Adler-Kinsella Show: Ontario politics and what the heck is a HOAG?

I’ve written extensively about the highly-scientific HOAG concept, which I will claim to have invented if Bob Chant lets me.

From my book Fight The Right, which wrote about the then-coming Trumpocalypse:

That is, Bush was a Hell Of A Guy. As the political cliché goes, you can picture yourself at a tailgate party with Dubya, swigging Buds, telling lies about the ones that got away. With John Kerry or Al Gore, you just can’t. Eating quiche and sipping spritzers at a rich debutante’s coming-out party at Harvard, maybe. But are they HOAGs?  Nope.

This is not to suggest that Liberals are incapable of HOAGism. Chretien was eating at Tim Horton’s long before focus groups persuaded Stephen Harper to do likewise. Bill Clinton, too, was always a HOAG. Watching him hoover a Big Mac, you wouldn’t have ever guessed he was once a Rhodes Scholar.  But Bush – despite being the son of a New England multimillionaire, despite his pricey Yale education and his connections to American aristocracy – was a true-blue HOAG.  He was the ultimate HOAG, in fact.  He made his inability to string a few words together work for him.  Moreover, when he talked about “values” – which, Google informs us, he did literally hundreds of times during his presidency – he could light up a conservative audience like a Christmas tree.

He was up-front about it, too.  In one of his campaign ads in the summer of 2000, Bush said this: “This is a moment in history when we have a chance to focus on tough problems. It’s not always popular to say…we have a deficit in values. But those are the right things to say. And the right way to make America better for everyone is to be bold and decisive, to unite instead of divide. Now is the time to do the hard things.” On values and morality plays, Bush made his HOAGism work for him.  And when Bush’s presidency came to its constitutionally mandated end, as he defiantly told a crowd at the inauguration of the George W. Bush Presidential Centre, “I came home to Texas with my values intact.”

And that, I think, is why we effete lefties couldn’t stop watching him as he peddled his book hither and yon: on values, he spoke to our suppressed inner HOAGs.

Now, here’s me and Charles:



SFH: come hang out with us and win

Look, none of us are as young as we used to be.

We don’t hang out in noisy, seedy bars like we used to. We go to bed earlier than we used to. We worry about getting stabbed in a booze-fuelled argument.

SFH gets that. We’re old too. As Maximum Rock’n’Roll and others have noted, we’re Canada’s best-loved geriatric punk combo.

None of us hang out in seedy bars as much as we used to. All of us get tired a lot sooner than we’d like. None of us are into being stabbed, to be candid.

But come to this gig. It is going to be (a) early enough for you to get to bed at a reasonable hour (b) fun. Lots of fun.

And get this: the first twenty folks can get SFH’s critically-acclaimed Kinda Sucks LP and my Recipe for Hate book for just ten bucks. Ten bucks! And the band may even buy you a drink.

Come. Us, Mr. Pharmacist. You can’t lose.

And you won’t get stabbed.


Punk rock bassists are the best

The New York Times:

HOUSTON — Senator Ted Cruz of Texas kicked off his re-election campaign this week with a new Texas-themed slogan and a new video, but something else that was entirely new went largely unspoken — a formidable and well-funded Democratic opponent.

For the first time in Mr. Cruz’s rise to political prominence in Texas, he is facing a serious Democratic challenger, Representative Beto O’Rourke from El Paso, who has stunned political observers by raising more money than any Democrat who has ever run for a Senate seat in Texas.

Mr. O’Rourke, a former punk-rock bassist and El Paso city councilman, has raised $13.2 million in the race so far, and outraised Mr. Cruz in three of four Federal Election Commission reporting periods. (Mr. Cruz has not yet reported his latest fund-raising.) In the first three months of 2018, Mr. O’Rourke raised $6.7 million, more than any other Democratic Senate candidate in the country in that period.


Column: the Canadian connection

It’s the biggest political scandal in the world.

And it involves a bunch of Canadians.

For quite some time now, it’s been known that Vladimir Putin’s Russia – and assorted other outlaw states, like North Korea – have been engaged in acts of cyber-war against democracies around the globe.  Long before Special Counsel Robert Mueller was hired to probe Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, in fact, it was widely accepted that hackers had targeted Western democracy.

In one extraordinary July 2016 press conference at one of his South Florida resorts, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump even said the following: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing…They probably have them. I’d like to have them released.”

Trump had invited a hostile foreign power to hack into the computers of private U.S. citizens.  After his request to his pal Vlad, it should have surprised no one that Russia did precisely that.  They hacked democracy. Trump would go on to “win” the Electoral College with three million fewer votes than his opponent.  Interesting, that.

In the ensuing months, that is what has constituted the broad outlines of this story.  One, the bad guys were Russians, mainly.  Two, the beneficiaries were Trump and his cabal, mostly.  Three, the victims were the legions of normal people who opposed Trump, and who cling to the notion that democracy is worth saving.  And, four, the criminals and the crime were known, too: predominantly anonymous Russian hackers who manipulated less than 80,000 votes in three American states, thereby engineering a “victory” for Trump.

In recent days, however, the story has changed.  The cast of characters has expanded.  So too the victims, and the nature of the alleged crimes.

A few days ago, Canadian Press revealed that the self-proclaimed “whistleblower” in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal was a Canadian who had worked for the Liberal Party of Canada, receiving tens of thousands of dollars to do…well, we don’t know, exactly.  The managing director of the Liberal Caucus Research Bureau says Christopher Wylie was simply “assist[ing] the Liberal Research Bureau in acquiring and setting up social media monitoring tools.”

As benign as that may sound, however, let’s not forget that “acquiring and setting up social media monitoring tools” was also what Putin and Co. were doing, too, for their American pal, the Mango Mussolini.

Wylie claims to be a whistleblower, one who is now profoundly offended by what everyone at Cambridge Analytica and Facebook were doing.  But the unvarnished facts remain: Wylie helped create Cambridge Analytica, he worked there, and he sold the Canadian Liberals (and, later, the U.S. Trumpist Republicans) on making use of personal information appropriated from the profiles of millions upon millions of Facebook users.

And – surprise, surprise – he wasn’t alone.  It turns out a few other Canadians were involved, too, at a shadowy British Columbia-based outfit that called itself AggregateIQ.  Last week, Wylie told British Parliamentarians that AggregateIQ was up to no good, too.

AggregateIQ was co-founded by Canadian Liberals Jeff Silvester and Zack Massingham in Victoria in 2013, Wylie told a British Parliamentary committee – and it worked very closely with Cambridge Analytica’s parent company.  The three companies were allied from 2013 to 2016, influencing vote outcomes in Trinidad and Tobago; Nigeria; the United States; and Britain’s Brexit campaign.

Wylie – in whose mouth the proverbial butter would not melt – told the British MPs that AggregateIQ, which he helped to set up, “really doesn’t consider the ethics of its actions,” adding that the Canadian company would go to considerable lengths “to do what their clients want.”  Up to and including, he said, disseminating videos of people being slaughtered with machetes, to intimidate their votes in the 2014 Nigerian presidential election.

Chistopher Wylie was deeply involved with, and helped to create, Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ.  For him to now claim to be shocked and appalled by their activities stretches credulity to the breaking point.  But, with multiple investigations now underway on two continents – some involving law enforcement – we will all get a truer picture of Wylie’s role, soon enough.

What remains stubbornly unanswered, however, is whether these three young men – Messrs. Wylie, Silvester and Massingham – broke any laws here in Canada. And whether they did so on behalf of the political entity they all supported.

The Liberal Party of Canada.


Democracy prevails after all

They tried to pull a fast one on Good Friday, as my wife pointed out. But it didn’t work.

In one of the safest Liberal seats in Canada – when you have someone amazing like Jess Spindler prepared to run for you – you shouldn’t jam in a buddy of a crony. Who doesn’t even live in the riding.

And trample all over democracy in the process.

Make no mistake: this is Kathleen Wynne rebuking the Wizard and the Board – the same crew who sank Paul Martin and consigned the Liberal Party of Canada to a decade in the wilderness. It’s overdue.

Great news. And, sometimes, democracy will prevail, you know?