He will be impeached in the House. But the Senate will not remove him, of course.
Doesn’t matter. It will increasingly obsess him and his team, it will drain their already-thin resources, and it will hobble his re-election effort.
Which means it’ll work.
It happened yesterday. You didn’t hear much about it, because all the drama had happened the day before, with the seven-hour-long Conservative mass-suicide disguised as a caucus meeting.
The Liberal caucus meeting was a happier affair. For one thing, the newbies – and Trudeau has a lot of them in his caucus – are now just two short years away from qualifying for the fabled gold-plated Parliamentary pension. That kind of boodle tends to keep the natives from getting restless.
Ditto re-election. A lot of them didn’t expect to be back. Forget about Aga Khan, Gropegate, LavScam and the Griswolds Go To India – who could ever expect to survive multiple mid-campaign revelations about their leader wearing racist blackface? But they did. They did.
So, the Grit nobodies were happier than the Tory nobodies (that’s what Justin’s Dad used to call MPs, by the way – nobodies).
But all is not well. A sampling of the Liberal Nervous Nellie list:
• The Emperor’s Clothes. He doesn’t really have any. Liberal MPs universally do not trust the judgment of Trudeau or his inner circle like they used to – they’ve simply made too many big, big mistakes. Exhibit One: turning a sure-fire second majority into a minority. There’s no mutiny on the horizon – but nor is this the united, happy group it once was. Many are looking past Trudeau, now.
• Events, dear boy, events. Who said that? Harold MacMillan? I think so. Anyway, the aphorism applies here. The Mounties have indicated that they haven’t closed the book on LavScam. Trudeau himself has said there are more Trudeau scandals/embarrassments as-yet unrevealed. The economy is expected to slump. The Tories may indeed get a leader who knows that God loves gays, lesbians and women who get abortions, too. And so on, and so on. Events happen, events affect political fortunes. Liberal fortunes, too.
• They didn’t win. If the Grit caucus is being honest with themselves – a tall order, we know – they will admit that Andrew Scheer lost. Justin Trudeau didn’t win. They were up against a placeholder Tory leader, one who didn’t inspire, but who has “hidden agenda” stapled onto his DNA. And they were up against a Conservative Party that forgot that data analysis is no substitute for voter ID and GOTV. I wager that won’t happen next time: I think the Tories will have a new leader (because, honestly, they have to get one) and a Senator Doug Finley-style election operation (because that wins elections, not columns of numbers).
But what do I know? I worked for Hillary Clinton in three states, and I was sure we were going to win.
Maybe Andrew Scheer will get another chance and become an actual progressive conservative. Maybe Justin Trudeau will learn from his many documented mistakes. Maybe the economy will be fine and the RCMP will decide that obstruction of justice is no more serious than a broken taillight. Maybe, maybe. Who knows.
All I know is the Liberal gathering didn’t generate as many headlines. And that suggests the Liberals are learning.
And the Conservatives? They aren’t.
The Conservative caucus met on Parliament Hill yesterday. Watching them from afar, it recalled a big therapy session. But without a therapist in charge.
It went for seven hours, reportedly. That’s a long caucus meeting. At the end of those seven hours, seven big problems remain.
A seven-hour caucus!
And, at the end of it, they’re in worse shape than they were at the start of it.
Them are the questions. What’s your view, O Smart Readers?
REASONS NOT TO
REASONS TO
You don’t hire him again. You suspend him.
A high school teacher has been placed on administrative leave in California after he wore blackface to school on Halloween, according to the Milpitas Unified School District.
A video posted on social media shows the teacher with his face painted black and dressed up in an apparent attempt to imitate the rapper Common.
Milpitas High School Principal Francis Rojas and MUSD Superintendent Cheryl Jordan said in a statement that the teacher, who has not been named, was suspended and now is under investigation for the “disparaging” act.
“In a school community where we welcome learners and families from over 50 languages who represent cultures and religions throughout the world, and where our long-standing neighborhood, Sunnyhills, was established as the first city in the nation for planned integration, it hurts to know that this type of cultural insensitivity and lack of cultural awareness still hovers in the background,” reads the statement.
Chris Norwood, the MUSD school board president, called the teacher’s actions “inappropriate, unprofessional and insensitive,” according to an online statement.
“As an African American man, the history of Blackface reminds me of the cruelty, hatred and fear my parents and people of African Ancestry have dealt with in the past and still experience today around the world,” Norwood said.
Cancel culture, so-called, interests me. Two reasons.
First reason: Barack Obama decried it recently, and what he said made a lot of sense. Here’s part of what he said:
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids. And share certain things with you.
The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people and that’s enough. That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”
Second reason: I’ve been “cancelled,” a bit. Someone broke into our files at the office, and stole some material. What they stole has found its way into the hands of others – mainly a reporter in Ottawa – who, inter alia, has sought to depict a gang of racists as victims, and demonize us for helping a group pro bono. Cancellers thereafter got to work.
It’s been weird, to say the least. I had more than 42,000 followers on Twitter, but I turned that off. I had thousands on three different Facebook platforms, too, but I logged out of those. You could say I self-cancelled, I guess. The invitations to kill myself got to be a bit much, so, bye. See ya.
Cancellation often happens because someone is seen as insufficiently ideologically pure. Sometimes, however, it happens because some people just dislike you, or disagree with you, and they want you to bleed.
This lengthy New York Times piece on cancellation mainly focusses on people who have been cancelled for ideological reasons. Quillette’s Jonathan Kay makes an appearance in there, too.
(Disclosure: Kay used to be my editor at the National Post, and – if nothing else – he’s always been pretty absolutist when it comes to speech issues. We weren’t buddies, to say the least, but he was right when he years ago said to me that the orthodoxy of progressives would – like a snake – one day start to consume itself.)
Anyway. Here’s some snippets from the Times piece. It’s a fascinating read.
“…The term for people who have been thrust out of social or professional circles in this way — either online or in the real world or sometimes both — is “canceled.”
…Readers want to hear from the canceled, but the larger motivation is philosophical. Quillette’s editorial point of view is that so-called cancel culture is overly punitive and lacks nuance.
“When I went to law school, in the ’90s, the presumption of innocence was seen as a progressive value,” Mr. Kay said. “Because who is mostly wrongly accused of crime? Racialized minorities. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor. More often than not, it protects marginalized communities. And now the presumption of innocence is seen as a conservative value. And that troubles me.
…Cancellation does present a question about power, and who has it.
“The biggest problem we have as a culture is that we can’t define who the establishment is,” Mr. Tavana said. “Is the establishment the woke media people who own 99 percent of the keyboards in the country, or is it the old, canceled guys in media? Who’s the punk rock band and who’s the corporate rock band?”
Mr. Rubin imagines a near future where everyone is canceled for 15 minutes.
“The woke progressives are going to implode, and pretty soon they’ll destroy everything,” he said. “It’s just a matter of how much will they take down with them. They’re going to cancel Barack Obama one day, because Obama ran against gay marriage at one time.”
Mr. Shapiro said, “Our culture is dying because we have no capacity for forgiveness or discussion.”
I wrote this some time ago – you know, during that period when I was secretly running the CPC campaign.
The bar isn’t much to look at.
It’s on the tougher side of downtown, in a place where you cross the street when you see a couple guys coming your way.
There’s a big marquee out front, announcing its name, and a pair of weathered wooden doors that are open to all, but not all dare step inside.
No liquor licence. Envelopes stuffed with bills, handed over to the cops, are all that keep it open.
Whenever there’s a raid, the bar’s owners will sometimes get tipped off. Not always, but sometimes. The raids happen, ostensibly, because people gather there – people who dare not speak their name out loud.
Their sin? Dancing. The city doesn’t want them to dance together.
In the early morning hours of June 28, the cops raid the place again. There are uniformed officers outside, and some plainclothes officers inside, posing as patrons.
The cops go after one of the women in the bar, a regular. They push her and strike her. She gets mad and pushes back. They assault her some more.
A crowd has gathered out on the sidewalk, watching what the cops are doing to the woman. A cop brings his baton down on her head and she starts to bleed, a lot.
She’s mad, but not just at the cops, who are punching and kicking the bar’s patrons. As she’s being pushed into the back of a police van, the woman yells at the crowd: “Why don’t you guys do something?”
And they do. Just like that, just like a light being switched on, they do. Remembering, perhaps, all the years of bullying and beatings and actual murders, they erupt. They hit back.
By the end, they’ve trapped the cops inside the bar. And, later on, it’ll take dozens more cops to rescue them.
The bar isn’t in your town, but it could be. The raid, or something like it, doesn’t really happen in your town anymore – but it used to.
And the kind of people who would go there? They’re found in your town. Lots of them.
The bar really existed. Stonewall’s, in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Anyone could go there to dance and have a drink, but only one of kind person generally did so.
Homosexuals. Gays, lesbians. The ones who – in those days, and in these days, too – weren’t allowed to dance together. Or come together. Or even, you know, be.
The ones who would be denied jobs, or hotel rooms, because of the way they were. The ones who would be often beaten and sometimes killed for being who they were.
Their uprising that June night – that’s what that lesbian who the cops were beating called it, an uprising and not a riot – would later bear the name of the bar: Stonewall. Every year, bit by bit, in cities and towns all over, there would be a commemoration of what happened at Stonewall’s bar that night. Remembering.
In time, the remembrances bore another name. A name that described what they were really about.
Pride. Pride in being, at long last, in being who they are. Being how God made them.
Now, I don’t know Andrew Scheer all that well. He’s a family man, he goes to church. If he stayed that way, nobody would really care what he thinks about the various Pride events that happen across Canada every Summer. He’d just be another guy.
But he’s not just another guy. He’s not a nobody. He’s the leader of the Conservative Party, and he’s running to be Prime Minister.
When you’re a Prime Minister, you don’t get to pick and choose which Canadians you represent. You represent all of us, or you represent none of us.
So, I ask Andrew Scheer: are you going to be one of the guys on the sidewalk, watching and not doing anything about what you see? Or, are you going to step forward, and say: “I support you. I will help you. I will protect you. You are no better or no worse than me.”
That’s what the Pride stuff is about, really: equality. Support. Humanity.
Get off the damn sidewalk, Andrew.
People are starting to notice.
No, not me. (You wish.)
The power. The power’s out. Has been for hours.
That image up above is a pretty good representation of the County, this November 1. Power went out around midnight and is still out.
Right now, I’m wearing several layers and trying to boil some water on the woodstove, for tea. The dogs think everything is great. Me, not so much.
Outside, power lines down, trees and branches down, and – symbolically, perhaps – my beautiful Canadian flag pole is down, too. The wind snapped it in two and it smashed down onto my truck.
So, be safe, everyone. Last night was supposedly Hallowe’en, and – around here, at least – we got more trick than treat!
Two things, woke folks.
One, I read this with extreme interest, because in recent days, quite a few folks have “canceled” Yours Truly for, you know, (a) doing opposition research at an opposition research firm (b) opposing racism and anti-Semitism (c) trying to help a marginalized group pro bono. It’s been something. And it’s mainly why I turned off Twitter and Facebook.
Two, I fully expect no one will heed Obama’s words, here. But I will post the New York Time’s report about them, just the same. Maybe someone will listen.
Maybe.
Former President Barack Obama made a rare foray into the cultural conversation this week, objecting to the prevalence of “call-out culture” and “wokeness” during an interview about youth activism at the Obama Foundation summit on Tuesday.
For more than an hour, Mr. Obama sat onstage with the actress Yara Shahidi and several other young leaders from around the world. The conversation touched on “leadership, grass roots change and the power places have to shape our journeys,” the Obama Foundation said, but it was his remarks about young activists that have ricocheted around the internet, mostly receiving praise from a cohort of bipartisan and intergenerational supporters.
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” Mr. Obama said. “You should get over that quickly.”
“The world is messy; there are ambiguities,” he continued. “People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”
Mr. Obama spoke repeatedly of the role of social media in activism specifically, including the idea of what’s become known as “cancel culture,” which is much remarked upon, but still nebulously defined. It tends to refer to behavior that mostly plays out on the internet when someone has said or done something to which others object. That person is then condemned in a flurry of social media posts. Such people are often referred to as “canceled,” a way of saying that many others (and perhaps the places at which they work) are fed up with them and will have no more to do with them
“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people,’” he said, “and that’s enough.”
“Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb,” he said, “then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’”
Then he pretended to sit back and press the remote to turn on a television.
“That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change,” he said. “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”