its apparatchiks that Canadians have of them. It makes them look worse than Republicans; more like the bloated patronage-ridden power brokers that drag down the Japanese LDP.

It's every reason they got their asses kicked all in one idiotic package. And, as an added bonus, it'll have ticked off a key public media figure in Canada, which is the LAST thing the Liberals need. They have little pull online, especially compared to their Conservative and NDP counterparts, and the press is predominantly Conservative-leaning in Canada. They need people like Paikin, and he'll be thoroughly alienated after this.

One can only hope that somebody dressed this guy down thoroughly. Stupid, stupid, stupid.