03.20.2011 04:48 PM

Sick

That’s the only way you can describe this – going after an opponent’s family.

Maybe, you know, they will mock someone’s disability next. A facial paralysis or something.

Oh, wait.

40 Comments

  1. smelter rat says:

    Just when you think the Reformatories can’t stoop any lower, they pull through again.

  2. bc says:

    Iggy has to start hitting back.

    He’s such a passive salesman – “when you’re ready to vote for me, I’ll be here”. He needs to actually be angry, rather than just telling everyone how angry he is.

    “Is this the kind of Canada you want?”. What a cop out. Tell us what you really think of the guy and maybe Canadians will think of you as actually standing for something firmly.

    Just my 2 cents.

  3. Jan says:

    Next up Iggy’s grandfather’s income tax records. Cons get really nasty when threatened.

  4. Intpro says:

    Actually the attacks are bang-on. Iggy is trying to be something he isn’t, and he’s also trying to re-write his family’s history to something it never was. Look at the bright side…..if there is an election in the next couple of months, we’ll only have to listen to him whine until he heads back across the border to Harvard.

    • nic coivert says:

      This is B.S. and misdirection, Harper is the son of wealthy oil executive and he went to a private school.

    • kat says:

      Intpro- are you lying for Harper? Be careful… see what happened to Oda. You can’t rewrite history. Oh look at that shiny object over there.

  5. Dan F says:

    This is exactly why I’m not worried about having an election now. The Cons are so arrogant that they will screw up as badly or worse then the 1993 face ad. They will feel like the attack ads are working beautifully, right up until the moment they cross the line. At that point, the cumulative effect of the attack ads will be the death of the Harper campaign.

  6. Kim Leaman says:

    You have this all wrong! The attacks are fiction. The man that Harper describes is ^Not the Real Michael Ignatieff. He is so far superior to Stephen Harper that the attacks are necessary. Good luck with your continued defence of the indefensible Mr. Harper.

    Stephen Harper is ^NOT a Leader! I like Mike!

    http://bit.ly/TheTwainShallMeet

    • Susan Delacourt who writes for the Toronto Star – not a publication usually known to support anything Conservative – wrote an excellent piece on her blog that points out that Ignatieff’s immigrant story is not how he often portrays it. She documents how, while it is true that his family left Russia without anything on them, they moved their wealth into European banks before they left Russia. She describes how they had $120,000 sitting in a bank account when the average Canadian annual wage at the time was $920. Sure, his family were immigrants, but they were hardly typical of the poor immigrant family coming to Canadian that Ignatieff is trying so desperately to convince Canadians of.

  7. allegra fortissima says:

    Can’t wait to watch Rick on youtube helping the Ignatieffs to move into 24 Sussex Drive. Just remember: do NOT drop the TV (okay, that was probably Bob’s fault).

  8. I will put my partisanship biased up front and say that I am both a conservative and a Conservative.

    While I generally deplore the idea of politicians going after their opponents families (in this case, the Tories going after Ignatieff’s family), I am inclined to believe that the attacks are fair game when the opponent runs ads that feature his family and their “struggles” as an immigrant family.

    If Ignatieff didn’t want the Tories going after his family and pointing out – quite factually, I might add – that his parents and grandparents were people of privilege and wealth, then perhaps he shouldn’t have used their “story” in a blatant partisan ploy to gain favour with immigrant families. If Harper had run ads depicting himself and his children as being “middle class” when the case might not be true, then Ignatieff and the Liberals would be perfectly within their right to run ads that contradict Harper’s claim.

    In the end, if a politician is going to use their family as political ploys, then they shouldn’t be upset when their opponents do the same.

    • Philip says:

      How very proud you must be. Politician’s families are now open for attack? What a thrilling time it must be to be member of the Conservative Party. So where is the line now Patrick? Steal taxpayer’s money to attack an Opposition Leader’s kids? Your Conservative Party said that Dion wasn’t a “real father” because his child was adopted. You must have really enjoyed that witty bon mot Patrick. God forbid if the children of any Opposition Leader has any disabilities, is overweight, shy or different in any way. Grist for the mill I suppose. There used to be standards in Canadian politics but thanks to the Conservative Party those are gone. Roll on election, roll on.

      • Pete says:

        We do know what the cons said about jean Chretien’s facial disability and look where it got them. The Harpercrites are going to get a good kick in the ass for their nastiness.

      • Namesake says:

        I don’t know if they actually _wrote_ that on the CPC war room’s notaleader.ca attack site, e.g.,

        but they certainly _implied_ it in the coded, dog-whistle sort of way being discussed in the other thread on Kenney & gay marriages — using innuendo, to invite their base to draw the inference and spread it themselves, as on this Ignatieff’s not a “real” immigrant family issue — when:

        – they ran a series of ‘warm & fuzzy’ ads depicting Harper as a “family man” par excellence, during the 2008 campaign: one actually entitled, “Family is Everything”; and

        – given the opp. to explain how that differentiated him from the other leadership candidates, and asked point-blank whether Mr. Dion wasn’t also a family man, the PM feigned ignorance about his chief rival (which is a virtual impossibility, given the way his whole Party & Gov’t spends more time on oppo. research than anything), and replied:

        “‘I don’t know Stephane Dion all that well,’ Mr. Harper said when reporters asked whether he feels the Liberal Leader is a family man. ‘But I presume that he’s been married a long time, has children. I presume he’s a family man also.'”

        http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080907.welxnfamily08/BNStory/politics

        … which of course would send the conbots scurrying to see whether that was an accurate presumption, and they’d soon discover from the many profiles of the time about how the couple adopted a daughter from Peru since they could not conceive themselves, and, armed with that knowledge, they could proceed to scurry about depositing scurrilous ‘puffin poop’ aspersions of his family status and manhood on various blogs and media sites like this….

        … which is why the Lib. campaign soon felt compelled to create its own site, “This Is Dion, [which] portrays Dion as a rugged family man who loves fishing, spending time with his wife, his daughter and his dog.”

        http://www.cbc.ca/news/canadavotes/story/2008/09/09/leaders-preview.html

  9. Savant says:

    While I don’t support unprompted attacks on one’s family or personal life, the reality here is that Ignatieff *did* bring it up first, and in a big way. When you throw out a big softball of an ad talking about your ‘history’, it only stands to reason that you opponents will pick up on it. Right now – personal attacks and politics go hand-in-hand, and that apples to ALL parties. No one has the higher ground here, which is why the public doesn’t really care one way or another. It’s kinda like violence on TV, where if you watch enough of it you become desensitized to it.

    If Ignatieff didn’t want his family dragged into this, then he probably shouldn’t have make them part of his campaign ads.

    • kat says:

      If the Reformatories didn’t keep running ads on Ignatiff, first I might add, not being a Canadian and not living in Canada, the need to clarify history would not have been necessary. No Ignatiff did NOT bring his family up first but was just responding to the stupid “he’s been out of the country for 30 years” sh*t. Like Harvard would even p*ss on Harper if he asked them for a job. Bawhahahaha But it take a Con to twist the facts around. Believe me Savant, the public cares. But hey… don’t let me change your mind.

  10. Philip says:

    Or, conversely we can watch the long knives come out as the penny finally drops in Conservative Party that Harper can’t get a majority. All those taxpayer dollars spent attack ads bent on demonizing one single Canadian citizen and Harper still can’t get the job done. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, after all it’s not like it is Conservative money being pissed away. Still it has got to be pretty frustrating to what passes for the Conservative Party’s brain trust that the only way forward is deeper into the bilge. They will go there but the Conservative Party will lose more and more Canadian voters the deeper into the bilge they go.

  11. Matthew says:

    I dunno…the LIBERALS made Iggy’s family an issue by trying to score political points by saying how hard up his family was. I think it’s fair to poke holes in the story once the issue has been raised in an attempt to score political points. If Iggy wanted the big, bad Harper to leave his family alone, he shouldn’t have used them as a political prop. You reap what you sow, etc.

    • Cath says:

      I agree with you Matthew. Once it’s used publicly even by your guy, it’s fair game. Why put it out there in the first place?

    • Ted says:

      Except the Harperites are making stuff up about Ignatieff’s family. They were refugees from Russia, escaping communism. They did try to help the counter-revolution. They did come over to Canada with nothing. They did become farmers and lay rail tracks and work other manual jobs before rising, rung by rung up the ladder based on talent and hard work.

      In other words, it is the classic immigrant story.

      And we should be proud to have George Ignatieff as a significant part of our Canadian history.

  12. Philip says:

    Is Harper’s marriage fair game now Gord?

    • Philip says:

      Wrong again Gord. Marriages and relationships are nobody’s business, except to the people directly involved. It’s called class Gord. Do look it up.

  13. Namesake says:

    The CPC war room piece is a real piece of work because it’s achieved what it set out to: it cherry-picked certain facts from published accounts of Ignatieff’s family history (much of it from MI himself), but left out certain crucial facts, and invited its lazy readers — the conbots — to fill in or skip over the missing details with their (lack of) imagination to arrive at the Conbots’ default implied conclusion of: Hypocrite.

    Here’s a relatively short v. of the facts:

    – the family fled Russia during the Bolshevik revolution in 1918, with SOME money and assets….
    – enough to buy a dairy farm in England (but it’s not at clear whether it was completely paid for, as opposed to them paying a mortgage on it), which
    – some of the family & some other Russian exile hangers-on tried to make a go of for ten years, but lost a lot of money on, while,
    – the patriarch (MI’s grandfather) lived in Paris, bemoaning his fate, & trying to raise money to free other White Russians….
    – the oldest son, MI’s uncle, had already emigrated to Canada, and when he returned and saw the state of the family’s finances, he promptly sold the farm & packed up his mother & brothers and they all emigrated to to Canada in 1928 (which probably a consumed a considerable amount of whatever they netted from the sale of the farm, just for the boat passage & subsequent travel to get set up here); where they (and later the grandfather, who eventually left Paris to rejoin them)
    – only had enough to rent a farm, and could only pay for one year of tuition at UCC for MI’s dad, before the Depression hit and they couldn’t afford that any more, and so his dad took jobs like laying RR track to put himself through college & university, before earning a Rhode’s scholarship and going on to a career in the public service.

    Which is why MI says in the Youtube ad the CPC jumped on, that his dad arrived in Canada with virtually nothing, and had to work hard to achieve things in life, and taught him the value of work.

    All that’s true, and it’s only by glossing over the fact that they pretty much literally lost the farm in England (after previously losing everything else in Russia during the revol’n) before coming here, that the conbots now ‘think’ otherwise.

    This is all been hashed out on sites like

    http://calgarygrit.blogspot.com/2011/03/ignatieffs-were-not-typical-immigrants.html

    and various Aaron Wherry Macleans blogs, and Kady’s tweets the other night, among other places.

  14. dawg says:

    Personal income tax wasn’t introduced in Canada until WWI. Nice try though.

  15. kat says:

    The lie was from the CONS. But then they believe Joseph Goebbel

  16. Hammer (vote Liberal) Dom says:

    See, there is always a line, right? I know Politicos’ purposely blur it to service their interests, but still. If I knew that when I shared a frat house with Stevie Harper, his retarded Mom used to show up drunk on mouthwash and park her shopping cart in our driveway, I wouldn’t tell everyone. Discretion – better part of valor and drunken Mum’s or something?
    Plus, vote for the smart guy with the better haircut.

    • Hammer (vote Liberal) Dom says:

      I’m starting to think you will post anything I say (Harpersmallpenis) – no matter how intelligent….(DominicandIggywickedsmart).’cause really – I do dumb it down a bit so as not to show you up.(WarrenPMcountryrunsoonbigpenis). You know, utual respect and all.(PearljamisGod).

  17. Brad says:

    The biggest difference between Michael Ignatieff and Steven Harper is that Michael Ignatieff isn’t a sociopath.

  18. Ted says:

    What word or sentence is false in Iggy’s ad, Gord? Not a single one as far as I’m aware.

    So not only do the Conservatives go after immigrants and Ignatieff’s family, but they lie in doing so.

  19. Michael Slavitch says:

    Just as I got all apathetic about politics, assdouchery like this sucks me back in. Alley-Oop!

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