01.03.2011 12:56 PM

I beg your pardon?

Someone sent me this link, in which the new Conservative MP for Vaughan is quoted:

“That whole passage of history is unpleasant. And some of the things that happened to me on my campaign were unpleasant too.”

The “whole passage of history” he refers to includes, inter alia, the Holocaust.

Is he saying what it sounds like he might be saying?

It is way too soon in the New Year for this sort of stuff to be happening.

29 Comments

  1. Andrew says:

    I guess people never use hyperbole in speeches or interviews anymore and everything is to be taken literally.

  2. Mike says:

    Apparently “Top Cops” are incapable of empathy, presuming they understand the notion in the first place.

  3. Jay-TO says:

    Poor man. What’s this his third public service pension? For a necon he sure loves the gravy train and nanny state. A 68 year old has nothing to offer a modern country like ours. Especially when he seems senile.

  4. Dave says:

    ‘unpleasant?’
    ‘UNPLEASANT?’
    Does that rank with ‘appropriately measured response?’

    Zounds – ‘unpleasant?’

  5. Namesake says:

    Fantino comes off as a thin-skinned drama queen in those interviews in which he likens the criticisms he received during the campaign as akin to Hitler’s “Big Lie.” And he’s evidently pretty ham-fisted / prone to foot-in-mouth / careless in his choice of words (or knowledge or sensitivity to history), as a speaker. But as this latest interview also took place last year, it might be better to just let sleeping dogs, er, lie.

  6. Stephano says:

    Sorry Warren, I don’t see it.

  7. Jan says:

    Maybe he’s bitter Harper didn’t put him in the Senate. He’d find it much more pleasant there.

  8. allegra fortissima says:

    If he is saying what it sounds like he might be saying, then his statement is irresponsible. Embarrassing. Insulting.

  9. Doug Marsh says:

    Godwin’s Rule, Warren.

  10. Cath says:

    from your very own crystal ball Warren:

    “9. Scandal-mongering will persist. But it won’t work because it rarely does. Look at what happened in Toronto’s recent mayoralty race: Rob Ford’s mugshot was on the front page of every paper. He confessed to drunk driving and a drug charge and being too rough. All in one week! Result: He won a massive landslide. Bottom line: Nobody cares about scandal stuff, except the media and the politicians. So they’ll keep braying and screeching about it.”

    Do you believe what you wrote? Are you just making Fantino more interesting, not less.

    At the moment I don’t feel one way or the other about the man.

    • Warren says:

      Well, okay then! I suppose there’s equivalency between the Holocaust and the criticism he got from his opponents in the by-election, then? Am I getting that right?

      Please confirm, because I intend to quote everyone who minimizes this one. I’m sure no one will mind!

      • Cath says:

        I’m not minimizing this at all Warren, just wondering if you’re writing one thing but then doing something else. If as you wrote in your Sun column the scandal-mongering persists and will not work, why would this be any different?

        • Warren says:

          Let me try again, because you don’t seem to be getting my point: do you think a politician should equate criticism with the Holocaust? Is that okay by you?

          If you think that’s okay, well, I guess there’s no scandal, is there?

          At least in your mind, anyway.

    • Ted says:

      As far as trying to scandal monger to win elections or public favour is concerned, WK is pretty bang on. Especially when you scandal-monger instead of taking on issues.

      But that doesn’t mean comparing some criticism you received during an election campaign to the Holocaust is in anyway acceptable. It is truly offensive. Fantino, the big drama “me me me” queen, should be ashamed.

      There’s no “scandal” here or any “mongering”. There is an offensive statement now repeated and defended/justified.

      The stuff on Ford showed Ford to be a liar, an idiot and a overprivileged rich kid. But those were not the issues in the campaign so focusing on them was dumb. Same with focusing on a “hidden agenda”.

      But no one is campaigning here. We’re just rubbing our foreheads from the big smack we keep having to give ourselves whenever Fantino opens his mouth.

  11. Mr. Chamberlain says:

    Warren, it just goes to show there are times when it may be best to lose (though I suppose that’s up for debate). Wait and watch for him to embarrass his party on the Hill. I imagine his comments caught the attention of the odd CPC insider… but I suppose that’s up for debate as well.

    Guessing there is nothing quite like the sinking feeling that your newbie star MP is actually a millstone around your neck.

    “Stop talking and smile, man! Don’t you get it? You won!”

    There are two things going on here: 1) the suggestion of equivalency and 2) the political correctness with a word like “unpleasant”. Unpleasant is something you find at the back of your fridge.

    And we live in a strange time when the “unpleasant” abuses of political campaigning in ONTARIO is equated to the “unpleasant” history we know as the Holocaust.

  12. Lipman says:

    Negative campaign?

    How about the member’s intensely negative campaign literature in which his party erroneously referred to liberals as “Soft on Crime” playing to the lowest common denominator (in one of the safest cities in Canada).

    How about his cynical, “Where’s Waldo” campaign in which he failed to attend debates?

  13. Michael Behiels says:

    Check this out!! It is the new world coming at us at the speed of light!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY

    Some idiots dismiss the holocaust!

    Most of us don’t even see the big picture staring us in the face!

    Especially are micro-mind politicians!!

  14. Namesake says:

    Well, maybe one good thing will come out of this:

    It may cause people to regard the rather cursory work of some interest groups such as CJPAC — the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee — in evaluating candidates with a bigger grain of salt.

    Absent any direct interview, follow-up, or commentary, the response they posted on Fantino’s views might appear to be a quasi-endorsement; he certainly appears to be sensitive to Jewish concerns, the Holocaust, and hate crimes, here:

    http://www.itsup2you.ca/en/vaughan/julian-fantino/

    But all they did was send out a form letter questionnaire that can obviously be filled out by Party HQ instead of the actual candidate they’re seemingly vetting.

    (the other candidates’ responses are here: http://www.itsup2you.ca/en/vaughan/

    They’ve been conspicuously silent on Fantino, since then.

  15. A. Lehrer says:

    Fantino is thin skinned and has an ego the size of a planet. With that sort of mindset no wonder he sees questioning his behaviour as tantamount to genocide.

  16. James Bow says:

    Geez, what a whiner!

  17. Springer says:

    Think you’re stretching for this one.

    There is an equivalency between the deliberate tactic for which that regime became notorious, specifically “telling big lies often enough that people eventually come to believe them”, and what happened to him in his campaign.

    …which, tragically, is not terribly unusual in modern politics, and is as unpleasant now as it was then, if not more so considering we should all be the wiser you would think.

    • Namesake says:

      Ugh. It’s a wonder you can say this with a (virtual) straight face and with such a sanctimonious tone.

      First, there weren’t really even any lies being told about Fantino by the major political parties, much less colossal ones.

      He DID criticize the Charter of Rights in his book as something that pandered to criminals; and he DID avoid and even back out of a number of public debates, likely at the behest of the PMO. Those were the two main criticisms made against him that he finds so wounding.

      And — news flash — the source of the term “the Big Lie” was Hitler himself, in Mein Kampf: but not to describe what HIS Nazi party was going to do, but what he alleged the Jewish people did (unfairly blaming Germany’s WWI loss on German Army officer Erich Ludendorff). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie

      So, what, are you and Fantino maintaining that the Liberals are like “the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood,” now?

      • Springer says:

        All sanctimony aside, get a brain.

        • smelter rat says:

          Awesome comeback.

        • Namesake says:

          Mine’s working fine, but you might wanna update your zinger toolkit, there, Jerry, unless you wanna be indelibly associated with the Tea Party “morans,” too:
          http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/get-a-brain-morans

          No matter how you slice it, Julian Fantino, like many, misunderstands the history and import of the term (“the big lie”); the period; and many people’s acute sensitivity to inappropriately invoking ANY references to that period to describe comparatively trivial perceived injustices — even AFTER pundits & the commentariat all across the country howled about the folly of breaking ‘Godwin’s Law.’ And your attempt to defend his ignorance of all the above just digs both of you in deeper.

  18. Steve T says:

    Oh, good grief. Really??

    Those who are waiting with baited breath, for anything to pounce on, will always find some evil motive to ascribe to innocuous comments. It’s in the Top Five Political Moves handbook, I’m sure. Further, the media love to rev this kind of thing up even further, especially during slow news periods.

    Those facts, however, do not actually make the comment any less innocuous.

Leave a Reply to Namesake Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.