Categories for Musings

I can now reveal I was offered the role of Ritchie in Happy Days, but I declined because it was beneath me. I will not be taking questions.

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) March 23, 2017

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From the Globe:

Despite calls from the United States for Canada to increase its contributions to international military efforts, there is no increase in defence spending in the 2017 budget. In fact, the Department of National Defence is reallocating $8.48-billion that it expected to spend on capital projects, such as planes, ships, trucks and large infrastructure, before 2036 to future years when it will be used to purchase fixed-wing search-and-rescue aircraft and new light-armoured vehicles.

That’s quite a stark contrast from the military-industrial complex fiscal orgy that the Unpresident kicked off a few days ago with his “budget.”  From the Times:

President Trump put both political parties on notice Monday that he intends to slash spending on many of the federal government’s most politically sensitive programs — relating to education, the environment, science and poverty — to protect the economic security of retirees and to shift billions more to the armed forces.

The proposal to increase military spending by $54 billion and cut nonmilitary programs by the same amount was unveiled by White House officials as they prepared the president’s plans for next year’s federal budget.

No increase in spending up here, $54 billion down there. Given that Agent Orange has threatened to kill NATO to save it – given that he has said (perhaps appropriately) that all NATO countries need to pull their weight – I don’t see how Canada’s 2017 budget can possibly be the last word on defence.

Unless we want to enrage the lunatic to the South, we will need to spend more. I think that today’s Parliament-hallway noises about some sort of a long-term defence spending plan mean that Messrs. Trudeau and Moreau plan to do just that: spend more on guns and tanks and fighter jets and whatnot.  Why be Neville-Chamberlain-like with the Unpresident for two months, and then abruptly piss it all away in a single budget?  Makes no sense.

Trump will eventually win what he wants from Canada, even if it didn’t seem that way today.

Oh, and Obama wanted it too, folks.

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IT'S A LIVING THING SEPARATING FROM THE HOST pic.twitter.com/6yYJqpe1j2

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) March 22, 2017

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Greg Sorbara was on Steve Paikin’s The Agenda last night on TVO.  I was at Strombo’s place watching Against Me! play in Strombo’s living room, so I missed Steve’s show.  But I certainly heard about it afterwards.

On Paikin’s much-watched program, Greg Sorbara did to Kathleen Wynne in 2017 what he did to Jean Chretien in 2002: he went out onto the public airwaves and called for the resignation of a sitting, elected, majority party leader.  One he had previously supported.

Federally, we all know how that genius strategy turned out, don’t we?  In the case of my former boss, Martinet thuggery persuaded him to stay way longer than he’d planned.  His unctuous successor blew the Liberal Party of Canada to bits, and was thereafter relegated to a historical footnote.  Take that, mutineers.  Put that in your pipe, Greg.

So, anyway: Greg is at it again, 15 years later.  You will perhaps understand why I’ve never been a fan.

Oh, and this, too. It’s an anecdote: way back in 2009 or so, I got a call one day.  It was from a friend who worked, at a quite senior level, for Ontario Finance Minister Greg Sorbara.

“Um, the Minister would like you to stop being critical of his friend Bob Rae on your web site,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

She was very, very uncomfortable, and said so.  “I didn’t want to make this call,” she said.  “I said it was a bad idea.”

“It was,” I said to my friend. “Nobody tells me what to write, ever. You tell the Minister to go to Hell, okay?”

I let the Premier and a few others know what had happened, and it didn’t happen again.   Greg Sorbara kept away from me, and eventually left provincial politics.

On The Agenda last night, Greg was back to his old tricks.  He supported Jean Chretien, then cheerfully played the role of Brutus.  He supported Kathleen Wynne, and is reprising the Brutus role.

I don’t know for sure who Greg Sorbara is trying to help out with all this crap.  But I’ll tell you one thing.

It isn’t helping that Minister, or the Ontario Liberal Party, at all.

 

 

 

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And Donald Trump’s words sure are coming back to haunt him, aren’t they?

It’s beautiful.  I wish him deep and everlasting misery and pain.

 

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It’s Ralph Goodale. You know, the Saskatchewan Liberal who has been in the House of Commons since 1993, which coincidentally is the same year that Kevin O’Leary moved to Boston, where he has been ever since.

Anyway, O’Leary says he’s going to fire Goodale, even though he doesn’t know who he is. My suggestion is the Conservative Party fire Kevin O’Leary, instead, because they know who he is, by now – a clown, a fool, a liar.

But they won’t.

"I don't even know who Ralph Goodale is…I'm going to fire that guy when I get to Ottawa" ~Kevin O"Leary (that's not how…it works?)

— Siobhan Morris (@siomo) March 20, 2017

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It’s apparently International Poetry Day, or something like that. Having always loved poetry – and having always lacked the ability to write it well, myself – I decided I would share my favourite poem by my favourite poet with you.

He was a drunk, a philanderer, a dropout, a victim of mental illness, and – to me, way back when and now – a god. In A Dark Time is one of his greatest works, and I have been known to quote it at dinner parties and at inopportune moments.

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood —
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks — is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is —
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

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Campaigns matter.

That’s a long-time conceit of political consultants, of course.  We say it all the time.  I even worked at a successful political consulting firm which trademarked the phrase. Campaigns Matter™.

Campaigns matter – along with its corollary, “the only poll that matters is the one on Election Day” – are central to the political consultant’s belief system.  It is the foundation upon which our entire catechism is built.

If nobody believed that campaigns matter so much, we’d all be out of business and pumping gas somewhere.  The campaign managers, the ad guys, the pollsters, the advance people, the digital elflords, the speechwriters, the debate prep team: all of us need potential clients to believe that “campaigns matter” if we are to survive.  It is critical.

Except for, you know: Donald Trump.  Agent Orange’s successes, inter alia, forcefully make the case that the political class should all find a new line of work.

Trump was a political seismic event in many ways, of course.  Trump shattered the Western liberal democratic consensus in respect of trade, immigrants, refugees, security and race.  He upended every convention.

He also showed everyone, in a yuge way, that campaigns now don’t matter much at all.  Consider the evidence.

• He had never before held elected office.   Anywhere.
• He beat 16 others seeking the Republican presidential nomination, professional politicians who collectively had several hundred years of campaign experience between them. He beat nine state Governors and five U.S. Senators.  He beat the CEO of Hewlett-Packard.  He beat an actual brain surgeon.
• He beat one of the scions of the Bush family. A Bush. He beat one of the Bushes – who had, you know, previously produced two presidents.
• He beat an army of the best political consultants in the world. He beat legendary conservative political geniuses like Mike Murphy, Steve Schmidt and Mary Matalin.  He humiliated them.
• He ran the stupidest GOP primary campaign anyone had ever seen, and won. He ran the most insane presidential campaign anyone had ever seen – almost no ads, little polling, no structure or coherence – and he still triumphed.

Think about it.  A tape came out, mid-campaign, in which Donald Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women.  He insulted military veterans and war heroes and Gold Star families – people considered deities in the U.S. political firmament.  He repeatedly made racist statements.  He attacked the Pope and the disabled. He invited a hostile foreign power to invade the privacy of American citizens – and the hostile foreign power did.  He refused to release his taxes, unlike every other presidential candidate in modern times.  He said, and did, things that were crazy.

And he still won.

Donald Trump – the combed-over, sphincter-mouthed, racist, sexist, fascistic Human Cheeto – showed all of us that Campaigns Don’t Matter.  You can run a really shitty one, like he did, and still win.

But.  But one thing, and it is deliciously ironic.  It is schadenfreude on a scale heretofore unseen in politics.  It is frigging beautiful.

You can see it in the decisions of federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii, issued late last week – but particularly in the must-read decision of Judge Derrick K. Watson, of Federal District Court in Honolulu.  In it, Judge Watson threw out Trump’s second (allegedly kinder and gentler) executive order seeking a Muslim ban.  And he did so by relying upon the words of Donald Trump himself.

Judge Watson dismissed the Trump regime’s claim that a court would need to probe the Unpresident’s “veiled psyche” to locate religious animus. Jusdge Watson would have none of it.  Repeatedly, he cited Trump statements that were helpfully found in the pages of the lawsuit brought by Hawaii’s attorney general.

“There is nothing ‘veiled’ about this press release,” Judge Watson wrote, quoting a Trump campaign document titled “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Said he: “A reasonable, objective observer would conclude that the executive order was issued with a purpose to disfavour a particular religion.”

The general consensus, now, is that the short-fingered vulgarian – per Canadian Graydon Carter’s now-immortal phrase – will continue to be hoisted on his own petard.  As he labours to render the United States of America an Aryan Nation, Donald Trump will continue to lose in court.  That is now very clear, to every legal scholar and constitutional expert.

Why?  Because of Donald Trump’s own words.  Because of the racist, bigoted things he said in his presidential campaign.  Because what he said, over and over, is now being used against him.

Campaigns may not matter any more.  Donald Trump has proven that.

But words?  Words matter.

He’s proven that, too.

 

 

 

 

 

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