Way, way back in July 2001, I wrote this single paragraph for a column in some Canwest papers. I was poking fun at (yet another) screed Paul Wells had typed up about Yours Truly, in which Jazz Boy suggested (yet again) that I had never done anything good, ever, anywhere, and that he knows for a fact – a fact! – that I have never been part of a winning campaign. Not even as janitor.

Here’s what I wrote:

“Anyone reading this, naturally, will wonder why this Liberal ‘strategist’ is being so nice to [Stockwell Day], a political opponent. I am, after all, the Liberal ‘strategist’ who ran the entire federal Liberal election campaign all by himself, every damn thing, with no help from anyone at all (that, at least, is the recent analysis of one of the macrocephalic, girl-crazy columnists at the Post).”

I didn’t even use the words “Paul Wells”! But when he saw that good-natured bit of ribbing, well, Wells went apeshit. He didn’t say anything to me, natch, because he’s a gutless wonder. But he lodged complaints all over the place at Canwest, demanding that I be fired or disciplined or worse.

This, naturally, only encouraged me. So I posted on my then-youthful web site a cartoon of Wells with horns sticking out of his impressively-sized head. I did it myself, and I was rather proud of it. Anyway, that effrontery and insolence resulted in him going totally bananas again. So, while I was on vacation with my family, Wells demanded that my editor call me, and order me to take down the cartoon. “Seriously?” I asked my editor. “Seriously,” my editor said.

“What a fucking crybaby,” I said. “No comment,” my editor said.

Anyway, Paul – who thinks me to be insufficiently awed by his intellect and talent (true), and not nearly as deferential as I should be when in the presence of the national herald of dentist office waiting rooms (ditto) – has lately re-taken to raging about Canada’s Best-Loved Political Web Site™ and its fun-loving owner (ie., moi). This resulted in me describing Paul to a regular correspondent as, quote, “a pompous, pretentious, North-of-the-Queensway zero who has never done anything of significance, who wouldn’t know how to communicate with a real person if his life depended on it (which is why he’s never asked to go on TV, by the way, and which he perpetually whines about). Oh, he tweets every moment of his boring life, in the way that pre-adolescents do. Except that he’s supposedly a grown up. And he name-drops jazz.”

But I mean all that in the nicest possible way.

Anyway, you get the point. He’s an idiot. Moreover, I think Paulie is a bitter, petulant little man who probably got knocked around at recess once or twice, and he’s been using his typewriter to get back at the world ever since. So, to show the extent of my respect for the Girl-crazy Macrocephalic©, and to christen our renewed affection for each other, I have commissioned a beautiful new portrait of Paulie Jazz. I’d encourage him to go complain about it to Kory Teneycke, but I have on good authority that Kory thinks it’s pretty funny.

So will a lot of people.

Paul Wells, girl-crazy macrocephalic©. Clip and save.

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I’ve written about both.  The first is legal, the second isn’t.

The legal:

Nowhere in the ad does Harper’s campaign team declare they were hoping to persuade one million Liberal voters to stay home.

But that in fact was their objective and they achieved it. Extensive focus group and polling research had told the Tories that while many Grits despised Harper, they also had serious misgivings about Dion’s “image” as a leader and his ability to communicate.

If they couldn’t persuade those million Liberal voters to come over to the blue team, the Conservatives concluded, they would persuade them to stay home on election day.

Thereafter, the Tories spared no expense in their multi-million-dollar voter suppression strategy. It worked.

…the author now needs to withdraw from the Manning Centre conference, I think. You can’t condemn people this strongly one week, then appear at their conference the next.

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Get a load of this horseshit:

“The Conservative Party of Canada ran a clean and ethical campaign and would never tolerate such activity,” said the statement attributed to Jenni Byrne, who managed the Tories’ national campaign.

And then, today, this:

A Conservative staffer caught up in a scandal over fake election day phone calls to keep voters away from the polls has lost his job.

So, they did nothing wrong, and then – a mere 24 hours later! – they throw a future Conservative Senator under the bus. Then: did nothing wrong. Now: something went wrong, but we didn’t do it.

Make sense to you? Me neither.

However this one ends up, it follows the Reformatory MEP issues management standard operating procedure™:

1. Nothing to see here, move along. The Tim Horton’s crowd don’t care.
2. The Liberals did it first. Adscam, blah blah blah.
3. The young staffer who did this was acting without anyone’s knowledge or approval. Nothing to see here, move along, etc.
4. Rinse and repeat.

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Last night, I received a Twitter message from a National Post person, communicated in the way this person might communicate.  It was late.  When I tried to access his recommended link, I had to re-enter my password – which, on my Blackberry, Twitter occasionally asks you to do.  So I did.

Big mistake! Only a few minutes later, when my pal Jill Fairbrother sent an identical Twitter message as the National Post one, did I realize I’d been spammed.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.

To my 7,700 closest Twitter besties, I sincerely apologize for the weight-loss messages you have received; I apologize for future penis-enlargement messages you may receive.  Some of your responses (below) have been hilarious.  In the meantime, I have now changed my password, blah blah blah, and won’t be so gullible again.  (I think.)

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Kudos to the reporters who dug this one up. This is big, methinks. But the best part is the photo of this robocalling character, above. An instant classic.

From the story:

Elections Canada has traced fraudulent phone calls made during the federal election to an Edmonton voice-broadcast company that worked for the Conservative Party across the country.

While the agency investigates, aided by the RCMP, the Conservatives are conducting an internal probe. A party lawyer is interviewing campaign workers to find who was behind the deceptive “robocalls.”

Elections Canada launched its investigation after it was inundated with complaints about election day calls in Guelph, Ont., one of 18 ridings across the country where voters were targeted by harassing or deceptive phone messages in an apparent effort to discourage Liberal supporters from voting.

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A grainy (but goodie) one from the archives. Perhaps he can go complain about it again to Scott Anderson and Gord Fisher.

Oh, wait.

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“Lowering tone of the debate.” So says the one who was using social media to do precisely that, for days.

UPDATE: One commenter asked me why I’m so irritated with young Jordan. Here’s why. Last week, she and her pal Geoffrey tweeted and retweeted their enthusiasm for “Vikileaks.” Given that both are former Ignatieff staffers, and given that I don’t recall either of them doing to their former boss what was now being done to Toews’ ex-wife, children, etc., I found that objectionable, and said so. They didn’t like that. They then took to retweeting stuff to get at someone close to me – stuff that was critical of Ontario’s Liberal government, to boot. And now, this morning, we have Jordan piously whinging about “cyber bullies.” She and her gaggle should take a long look in the mirror.

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I particularly like this screen cap the Sun folks used before my segment.

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Very, very powerful.

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