Rock On

The National are awesome, here they play a new a song for CBC’s Q:

Stealing from the Robert Mugabe playbook

That’s not the comparison that I made, that’s the comparison Allan Gregg made on the CBC tonight. Proroguing parliament as a Mugabe tactic? Ha. I’d buy it. Of course having Stephen Harper and Robert Mugabe come up together in Google searches would be a pity.

Paul Martin, Finance Minister or Vote Red, Go Black

It was nice to hear the CBC news pull a quote from Paul Martin on the matter of the Conservatives putting this country back in the red. For reasons that are entirely understandable, Martin sort of went to ground the past few years after his ‘06 defeat. If he can re-emerge and do so as “former finance minister Paul Martin” it has the potential to really help the Liberal brand. Here’s an opportunity for the grits to own fiscal prudence. It’s the sort of inversion of party perceptions that the British Tories are attempting with their “Vote Blue, Go Green” campaign on the environment. This time the Liberals can make it “Vote Red, Go Black” (as in ink).

Getting ready for the results to come in…

I have:

One (1) television tuned to CBC,

One (1) laptop, and

One (1) stiff drink – Woodford Reserve in my case.

Conservative Platform ‘08: The Cult of the Leader

There was a story on the CBC tonight as I drove home discussing another round of pre-election ads featuring Stephen Harper as a nice man who likes being a dad. Good for you Steve! Every parent who has any social graces can launch into how parenting is the greatest thing ever. Great. Now tell us what in the hell you would like to do if you got your sought-after majority. You can hate on the Liberal Green-Shift policy, but at least it’s a, you know, actual policy!

Who’s afraid of an abortion debate?

Andrew Coyne has written a piece in Macleans that purports to show that Canadians are somehow fearful of reopening debate on the question of abortion. While Coyne correctly points out that when the previous law was struck down every Supreme Court Justice expected parliament to write a new one, I’m not sure why he thinks that “Canadians” (because we’re all such a homogenuous group) are so afraid of this topic.

A while back the CBC ran its Great Canadian Wishlist on Facebook and the top two wishes involved abortion law in this country. Now this is partially an example of freeping I’m sure, but nonetheless it shows that there are significant segments of the population ready to refight this topic. You can also find a great many blogs ready to advance either side of this issue rather vigorously. Yet I’m also fairly certain that these groups are outnumbered by a somewhat more apathetic majority – people who either don’t care or who accept the law because they can’t be bothered with the shouting and acrimony that this topic usually engenders. Of course this is because there are still plenty of people champing at the bit to debate abortion.

What irritates me about Coyne writing this way is that he clearly must have some opinion of his own on the matter and yet he appears to be afraid to come right out and state it in the article! Who’s afraid now, Andrew Coyne? He says he wants this debate because we’re a democracy and this isn’t how democracies “behave.” Or something. Never mind that, as heirs to the British Parliamentary system, we have all manner of traditions and systems that are rather undemocratic. We could start at the top: Why is it that a wealthy English grandmother named Elizabeth Windsor called our Queen? Because her father was King of course!

So I don’t think this is strictly about procedures in a democratic country, I think rather that Andrew Coyne wants to say rather more about abortion, he’s just afraid. So he masks it by calling the rest of us afraid. A Google search for Andrew Coyne+abortion reveals that he has been consistently upset that the law that was struck down in 1988 was never replaced but he says little about what he would replace it with – he just wants to have a debate about it. Tell us Andrew Coyne, what exactly your position is on this matter – you want a debate, I call, show us your damn cards.

Hockey Night in Canada – like you’ve never heard it!

Via Saskboy I’ve learned that this is the leading vote-getter for the HNIC theme-song contest:

You’d think that the CBC would have learned about freeping after their Facebook experiment went awry.

Don’t Let the Facts Ruin a Good Fundraising Drive

Back to politics:

Buckdog reports that Doug Finley is beseeching the Conservative Party faithful to fight the evil CBC. This all goes back to the tempest in the teapot over a CBC reporter feeding questions to a Liberal MP about Mulroney. This is amusing because a while ago Paul Wells pointed out that this sort of thing happens all the time in Ottawa. A sample:

“I don’t know whether I ever did it with Reform, Alliance or NDP MPs when the Liberals were in government, but I know it got done and if I had a story I needed advancing, I’d have done it in a second. ‘Hey, you might want to ask about….’”

Anyone who has anything other than a totally, totally naive view of politics must surely assume that such things happen all the time. Of course feigned naivety is a great political tool. Stephen Taylor and Doug Finley are shocked! Shocked that the media and the opposition sometimes share information.

FLICK Rex Murphy

I really cannot believe that people are still on about this “Flick off” campaign that the government has launched to conserve electricity. Whatever taboo that the word “fuck” once held has greatly dissipated over the past decade. The Globe and Mail routinely quotes people saying “fuck” without bothering to asterisk any of the letters. (My goodness, what could they have meant by f***?) Recently, Mark Steyn wrote the following for Macleans:

“Fuck!” “Fuck!” “Jesus Christ!” “Fuck!” Fuck-fucketty-fucketty-fucking-fuck.

Seriously, look it up – even writers who drone on about our decadence and moral decay don’t bother to bleep it out anymore.

It seems everyone is okay with “fuck” in just about any context. Everyone that is, except Rex Murphy who used his CBC soapbox tonight to whine about it. Someone ought to buy Rex a FCUK t-shirt. Look, the way I see it, most of tune out government public awareness campaigns because they come off as so much sanctimonious nagging (come to think of it, Rex comes off that way too). Kudos to whoever had the idea to make this effort at least a little bit interesting.

Media Bias: The Stephen Taylor Edition

Stephen Taylor of the Blogging Tories is up in arms about some report on the CBC. From what I’m able to tell the problem was that Tom Flanagan didn’t get a chance to comment about the story. Thus, in Taylor’s mind some kind of artificial balance was thrown out of proportion.

I’m somewhat concerned by balance fetishists because balances of opinion are artificial. Everyone’s idea of a “balanced” news report is shaped by their own sense of what constitutes “balance” in the media. I’m sure that Flanagan has other reasons to be upset with CBC, and to him this is another in a long list of grievances. What is fascinating about Flanagan’s letter to Taylor is that the one thing that the media needs for better balance is more Tom Flanagan.

Of course it’s not as though Tom Flanagan (or Stephen Taylor for that matter) are silenced by the media. I’ve read lengthy Flanagan Op-Eds in the Globe and Mail and I see that Macleans has anointed both Flanagan and Taylor as two of their 50 extra-special opinion-shaping people. It is evident that there are lots of opportunities for both Taylor and Flanagan to get their opinions out there. So what if one reporter ditched Flanagan’s shimmering pearls of wisdom on one story? I’ve seen plenty of one-sided articles emanating from both Macleans and the CanWest Global empire that I vehemently disagreed with.

What did I do?

Well, I didn’t waste time trying to dig up some journalism code of ethics with which to sully these institutions. No. I accept that everyone is biased, you, me, Stephen Taylor, everyone. I criticized and/or mocked the pieces that I found disagreeable instead. There is nothing wrong with an editorial board having a point of view – in fact the media that I consider most suspicious are those that swear up and down that they are unbiased. It’s humanly impossible to be unbiased, when some outlet says it’s unbiased it likely means that the bias is more insidious than in other cases.

On a side note, what happened to the whole conservative pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps mentality? I mean this seems to be an appeal to have someone else fix a problem for you. Shouldn’t true conservatives busy themselves using entrepreneurial energies to create a leaner, more innovative market-driven competitor to a big mushy government apparatus like the CBC?