Anti-Racist Canada: Leitch speaks to hate group

Here:

Ron Banerjee and Rise Canada Hate Group Meets With Kellie Leitch

…Banerjee also operates Twitter accounts for both Canadian Hindu Advocacy and Rise Canada in which he celebrates the deaths of Muslims and Sikhs, post misogynistic diatribes against women, and attacks the LBTGQ community.

The post assumes the reader knows a lot about the group in question. So I would encourage you to read the whole thing, at the link above. More about Banarjee here and here.  More about his hate group, which Leitch apparently supports, here.

Leitch has made a lot of mistakes in her campaign. This is a big one.


This week’s column: Trudeau, Trump and NATO

What Donald wants, Donald gets.

Well, not really. He wanted a Muslim ban. Didn’t get it. Wanted Obamacare killed, and something else instead. Didn’t get that. Wanted – promised! – ISIS defeated in 30 days. Didn’t get, or do, that.

But getting more money out of Canada for NATO? He’s going to get that.

Now, if you were to poke through the entrails of the 2017 federal budget, released with a minimum of fuss last week, you would not find any statement that read: “Her Majesty’s Government pledges to commit more resources to the North American Treaty Organization (NATO), because we are concerned what the short-fingered vulgarian to the South will do to us if we don’t.” No such statement is in there.

There is, however, this on page 186 in Chapter Three of the budget:

“The Government will soon release a new defence policy for Canada, following substantive public consultation and extensive analysis. It will be more rigorously costed than any previous defence policy. It will commit the level of investment required to restore the Canadian Armed Forces to a sustainable footing with respect to finances, capital and people, and equip the Forces to meet the challenges of the coming decades.”

That paragraph is the Donald Trump paragraph, you might say. It was written just for him. As we speak, Canada’s highly-capable Amabassdor to the U.S., David MacNaughton – probably the best appointment Justin Trudeau has made to date, but that is a column for another day – is shuttling around Official Washington, a photocopy of that paragraph in hand, solemnly assuring the hawks in the Trump regime that Canada will start paying its way in NATO very soon.

Because we don’t pay our way in NATO, and we haven’t for a long time. And we need to.

There are 28 members of NATO. Its budget is north of $900 billion annually. The United States of America contributes an extraordinary $650 billion of that. The United Kingdom, $60 billion; France and Germany, in and around $40 billion each, give or take. Canada?

Canada is in the bottom third of NATO members, alongside military powerhouses like Slovenia and Luxembourg, and others with bankrupt and/or struggling economies. By agreement reached in 2014, NATO members are supposed to be devoting two per cent of their nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) to defence. Canada doesn’t, and consistently hasn’t. We spend less than one per cent.

During the Republican primaries, and during the U.S. presidential race, Donald Trump would be asked often about defence by reporters looking for some new insane Trump statement to report. Trump wouldn’t disappoint.

So: “We are getting ripped off by every country in NATO, where they pay virtually nothing, most of them. And we’re paying the majority of the costs.”

And: “We’re spending a tremendous — billions and billions of dollars on NATO. We’re paying too much! You have countries in NATO, I think it’s 28 countries – you have countries in NATO that are getting a free ride and it’s unfair, it’s very unfair.”

And, this gem, which gave plenty of Western leaders heartburn, and which transformed Donald Trump’s presidency from something that was mildly amusing to something that was deeply terrifying: NATO was “obsolete,” he said. And: “The US must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves.”

That statement about NATO’s obsolesence, uttered during an interview in January with a German newspaper, was a shock. “[NATO is] obsolete, first because it was designed many, many years ago,” Trump said. Secondly, he said, it’s obsolete because “countries aren’t paying what they should.”

His first point, like so much that the Unpresident says, was certifiably insane. With Trump’s pal Vladimir Putin massing troops and guns on the border of assorted Baltic states, NATO is needed more now than perhaps ever before. But on his second assertion, that NATO is compromised because many countries aren’t paying what they should?

Donald Trump is right.

[Your eyes are not deceiving you. Hillary Clinton-loving Warren Kinsella wrote that “Donald Trump is right” about something. Clip and save, folks. – Ed.]

The unofficial word around official Ottawa is that the budget’s Donald Trump Paragraph means that the forthcoming defence review – with the Trudeau government’s amorphous pledge to “equip the Forces to meet the challenges of the coming decades” – will result in Canada finally meeting its NATO commitment. A Conservative government had long been a NATO free rider, but it will be a Liberal government that will finally pay its way in NATO. To this Liberal hawk, that is profoundly ironic – but highly satisfying.

Donald Trump is a traitor to his nation and its constitution. He is a thug and a demagogue. He is an Internet troll, elevated to the Oval Office. But on NATO, and on the requisite contributions to NATO, he is right.

Ask the guy who said this: “NATO needs more Canada.” That guy?

One Barack Obama, in the House of Commons on June 29, 2016.


John Lydon is an asshole

Many of you have sent me a story in which the Sex Pistols frontman expresses enthusiasm for Trump, Brexit and the racist UKIP.  To wit:

In an interview today with ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Johnny Rotten said he supported Brexit and described Donald Trump as a “possible friend” while dismissing accusations that the president is racist. The Sex Pistols frontman told hosts Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid that Trump was a “complicated fellow.” “One journalist once said to me, ‘Is he the political Sex Pistol?’ In a way,” he said.

“What I dislike is the left wing media in America are trying to smear the bloke as a racist, and that’s completely not true,” he added. “There are many, many problems with him as a human being but he’s not that, and there just might be a chance something good will come out of this situation because it terrifies politicians. This is a joy to behold for me.”

When Morgan pointed out that Trump’s anti-establishment streak mirrored the Sex Pistols’ approach to music, Rotten replied: “Dare I say, [Trump could be] a possible friend.”

Rotten also described former UKIP leader Nigel Farage and his Brexit movement as “fantastic.”

“The working class have spoken and I’m one of them and I’m with them,” he said.

Does this shock me as much it has clearly shocked some of you? No, not me.

I’ve interviewed Rotten many times, and have long held the view that he is – truly – an asshole. And he’s always been pretty right-wing, too.

Read this, from my book Fury’s Hour:

It is twenty-five years since an emaciated, feral Johnny Rotten snarled that he was the anti-Christ on the Sex Pistols’ astonishing ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ …It seems almost impossible that Johnny Rotten and John Lydon are the same person.

To say that Johnny Rotten, former anti-Christ, has become John Lydon, utter hypocrite, would not go over well with his adoring audience this day.  But a hypocrite he is, without much doubt.  He sneers at the United States of America, calling it “the new Russia.”  But he lives there, and has for many years.  

He repeatedly pronounces that he is above politics, and insists that we need to “break down these barriers that we keep fucking putting between us” – and then he appears to mock black people, suggesting that their music comes from “the jungle.”  (On that single occasion, the audience goes silent.)  

And, later, at a Sex Pistols show in Toronto, as I looked on from the side of the stage:

I note that Rotten is looking down, squinting.  On the ground, between his microphone stand and a bank of monitors is a three-ring binder, filled with laminated pages – presumably to protect them from such phlegm assaults.  The binder contains Sex Pistols lyrics.

Binder or no binder, by the time the band gets around to ‘God Save the Queen,’ Johnny is forgetting the words a lot.  He looks intently at Matlock, perhaps for inspiration.  If Matlock notices, he gives no indication.  He keeps playing bass, bouncing back and forth to Rotten’s right.  A steaming geyser of human saliva is now cascading down on the stage and Johnny Rotten.  The place is slick with it.

Looking suddenly weary, Rotten carefully places his microphone stand near Cook’s drum kit.  Offstage, he is regarded with concern by his money manager Einbund, and Rambo, the bodyguard.  Rotten then addresses the crowd, some of whom are lunging at him to better place the next wad of gob.  Rotten is snarling:  “Canada, I hope you enjoy your fucking socialism because it is fucking you up the arse!”  He then stalks off the stage, shortly followed by Jones, Matlock and Cook.  Einbund scurries after him; so does Rambo, who scoops up the binder of lyrics along the way.  No one is quite sure what socialism has to do with anything, but one thing is clear: Johnny Rotten is livid.

Backstage (where I have been smuggled in by a friend), Rotten is handed a towel to wipe off the sweat and saliva.  His money manager and bodyguard flit around him, nodding sympathetically as he rails about the crowd.  The rest of the Sex Pistols regard him with unconcern, or not at all.

Sorry to go on at such length, but I wanted to document that Johnny Rotten has always been a crypto-racist (cf. his remark about blacks), and he has always been a conservative (cf. calling Canada “socialist”).

Bottom line: great band, great album. But Rotten was, is, and always will be an asshole.


Bill Rompkey, RIP

I didn’t know he had passed away until I saw the item below in the Hill Times. Very sad to hear that – he was a great politician, and a great guy.  RIP, Bill.

Bill Rompkey, who spent almost 30 years as Liberal MP and then Senator, died last week at the age of 80. A CBC report indicated he had been battling cancer.

Mr. Rompkey was first elected as the Liberal MP for Grand Falls-White Bay-Lab- rador, N.L., in 1972 and held that seat, and the rejigged riding of Labrador, N.L., until being appointed to the Senate by prime minister Jean Chrétien in 1995. He served in the Senate until 2011.

Among the key roles Mr. Rompkey had as a politician was as National Revenue minister from 1980 to 1982 in prime min- ister Pierre Trudeau’s government, and he was the deputy government leader in the Senate from 2004 to 2006.


SAY NO TO HATE

Oppose the neo-Nazi rag, Your Ward News? Opposed Canada post delivering I hate sheet to your mailbox? Now’s your chance to say so! Write this committee! Say NO to hate! 


The Great Dealmaker gets dealt

Dowd. End is odd. But main point is assuredly true: DC has figured out the Unpresident, and they are playing him like a  proverbial fiddle. 

He’s the kind of guy who likes to say a sucker is born every minute. What he doesn’t say, and doesn’t know, is he’s one of them.