Feature, Musings —04.15.2021 04:10 PM
—My latest: CNN 1, #TruAnon 0
Celebrities love celebrities.
Justin Trudeau certainly does. He considers himself one, after all.
No mere mortal is our Justin: He breathes the rarefied air of the uber-rich and uber-cool at Davos and places like that. It’s his milieu. Hollywood stars, billionaires, best-selling academic types — that’s Justin’s world.
So there he was, just a few years ago, watching TV one Sunday night. A bunch of Justin’s fellow celebrities had gathered in Johannesburg for something called Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100. The celebrities were raising money for children’s education.
It’s a worthy cause. Normally, governments go through a process before they pledge money to stuff like the Global Citizen Festival. Not our Justin, however. The rules that apply to normal folks don’t apply to him.
Justin thumbed out a tweet to the host of the show, comedian Trevor Noah. Here’s what he said: “Hey @Trevornoah – thanks for everything you’re doing to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s legacy at the @GlblCtzn festival. Sorry I can’t be with you – but how about Canada pledges $50M to @EduCannotWait to support education for women & girls around the world? Work for you? Let’s do it.”
“Sorry I can’t be with you.” OMG! Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that dope? Just like that, our Justin offers $50 million — no pesky votes in the House of Commons, no oversight or review stuff or whatever! Just like it’s his own money! So sick.
Justin got in a lot of trouble for that little stunt, as you may recall. Conservative MP Michelle Rempel called Trudeau “tone deaf” — and noted that Trudeau seemed to be more preoccupied with getting noticed by a celebrity than, you know, acting like a prime minister.
But Trudeau, and Trudeau’s family, kept at it. Rules schmules. The rules don’t apply to them.
So, a couple years after the Trevor Noah Is My Bestie thing, Sophie Trudeau jetted over to a big star-studded event in London, to urge support for — wait for it, wait for it — the WE charity’s toxic twins, Craig and Marc Kielburger.
Lots of famous people were there. British TV chef Jamie Oliver, Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, the actor Gwendoline Christie, who played Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones. Neat!
Idris Elba was there, too, and Sophie Trudeau got to hang out with him and get selfies and stuff. Idris, however, got something else: Coronavirus. He tweeted about it.
“This morning I tested positive Covid-19. I feel OK, I have no symptoms so far but have been isolated since I found out about my possible exposure to the virus.”
Added Elba, who would’ve made the best James Bond ever, IMHO: “This is serious. Now is the time to really think about social distancing, washing your hands. Transparency is probably the best thing for this right now.”
The bit about “transparency” was interesting because the British press reported that Elba felt Sophie Trudeau had infected him. Yikes! It’s a licence to ill!
And that brings us to right now, this week.
This week, you see, no less than CNN turned on celebrity Trudeau. This was a big deal, because CNN was formerly a bit of a media cheerleader for the Canadian Prime Minister, in the interminable Trump vs. Trudeau comparative coverage they used to do.
Jake Tapper broadcast a Paula Newton story about how Trudeau’s government was doing really, really lousy in acquiring vaccines. “It’s a real failure by the Trudeau government,” said Tapper.
Trudeau’s PMO, being obsessed with what Trevor Noah, Idris Elba, Jake Tapper et al. think about them, dispatched some winged monkeys to defend Canada’s honour online. One Trudeau fan even tweet tut-tutted Tapper directly, and noted: “Canada has been ranked the best country in the world.”
Tapper responded thusly: “It’s a great country. One that deserves better leadership regarding obtaining and distributing vaccines.”
Ouch. Ouch!
Justin, Justin: When your fellow celebrities abandon you, whatever are you going to do?
Davos sure is going to be different next year!
— Kinsella was Special Assistant to Jean Chretien
Maybe Trevor Noah can send us some vaccines and doctors and nurses from South Africa.
Davos is sure going to be different next year?
It will still be the same group of celebrities, business exec, and politicians flying in on private jets to lecture us all on how we have to make do with less.
Oh, almost forgot, the execs and politicians will expense the trip the meals, and some will expense the entertainment.
Trudeau has 2 natural talents;
1. He does everything wrong.
2. Nothing sticks to Trudeau.
I completely understand point 1, as the guy is incompetent. But could someone please explain to me why it is that he gets a free ride for being incompetent??
Because he has paid off the media. They have sacrificed their integrity and credibility on the altar of free money.
Low information voters can’t or won’t think for themselves and rely on the media to tell them what to believe, hence Trudeau remains popular.
Personally I think a lot of Liberal supporters these days are more wedded to the Liberal Party brand than to JT himself. And they’re totally bought in to the “evil Conservative hidden agenda” thing that Liberal spinmeisters have been trotting out at least since the 1980s. Which helps keen them wedded to the Liberal brand.
Also, JT passes the smell test for a Liberal. For a lot of Liberal supporters, that’s enough.
The Doctor- The Liberal “brand” in Western Canada is the political kiss of death. Clearly the East reads from a different book then we do in the West, I don’t ever see that changing, and now that Trudeau is crippling the western economy, we will not be increasing our population
Ken,
The problem in this country is quite deliberately self-induced balkanization and all regions in this nation are equally guilty of that. For each one, it’s unconditionally my way or the highway…what a pitiful, pathetic, myopic collectivity Canada has become since the 1970s.
Specifically what are we supposed to be wary of, Scot? The views of some crank backbencher from Dogpatch?
What matters is what’s in the CPC platform, and what the CPC actually does while governing. To wit: Liberals have been constantly blowing this abortion dogwhistle come campaign time fir decades now, and it’s a steaming pile of bullshit. First they said Harper would take away the right to abortion on forming government. He didn’t. Then they said, “Oh, but just wait until he gets a majority.” Then Harper won a majority government. No restrictions on abortion were brought in – just as was stated in the CPC platform (which Liberals, of course, lied about). Crickets, of course, from all of those partisan assholes who swore up and down that Evil Lord Harper and His CPC Horsemen of the Apocalypse would bring in restrictions to abortion.
It’s the same stupid movie every time. Machiavellian, cynical Liberals (guys like Gerry Butts) realize it’s a bunch of performative bullshit theatre. Gullible Liberals fall for it every time, all the time.
Interesting at Davos eh?
Can I read some subtext in on that?
If there isn’t an election till next year the political landscape will be very bad for the liberals and Justin will become Paul Martin.
Is that like the 10 million doses that where supposed to show up?
Scot- perhaps you are able to tell me why it is that this bonehead we have for a PM gets a free ride
Justin gets a free ride because of nice people like Scott. Justin is popular because people know he’s popular and people like to imagine that they are part of what’s popular. Justin’s staff are also very capable of figuring out what is momentarily popular and repeating it back to very nice people like Scott.
Well Scott, as a Liberal… I have to say that Justin Trudeau is the greatest disgrace ever fielded by our party. If he had not conveniently come along during an obscure period when everyone was very tired of Leadership contests, he would never have been allowed to run for leadership in the first place, much less win. When his tenure is over, he should be banned from the party permanently.
Yes, he keeps making the same Queen’s English mistake. You know what they say about assumptions. Almost a million fewer Liberals in 2019 thought Trudeau was a decent guy compared to 2015. And he actually lost the popular vote to Scheer.
Martin,
Remember when roughly one-third of Liberals sat the election out when Michael was leader? That’s coming again in the next election as Scot and other Trudeau devotees will find out.
How is O’Toole a moron? He’s got twice the education and five times the life experience of your boy.
Truedope is a mush mouthed imbicile who hasn’t made it out of the tenth grade. Name one thing, just one thing, that he has done right. One.
With all the money shoveled out the door quickly, several more WE like scandals must be lurking. Canada’s economic recovery may also be less robust than that of other developed economies. But with the ongoing third wave showing no signs of abating, the Liberals are unlikely to engineer a Spring election. On the surface, that will dim re-election prospects. However, Trudeau’s lucky streak could continue as the Conservatives still don’t have a cohesive message, and the wave of central bank stimulus may produce an inflationary surge that takes commodity prices, and thus Canada’s economy with it. Ironic in how O&G, mining and agriculture could turnout to be Trudeau’s saviour.
Dr Grande Profiles #TruAnon (aka winged monkeys): https://youtu.be/7vbcpgoWTtk
Scot,
If you knew Trudeau as well as you think you do, you would already know that this Prime Minister has a special talent: steadily eroding support for his government. Watch him do it AGAIN in the next campaign.
If only we could call it Trudeau Derangement Syndrome proper. That implies that he’s done little or nothing wrong to deserve the attention.
If only.
Scot,
You see Scot, governments get defeated by their records. That’s what happened to Harper in 2015 and that’s what will happen to this government in the next campaign. This Prime Minister preferred to favour an illegal donor to the Liberal Party rather than adhere to the rule of law and the wise counsel of his then own AG. Then this PM doled out a public policy program to a pro-Trudeau advocacy group rather than letting it be administered by a neutral, no agenda public service that he himself deemed incompetent to run same. And then there was that brilliant piece of political strategy whereby he made a vaccine deal with China while fully expecting that it would be honoured. That’s called just falling off the turnip truck and under normal circumstances, no sitting PM would fall for such an absurdity. When they are holding your citizens in prison, watching them dying and sending them before show-trials, they tend not to be generally accommodative to a naive and clueless PM’s public health requests. All of above is called keeping it REAL. Watch the voters and then believe.
Trudeau apologists typically rely on fictional conspiracies to back up Trudeau’s short comings.
Hence TruAnon is fitting.
The name will stick, and it will hurt politically, as it is a reminder of the conspiracy world TruAnon feeds off of.
Feds are ahead of schedule on vaccines, meanwhile provinces…conservative provinces…can’t even use all the vaccines they’re getting. Conservative provinces ignored their own health experts and didn’t lock down. If the feds stepped in and took charge the asshats in charge of Ontario Quebec Alberta Saskatchewan and Manitoba would scream bloody murder. I don’t understand why the feds are scared of the provinces. We need the NDP in charge. At least they respect public services and public Healthcare and will build up the services to where they should be.
“Feds are ahead of schedule on vaccines“
A meaningless metric they set up so they could hit it. And they haven’t even been doing that. Only vaccines in arms saves lives. But agree that the NDP would have done better than the clowns at the federal level.
Kurt,
It’s something called the constitutionally mandated division of powers. This Prime Minister hasn’t ignored that…yet. Even he isn’t THAT politically stupid.
Once again the incompetence of the Ford government has far exceeded the Trudeau government. Facing full ICUs and the highest rates COVID yet they announced a series of restrictions of questionable effectiveness like closing playgrounds and random police checks instead of the things experts from all corners have been screaming at them for weeks, like sick days, stopping construction and unnecessary factories and better targeted vaccines.
On the Vaccination front we are now 31st overall and seventh out of not-tiny Western countries behind Isreal, UK, US, Hungary, Serbia and Finland.
If you only look at not tiny Western countries we are sixth behind Israel, UK, US, Hungary and Finland.
Does the provincial incompetence really outweigh the federal?
Or is it the incompetence of the Federal government becomes a provincial headache, doubling the provincial problems?
Take Alberta for example, the majority of the daily new covid cases are the new variants. The introduction of the variants are the fault of the feds. We can say with certainty, that if the feds were competent, that Covid cases would be half of what they are.
All in all it is petty how these governments point fingers at each other. I think the whole finger pointing is the product of Team Trudeau, and provinces following suit.
Like today Trudeau trolled out a tweet of him discussing Ontarios problems with Atlantic Canada premiers.