Thursday, April 9, 2015

Tempest In A Teapot

This is a throw down. A show down. Hell no, we can't slow down.

The departure of Monte McNaughton from the PCPO leadership race has set the stage for the final battle between Red and Blue Tories over the soul of the party.

And rest assured, my friends, it is going to be epic. Nobody needs to pretend to be nice to anyone else to try and pick up second ballot votes anymore. From today until the end, it is open war.

We haven't had a good old bloody civil war since Norm Sterling got booted from his riding back in 2011, and even that was just a microcosm of the festering, boiling hatred that exists between these two camps. Attempts by the party to prevent a province-wide outbreak are going to fail hilariously, because they are currently scrambling to figure out how to keep Patrick Brown and his increasingly radical band of malcontents from completing their hostile takeover. Getting the bad blood out is going to be a nice bit of stress relief, if not an exercise in image management.

Liberals, get your popcorn and your lawn chairs ready.

If you need a recap of what's at stake here, you clearly haven't been paying attention, but I'll do so anyway. In one corner stands the reserved and dignified Christine Elliott, in whose mouth butter would not melt. Not for her the aggressive, frat-boy posturing of those pretenders without the royal jelly who have been smashing the party to bits with their tomfoolery ever since that uncouth cad Mike Harris destroyed the PC standing in dear old Toronto. Yea and verily, she represents the majesty of a bygone age, the golden epoch of Bill Davis, where ne'er there was any of the "divisiveness" that plagues us in these dark times.

In the other stands the peacocking, marathon-running, short-dude-overcompensating Patrick Brown, who has assembled a collection of business leaders, former sports stars, social conservatives, and second and third generation Canadians all united by anger over the contemptuous way they've been treated by the old guard. Considerations such as whether Mr. Brown has a seat in Queen's Park or not or whether he has something resembling a plan for the province have taken a back seat to promising that he'll rip the guts out of the party, which might cause the progressive coalition that's stomped the PC's in the past few elections to shrink in terror, or it might just cause them to burst out laughing.

If we are to go by Christine's latest press release, however, Patrick's presumptuous politicking has not deterred her resolve, but rather put her in She Stoops To Conquer mode as she stoops to the kind of rhetoric that made Kathleen Wynne the Premier she is today, using words like "ideology", "rejection", "modern and inclusive", "outdated", and of course, "the politics of division." No more of the limp Big Blue Tent nonsense for Christine- if you support Patrick, you're responsible for the inevitable fifth election loss, plain and simple.

Now I'm going to make the same point I've been making since this thing began. While the difference between Red and Blue is crucially important for the 30 some odd percent of people who can be counted on to actually show up and vote for a conservative party, the rest of the world doesn't care. They see no daylight between Christine Elliott and Patrick Brown. The fact that the PC Party doesn't understand this will sink them a lot faster than Christine's brittleness or Patrick's obnoxiousness.

As far as the voting public are concerned, both want to destroy the public sector and cut 100,000 jobs and deport foreign workers and implement chain gangs and fund faith based schools and take Ontario backward, not forward. Both of them are Mike Harris. Both of them are going to be accused of having hidden agendas and be blamed for Walkerton and Ipperwash and the 407. Christine Elliott will try and fail to convince Ontarians that this isn't so. Patrick Brown will act as though it doesn't matter.

Neither of these responses are inspiring, but of the two, at least Brown doesn't try to pretend he's something that he isn't. We may very well lose the next election with him in charge, but at least he isn't peeing on the legs of the voters and telling them that it's raining. So there's your "endorsement", for what it's worth.

For my part, I'm not voting for either of these two, and I want their "social media" teams to take notice. I, and lots of other people who would be otherwise interested, am going to put my feet up and watch this sucker burn, and my conscience over the next few years is going to be as clean as a whistle.

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Move Along, Nothing To See

So, everyone knows that there have been "shocking" "new" "revelations" from the father of Darcy Allan Sheppard that former OLP Attorney General Michael Bryant "killed" "his" "son", right? (Not sure how many quotation marks I need to avoid being sued here, so I figured better safe than sorry.)

Pretty much deafening silence from the right. PCPO, where are you? Hello?

No, on second thought, don't bother. This is perfectly consistent with everything we've seen before. Under no circumstances is this going to turn into a Dudley George situation, or even a Walkerton situation, no matter how hard the PCPO pushes, so they might as well save their energy. Just put it on the "growing list of scandals" that nobody reads and let it gather dust.

When ex-OLP cabmins are getting away with stuff like this, it's time to really, really stop blaming failures in leadership or messaging for election losses. The truth of the matter is, the voters are willing to let basically anything slide so long as they don't see another conservative government in Ontario.

So can we please, please stop pretending as though it makes a difference who leads the party, or how? We might as well just embrace the crazy, since the public isn't going to give us the benefit of the doubt either way.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

The New Rules

It's been said that a conservative is a liberal who was mugged by reality. Sometimes the liberal is too smug and arrogant to realize that he or she is now a conservative and it takes a few days to register, but them's the breaks in the new hierarchy of speech.

The right wing had better prepare for an influx of big-name liberal refugees who found out the hard way that they're not wanted anymore because they said the wrong stuff, and for the accompanying coma-inducing debate over whether we should water down the bloodline by granting these fops asylum.

The latest excommunique is the perpetually self-satisfied Bill Maher, who fell off the left-wing wagon in a big way this week when he felt that he just had to compare a former member of One Direction to the Boston Marathon bomber.

I never liked Maher, but I do feel a twinge of sympathy- not because I agree with the joke, which isn't funny- but because poor Bill has spent so much time getting smoke blown up his various orifices for being so bold as to make fun of conservatives, Christians, and conservative Christians in his own "unique" way that it's almost hard to blame him for being confused for thinking he did anything wrong here.

This is the guy who proved conclusively that it is possible to make a movie showing how dumb religious people are, call it "Religulous," get massively paid, and then continue to do this same routine for years while still getting massively paid. Poor bastard was never going to see it coming, was he?

Snarkoid lefty comedians like Maher, whose stock in trade is insulting people, are always the first people to unwittingly topple into the widening abyss of stuff you can't say. It happened to Dennis Miller. It happened to Stephen Colbert. It happened to Joan Rivers.

It's already trite to defend Maher's right to be offensive or to weigh in on whether the joke was racist or not racist. There's a bigger issue here, and that's that tired old white lefties like Maher honest-to-God believe that their progressive leanings are going to give them the same sort of free pass to say the kind of offensive stuff that Trevor Noah got away with.

Witness the spectacle of Patton Oswalt, for example, thinking that he's defending Noah by mocking people who are overly sensitive to "problematic humour", while also considering that Mr. Oswalt is a chubby middle aged white dude with a resemblance to Rob Ford who is guilty of dabbling in the saturated-in-whiteness nerd humour which is on the fast track to becoming "problematic" in its own right and you've got another one of these debacles waiting to happen. I give it five years before Oswalt misspeaks or misTweets and has to turn in his lefty card just like Maher did, and that's being charitable.

They are always horrified to find that the weapons they constructed to attack the privileged are now being used against them. Now it is Trevor Noah who gets a free pass while Bill Maher doesn't, but Mr. Noah has other strikes against him: He is a man, and he is straight, and as such his presence as the new Daily Show host is keeping women and non-straight people off TV, so you had damn well better believe that his time is coming. "First they came for the cisgendered white dudes, and I did not speak up because I was not a cisgendered white dude......"

Pay attention to this pattern, because this is what's going to trigger the final Armageddon battle between left and right- when the number of people who are being forced to their knees by the outrage outnumber those doing the forcing. See if it doesn't.