Liberal leadership: my take
Me on Unpublished Cafe on the Liberal leadership and the Mango Mussolini.
My latest: over the boards – and fight back
“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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Happy birthday
Many guys will understand what I mean when I say this: your father is both a bit of light, and a bit of shadow, over your path through life.
Mine, T. Douglas Kinsella, MD, OC, would have been 93 years old today. Ninety-three! So many years after we lost him, he remains a constant in our lives. He still illuminates some of the path. Without even being here, he still quietly persuades me to examine the choices I have made.
Me? I have made some bad choices. I have been reckless and selfish. I have not lived by the single rule he left us.
“Love people, and be honest,” he said to us, and I sometimes feel I have done neither.
He saved many lives as a physician, and he won accolades, and he was a member of the Order of Canada. But for us – my brothers, my nephew he raised, my closest friends – he was the man we aspired to be. Not for the distinctions he received, but for how he was, in his heart.
He was unfailingly honest; he was kind to everyone he met. He married his high school sweetheart, and was with her every single day for 50 years, and my God how they loved each other. We would sit there at the kitchen table in Calgary or Kingston or Montreal, and we would listen to him. He’d listen to us, too, and persuade us to try and figure things out. There were some great times, around that table.
The best thing is having a father like that. The harder thing is knowing that you will never be like him.
I met a girl, once, who had also lost her father, too soon, and never got over it. Fell in love with her just for that. Hope she finally finds peace.
Anyway. I had a dream that my Dad died in 9/11; I don’t know why, but I did. I woke up weeping, and remembered that I wasn’t a boy anymore, and that he has been gone for much more than a decade. I don’t think he would like what his son has become. I usually don’t.
So I put on my pants and shoes, and went out into the day, looking for what’s left of the path.
Happy birthday. I miss you.
The unChurchill
When a country is under attack, when the people want a leader to rally behind, the guy who sneers that the country is “broken” is not who you want leading you into battle.
Kennedy the killer
And Kennedy is approved.
I used to think that, when thousands of tiny crosses start appearing all over the US – children killed by measles and preventable diseases – Americans would rise up in anger.
But they won’t. They voted for Hell. And Hell is what they’re going to get.
Slava Ukraini
Sold! With part of the proceeds going to the Ukrainian Red Cross!
PSA
This is your periodic reminder that I proudly volunteered for Kamala Harris and none of this – none of it – would be happening if we’d won.
Elections have consequences.
Warren loves democracy
I love seeing photos of candidates, of every political stripe, smiling as they canvass and go door-to-door. It’s the purest form of democracy, and I’m a sucker for that. Thanks to every one of them.
This is a photograph that I will cherish until the end of my days
My latest: wake up, Team Tory
If the polls are accurate, this has never really happened before.
The Conservative Party of Canada has dropped nearly 30 percentage points in six weeks.
Now, in 1984, there was a 30-point shift that ended up favouring Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives. Sure. But that happened over a longer period of time. Same with 1993, when my former boss Jean Chretien wiped out the Tories. Thirty points, give or take, but the shift occurred over a number of months, not weeks.
Thirty points in just six weeks! How did that happen?
As the Conservative Party’s nervous-nellie caucus gathers for a meeting in Ottawa this week – and as thousands of Tory MPs, staffers and their families congregate in Ottawa’s Rogers Centre on Saturday – more than a few of them have to be asking themselves that question: what happened? What went wrong? Can we get back to where we were?
All fair questions. From being 30 points ahead of the Liberal Party at the start of the year – to now, with several pollsters suggesting the Tories and Grits are nearly tied. Or that the latter are actually ahead of the former. Ouch.
How they lost their lead is simple. As this writer opined in these pages months ago, Trump’s victory in November was always going to hurt the Tories. And it has. Canadians mostly hate Trump, and they quietly suspect Poilievre dresses up in his Donald costume at night, when no one is around.
Once Trump was re-installed in power, things got worse. In the intervening days – when Trump has threatened and belittled Canada, over and over, saying he wants to make us the 51st state – Pierre Poilievre’s predicament has become dire. See polls, above.
There are three reasons for this. It is an open question whether Poilievre possesses the will, or the insight, to repair the damage.
One: he needs to stop aping Trump’s policies. For example, this week the Toronto Star topped a report with this headline: “PIERRE POILIEVRE PROMISES ‘MASSIVE’ FOREIGN AID CUTS.” In any other week, at any other time, Poilievre throwing a bone to his migrant-hating red-meat base would be grist for the mill.
But doing it now, in the selfsame week that Trump and his evil Elflord Elon Musk have shut down USAID, America’s vaunted agency for international development and foreign aid? That’s deeply stupid, Team Tory. It doesn’t exactly advance the narrative that you’re not Trumpy, now, does it?
Two: Poilievre needs a MAGA-enema. In every Conservative caucus, at any given time, you always have a Randy White or a Myron Thompson. Remember them? Smart Tories sure do. The loose lips of White and Thompson and their troglodyte ilk sank Stephen Harper’s Conservatives when it counted – during elections. So Harper flushed them at his earliest opportunity.
Poilievre needs to do likewise. Polls show up to half of partisan Conservatives really like Trump. If that’s even partially true, that means that there are probably even more closeted MAGA types in Poilievre’s circle (Google “Pierre Poilievre staff MAGA hat” to see what I mean). So, Poilievre needs to march them out to the town square and – with a gleeful CBC and the aforementioned Star in attendance – terminate the Vichy MAGA-Canucks, with extreme prejudice. Like, yesterday.
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