Once upon a time in the dark and scary woods of Con Canada, lived a little girl named Little Miss Progressive.
And like many other girl and boy progressives she didn't believe in making nasty attack ads.
Even though the Big Bad Wolf and his evil friends made them all the time.
Used them to rip out the throats of their opponents. And win one election after the other.
But still Little Miss Progressive wasn't convinced. Because as her friend rabbit said "We're better than that eh?"
Until one one day along came a dark knight on a red horse, and told her the story of the Big Bad Wolf's long lost brother.
And how when he ran in Iowa he refused to use attack ads, and was eaten alive. But when he did use them in South Carolina.
He slaughtered the Mittens in the magic pajamas.
And so said the dark knight on the red horse to Little Miss Progressive, and her rabbit, maybe we should also use them against the Big Bad Wolf.
The best strategy is to hit first, and twice as hard. Be swift and brutal. Remind people that Harper moved us from a surplus to a deficit. That he didn’t see the recession coming. That he wants to dismantle health care. That he favours Alberta over other provinces. That he has a far-right SoCon agenda.
Whatever you do, progressives, do it now. Don’t wait. Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff complained about how mean Stephen Harper is, and it got them precisely nowhere. The best response to nasty attack ads then is simple: Make your own attack ads, fast, and make ’em nastier.
Now I'm with the dark knight eh? Because the survival of our country is at stake.
But still Little Miss Progressive wasn't convinced. Because like so many other progressives she's too nice and too precious.
So what did I tell her? Sleep tight sweet princess.
Pretend you live in a nicer country than Con Canada. Use morphine if you must.
And always, always, always remember.
To keep the door locked....
3 comments:
good column. As they say, "the best defense is a good offence". The more offending you can be the further along you will get.
Harper started a new trend with the attack ads on Liberal leaders and see where it got them. Stephane Dion would have made a good P.M. but people believed the attack ads.
I agree we do need to expose Harper for what he truly is. In my opinion that is a cold hearted, narrow minded individual who will do what he wants and ignores the rest of us. It will be his vision of Canada and not any one elses.
All sorts of tax breaks for corporations but no housing or clean drinking water on the reserves; a declining crime rate but wants to put more people in prison? Of course when you change the laws to put more people in prison and then you privitize the prisons, your friends in the prison industry get to make huge amounts of money.
Who benefited when american states passed anti immigration laws? The prison industry.
Sarkosy, pres. of france, just passed a new law, making it illegal to question whether the killing of armenians in turkey was genocide. People can be sent to jail for this.
I am waiting for Harper to do similar things here.
The "Arab Spring" was great in Arab countries but for western leaders, not so much. They don't want it in their own countries and we only have to look at Harper and Cook's comments regarding people opposed to the bitamen oi piplines. Radical enviornmentalists. It didn't seem to work too well but we need to expose them as radical destroyers of our enviornment.
Ho e.a.f. thanks, I'm glad you liked it. I tried to have some fun while writing it, but I was trying to make a serious point. In an ideal world I would be repulsed by attack ads. It may be sometimes hard to tell, but I really am better than that. ;)
However, the Harperites introduced vicious attack ads to the Canadian political scene, as much as I deplore it they work, so I think it would be naive not to give them a taste of their own medicine. With one proviso, that while doing that we give Canadians many noble reasons to vote progressive. Never in my worst nightmares could I ever have imagined a government as un-Canadian as those alien Cons. So I demand that our political parties do everything they can to defeat them...
Great commentary e.a.f. I never really stopped to think about it but Dion would have been a very good PM.
We would be leading the table on Kyoto while taking our responsibilities seriously. There would be no Gateway Pipeline unless proven environmentally safe and economically sound in the long term.
Instead of draconian crime bills, he probably would have had marijuana decriminalized by now. He certainly would have made sure nobody dared question Canada's positions on SSM, abortion and capital punishment.
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