Mark Carney’s running an effective campaign.
It’s low-bridge, it avoids media, yes, it doesn’t say much. But he’s doing well not just because voters have suddenly started to dislike Poilievre (Poilievre has never been universally loved).
He’s doing well because he’s run a good campaign.
Got a book coming, a documentary coming and much more – so I will have lots of exclusive content, as they say, on Substack in the coming months. It’s a platform that has really worked for guys like me. Here’s where it’s at.
As a starting proposition, I am grateful my parents are not alive to see any of this.
Babies and mothers abducted and murdered, for the sin of being Jewish, and much of the world shrugging. Monsters disguised as men, spraying schools and places of worship with bullets. Swastikas and symbols of death being paraded through places where ordinary people live, with impunity. Science being denied, democracy being denuded, ignorance being celebrated.
And, now, the most powerful man on Earth – in just one month – upending Western civilization, demonizing allies, and forming a Satanic alliance with the fascistic, genocidal Russian regime.
It is a cliché to say that we are living through history. But this? This? This feels like what my parents must have felt, observing the rise of Nazism and Hitler, and wondering if it was ever going to get better. Wondering if it could all be actually happening.
Now, as then, it is probably a waste of time to speculate about the motivations of madmen. Is Donald Trump mentally ill? Is he fashioning a dictatorship? Is Putin blackmailing him with some decade-old footage taken one night at the presidential suite at Moscow’s Ritz Carlton Hotel?
The same sorts of questions were asked about Hitler and his ilk, and no one had the answer. So, then – as now – politicians and pundits sought to defend the indefensible. All of us are familiar with the symptoms of that disease: asserting that Donald Trump is right on borders or fentanyl or dairy products or banking or military spending, or whatever lie he conjures up to justify his psychopathy. As long as he has the right ideology, these Vichy Canadians believe, Trump’s thuggery is justifiable.
Except it isn’t, not ever. Three years ago this week, Russia invaded Ukraine.
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I like this. Why?
1. I like horse races – they’re more fun.
2. It forces Poilievre to be definitive on opposing Trump. He was slippery before. Not now.
With an uneasy ceasefire in place, and some hostages finally being released, it’s likely that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s brain trust figured they could keep doing what they had been doing on Israel.
Which is silence.
And, yes, Prime Minister Carney. On March 9, the Liberal Party will select a new leader. In less than three weeks, the Justin Trudeau era will (blessedly) come to an end, and Carney will become Prime Minister of All Of Canada. By all accounts, he’s far, far ahead in the Liberal leadership race. So he’s the one.
That’s how the system works. The party with the most seats in the House of Commons forms the government, and that party’s leader gets to be Prime Minister. Here, Carney.
He’s run a classic low-bridge campaign since he announced his candidacy on January 16. He’s avoided media, he’s avoided specifics, and – in particular – he’s mostly avoided talking about Israel.
The folks who advise him are entirely comprised of Justin Trudeau’s gang, so it’s no surprise that Carney’s has been AWOL on the Israel-Hamas war. Apart from those occasions where schools for little Jewish kids got shot up in the city he represents, Trudeau usually did the same thing. Thoughts and prayers, enough is enough, this isn’t who we are, etc. etc. Rinse and repeat.
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Part of proceeds go to Ukrainian Red Cross.
Me on Unpublished Cafe on the Liberal leadership and the Mango Mussolini.
“Flooding the zone” is a football term, but it’s been appropriated by political people.
In football, flooding the zone happens when a team sends a lot of receivers to one side of the field – to force the other team to overcommit defenders to that side of the field, and thereby leave the middle or opposite side of the field exposed.
Political guys loves sports metaphors, because it makes them sound like tough guys, instead of what they mostly are, which is dweebs who never got picked for any team, and who got involved with the debate club instead.
Donald Trump’s Reubenesque former Chief of Staff, Steve Bannon, is apparently out of jail now, and he loves to use that term. In 2018, Bannon famously said this to a writer at Bloomberg: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.”
Politicos love that tough-guy jocky stuff. So, over on the search engine Bing, which keeps track of these things, “flood the zone” shows up in 2,280,000 places, most of them in the context of politics. Sorry, football.
So, that’s what the aforementioned Trump is now doing, albeit without the assistance of Bannon (see jail, above). He’s flooding the zone with sh*t.
There is literally not enough room in this entire newspaper to properly describe what Trump and his winged monkeys have done in the 27 days since he was re-inaugurated (feels like 27 years, don’t it?). Suffice to say it’s been a lot.
He’s thrown Ukraine to the Russian wolves. He’s threatened to use military force against Denmark, a NATO ally, to seize Greenland. He’s threatened force against Panama, another ally. He’s freed January 6 felons, and fired FBI agents. He’s pulled out of the World Health Organization and hired an anti-vaxxer and former junkie to run health care. He’s changed the names of mountains and bodies of water to things he likes better. He’s barred reporters who ask questions he doesn’t like.
And, most significantly, he’s threatened to use “economic force” against Canada. He’s said, a couple dozen times, that he wants to make us the 51st state. He’s mocked our Prime Minister and our Leader of the Opposition. He’s said that we offer nothing of value. And so on and so on.
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