— Musings —07.12.2011 07:39 AM
In today’s Sun: They doth protest too much
Most of the calls came from smear-for-hire call centres in Florida or the Dakotas, which were beyond the reach of Canadian law.
“A good Conservative friend informed me they had actually been utilizing a central office for phone calls and that none of them emanated from London itself,” Pearson wrote on his much-read blog. “They had poured big money from afar into influencing my riding.”
It is true that two persons in the US were indicted for causing robo calls to be made that confused people about where to vote. I can’t undertand why this is not illegal in Canada and why the RCMP hasn’t been investigating it. Don’t care where they originated, we know whose supporters are behind them.
Oh yeah, you do? Enlighten us? I mean with the solid proof you have it should be obvious right?
Well, why doesn’t the premier make out-of-country-election calling illegal and force the telephone companies to pony up the caller information. Then extradite them. This isn’t hard; calls have to be billed to someone. There’s accounting records for everything. I’m sure if this was, say, child porn it wouldn’t be a problem.
Stuff like this drives me crazy. It’s like for too many years too many Liberals have been working too closely and listening too much to their Democratic party friends down south and have now contracted the same case of learned helplessness and powerlessness that those folks down there exhibit.
Any negative campaigning is a form of vote suppression, especially for swing voters.
Hasn’t this message been up long enough for us to see the whineycomment, “But everybody else does it”?
Very good rejoinder to all those COnservative hacks who prefer to live in a state of denial by assuming that the CPC is a force of goodness. They would never engage in such dirty tricks, right?
We also had phone calls in Lisa Raitt’s riding (Halton) annoyed with us calling in the middle of the night (which we didn’t do) or calling the office and asking why we had called them -which we hadn’t done. This also happened in the Oakville riding.
Just remember, Gord, per Warren’s column: if you deny what he’s saying or disagree with him, you’re guilty of voter suppression tactics. 🙂
Ever notice how the board resident CPC apologist posts get terse when it appears his party may soon be caught with its pants down around its ankles?……
did people get phone calls from people purporting to be EC? If they did it was an unfair election practice and somebody should be charged for it. So the question is Gord – did it happen? If it did who did it?
You think Gord knows the answer to those questions? I didn’t realize he was omniscient.
Well his loss and subsequent retire from leadership do lead one to think he is “not a leader”…
get over it, Gord.
WK’s point was that those types of a negative ads are on a continuum of voter suppression, which runs the full gamut from a whisper campaign to intimidating or even murdering people on their way to the ballots.
And your stomping your feet and s…, er, Tulking, does nothing to invalidate that point.
stop being so obtuse…. if you can.
A continuum is a spectrum where there’s an almost imperceptible difference b/w any two adjacent points on it, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be a huge difference between its two extremes at either end of the spectrum.
hence, it’s simply absurd to claim that any two points on a continuum of morally dubious actions of a given kind (‘voter suppression’) are thereby “morally equivalent.”
It’s kind of funny really the ‘protest’ line is from MacBeth and uttered by Lady MacBeth. And does not mean protest as we know it, but rather it means affirm. Maybe WK you should have gone with:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
Um, don’t quit the day job, er, retirement, there, JH:
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks” is from Hamlet, and was said by his mother, in reaction to the play within the play, about not believing the stage queen’s protestations of love for her first husband whom her soon-to-be second husband poisoned.
http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/40/messages/705.html
http://www.bartleby.com/70/4232.html
But thanks for playing.
http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/lady-doth-protest-too-much-methinks
I defer to those of mightier memory. Should have checked I guess. Long time since high school (you know us troglodytes). Could have done without the sarcasm, but not unexpected.
Guess only the young and smart can play.
The obnoxious and pedantic play a lot around here too.
the backbone of this voter suppression argument is ‘millions of voters stayed home’ because they didn’t think their vote would make a difference.
please help me out. Isn’t that the primary reason voters have been staying home for the last 20 years or more?
what’s different, other than the party that benefited from it?
actually, the backbone of this voter suppression argument is to get people talking about it.
i guess that’s why WK does what he does, and i’m in finance !