Over breakfast last week, an American guest bemoaned her country’s politics.
She ceased to recognize them any more, she said. They had careened off on some crazy trajectory — the ricochets of too many trigger fingers. U.S. politics, she said, was so out there, had become so bizarre, it filled her with alarm.
I, Canadian, typically both envious and disdainful of the American experience, commiserated. A little too sanctimoniously. Tsk tsk. What are you people doing to each other down there? The smug, middle-way Canadian looks southward and sees, to his reassurance that everything is still right where he lives, a country filled with wing nuts.
Breakfast ended. But soon so did the air of self-satisfaction.
Back at the office, news arrived of the latest howler out of Ottawa. Conservative MP Vic Toews, head of the Orwellian-named Public Safety Canada, was again frothing at the mouth.
This time, he was the injured. Someone posted on Twitter the sordid details of his divorce.
I would have called it news except for the fact it wasn’t: Toews had been outed as an extramarital fornicator as early as four years ago by several newspapers.
The messy details of the divorce — an affair with, and impregnation of, a much younger Tory staffer — were also a matter of public record.
What distinguished this latest attack on Toews was the fact that the tweet was anonymous, and posted from somewhere within the House of Commons. This lent momentum to Toews’ public bluster and stagy sense of victimization. He’d been bushwhacked by masked bandits! It was an inside job! Form a posse.
What followed was not a conversation, but a conversation about the conversation.
Social media, flush with its ability to embarrass the government, exalted its success. Its acolytes insisted that the tired old mainstream media had failed to do its job, and had relinquished its role as news generators — this despite the fact that the tired old mainstream media had generated the Toews story four years earlier.
And if the anonymous tweeter learned of the Toews affair through those newspaper stories, which is likely, you’re welcome.
Meanwhile, for some reason I can’t fathom, the mainstream media went into hand-wringing mode over this, devoting column inches fretting over this supposedly new, yet old, reality.
Which is to say, somebody — an opposition operative? a staffer with a grudge? an inter-party quisling? — regurgitated embarrassing information about a politician to discredit his policies. Has ever such an outrage been perpetrated in the history of politics, or journalism? I wonder.
Old story. But one, it seems to me, set in new psychic territory.
Led by their pale cipher, the Conservatives have shaped a political landscape that is all at odds with the Canadian tradition of moderation. Whatever is coming out of Ottawa these days — especially in matters of law — feels like the work of zealots, not legislators.
Is it that small-town chippiness they bring to politics that explains it? Or their Old Testament weakness for punishment? Is it that predilection to frame every issue as us-against-them, and to appeal to the xenophobe in us? Or is it their inability to recognize the difference between resolve and rigidity?
Whatever it is, there’s a new mean-spiritedness in federal politics these days, and the public has responded in kind. The Internet attacks on the Conservatives were positively gleeful, which is a byproduct of social media’s often-adolescent tone, but which the Conservatives rightly deserved. Better than anyone they can appreciate an eye for an eye.
Consider the record:
According to Toews — him again — we either support their Internet bill or, by default, we aid and abet child pornographers. Any quibbling about personal privacy is the devil’s talk.
The Northern Gateway project? Any opposition to an oil pipeline is the work of foreign saboteurs, not the wish of patriotic Canadians.
Prisons? We need more of them, despite a decades-old trend that crime rates are headed downhill. (The Conservative remedy to correct that slide: their insistence that backyard gardeners get mandatory sentences for growing as few as a half-dozen pot plants. Memo to neighbours: grow five.)
Their record on rights? Odd priorities, mixed signals. Gun owners, a shrinking but vocal minority, can breathe easier now that the long gun registry is on its way to being scrapped, along with the promised destruction of all the records that have previously been collected about those guns. Thank gawd the Conservatives have made sure that government will no longer intrude on the rights of law-abiding people who want to shoot things.
But plans to allow the wider surveillance of the public’s email accounts, browsing history and personal information? That’s okay. The ass-backwards mantra justifying this? If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. This government presumes innocence only after guilt has been ruled out.
Doubt has been expressed that Toews was even aware of the scope of the powers his government’s bill permits. But he is quick to reassure us, much like a teenage male on the make, that hey, baby, it’s all right, the government knows when to stop, its intentions are honourable. It’s around about then that the public should pull up its collective panties and flee the room.
Speaking of fleeing:
The American guest at breakfast asked if Americans were still heading to Canada because they were attracted to its saner politics. In deference to her, I tut-tutted that notion, but smiled secretly at the thought.
It was only later in the day, after going into the office and reading the news out of Ottawa, that it struck me:
Why would Americans bother?
They’d just be coming to what they hoped they’d left behind.
Original Article
Source: vancouver sun
Author: Pete McMartin
She ceased to recognize them any more, she said. They had careened off on some crazy trajectory — the ricochets of too many trigger fingers. U.S. politics, she said, was so out there, had become so bizarre, it filled her with alarm.
I, Canadian, typically both envious and disdainful of the American experience, commiserated. A little too sanctimoniously. Tsk tsk. What are you people doing to each other down there? The smug, middle-way Canadian looks southward and sees, to his reassurance that everything is still right where he lives, a country filled with wing nuts.
Breakfast ended. But soon so did the air of self-satisfaction.
Back at the office, news arrived of the latest howler out of Ottawa. Conservative MP Vic Toews, head of the Orwellian-named Public Safety Canada, was again frothing at the mouth.
This time, he was the injured. Someone posted on Twitter the sordid details of his divorce.
I would have called it news except for the fact it wasn’t: Toews had been outed as an extramarital fornicator as early as four years ago by several newspapers.
The messy details of the divorce — an affair with, and impregnation of, a much younger Tory staffer — were also a matter of public record.
What distinguished this latest attack on Toews was the fact that the tweet was anonymous, and posted from somewhere within the House of Commons. This lent momentum to Toews’ public bluster and stagy sense of victimization. He’d been bushwhacked by masked bandits! It was an inside job! Form a posse.
What followed was not a conversation, but a conversation about the conversation.
Social media, flush with its ability to embarrass the government, exalted its success. Its acolytes insisted that the tired old mainstream media had failed to do its job, and had relinquished its role as news generators — this despite the fact that the tired old mainstream media had generated the Toews story four years earlier.
And if the anonymous tweeter learned of the Toews affair through those newspaper stories, which is likely, you’re welcome.
Meanwhile, for some reason I can’t fathom, the mainstream media went into hand-wringing mode over this, devoting column inches fretting over this supposedly new, yet old, reality.
Which is to say, somebody — an opposition operative? a staffer with a grudge? an inter-party quisling? — regurgitated embarrassing information about a politician to discredit his policies. Has ever such an outrage been perpetrated in the history of politics, or journalism? I wonder.
Old story. But one, it seems to me, set in new psychic territory.
Led by their pale cipher, the Conservatives have shaped a political landscape that is all at odds with the Canadian tradition of moderation. Whatever is coming out of Ottawa these days — especially in matters of law — feels like the work of zealots, not legislators.
Is it that small-town chippiness they bring to politics that explains it? Or their Old Testament weakness for punishment? Is it that predilection to frame every issue as us-against-them, and to appeal to the xenophobe in us? Or is it their inability to recognize the difference between resolve and rigidity?
Whatever it is, there’s a new mean-spiritedness in federal politics these days, and the public has responded in kind. The Internet attacks on the Conservatives were positively gleeful, which is a byproduct of social media’s often-adolescent tone, but which the Conservatives rightly deserved. Better than anyone they can appreciate an eye for an eye.
Consider the record:
According to Toews — him again — we either support their Internet bill or, by default, we aid and abet child pornographers. Any quibbling about personal privacy is the devil’s talk.
The Northern Gateway project? Any opposition to an oil pipeline is the work of foreign saboteurs, not the wish of patriotic Canadians.
Prisons? We need more of them, despite a decades-old trend that crime rates are headed downhill. (The Conservative remedy to correct that slide: their insistence that backyard gardeners get mandatory sentences for growing as few as a half-dozen pot plants. Memo to neighbours: grow five.)
Their record on rights? Odd priorities, mixed signals. Gun owners, a shrinking but vocal minority, can breathe easier now that the long gun registry is on its way to being scrapped, along with the promised destruction of all the records that have previously been collected about those guns. Thank gawd the Conservatives have made sure that government will no longer intrude on the rights of law-abiding people who want to shoot things.
But plans to allow the wider surveillance of the public’s email accounts, browsing history and personal information? That’s okay. The ass-backwards mantra justifying this? If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. This government presumes innocence only after guilt has been ruled out.
Doubt has been expressed that Toews was even aware of the scope of the powers his government’s bill permits. But he is quick to reassure us, much like a teenage male on the make, that hey, baby, it’s all right, the government knows when to stop, its intentions are honourable. It’s around about then that the public should pull up its collective panties and flee the room.
Speaking of fleeing:
The American guest at breakfast asked if Americans were still heading to Canada because they were attracted to its saner politics. In deference to her, I tut-tutted that notion, but smiled secretly at the thought.
It was only later in the day, after going into the office and reading the news out of Ottawa, that it struck me:
Why would Americans bother?
They’d just be coming to what they hoped they’d left behind.
Original Article
Source: vancouver sun
Author: Pete McMartin
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