Monday, April 22, 2019

The Racist Cons and the Fake News Election



I spent most of the long weekend far from the madding crowd, recovering from a particularly gruelling exam.

With only the sound of the rain beating down, and a passing yacht club boat chugging along to remind me that Spring had finally arrived.

But what I was also reminded about was that there are now just six months before the next election.

An election that will determine in a very real way, whether this country as we know it lives or dies.



For let there be absolutely no doubt that if Andrew Scheer and his ugly Cons do manage to win that election, they will make the dark years of the Harper Regime look like a walk in the park.

Especially after a campaign that the Con friendly host of Power and Politics Vassy Kapelos predicts will be ugly. 

One person working on the Liberals' campaign told me the federal election will make Alberta's "look like a day at Disneyland." Hours after Jason Kenney's win, a federal Conservative — victory drink in hand — told me the federal "battle" will be "bloodier, much bloodier."



With some of the cartoons in the Con media already verging on cannibalism.

And with Scheer's ex-rebel campaign manager Hamish Marshall recently sending out a mass mailing to their bestial supporters, which seems to suggest that the Cons are preparing to unleash an epidemic of fake news.

Beyond surveying supporters’ news diet, the mail-out asks whether the party should “bypass” the news media and instead hone “an aggressive social media strategy to communicate with people directly in their homes or on their mobile devices” and whether the party “should focus on direct voter contact … that will allow us to take our message to voters unfiltered.”

 It also asks whether the campaign should prioritize local and community media outlets, and invest more in advertising and a “sophisticated ground game” in order to “counter the efforts of pro-media news organizations.”

And at a time when far-right bots are already popping up everywhere like some foul fungus, everything suggests that the Cons are getting ready to amplify those messages and bury reality under a heap of fake news excrement.

Which of course makes sense because the Cons are increasingly anxious to bury two stories. One, the story of how the Cons are prepared to let Canada and the planet burn by not doing anything to fight climate change.

And two, the story about how they have become the party of  far-right extremists, and the home of the racists.

For this poll result couldn't be clearer.



And the results couldn't be more troubling. 

With even supposedly small-L liberal Edmonton becoming a stalking ground for far-right extremists.

And yellow vested fascists rearing their ugly heads all over the country...



And what makes all of this even worse, is that although Andrew Scheer has helped promote some of their deranged racist conspiracy theories.



And although he has played footsie with them, most recently at that rally on parliament hill...



The Con media seems to think it's OK for Scheer to call Trudeau a criminal, but not OK for Trudeau to call Scheer a bigot.  

The prime minister’s rhetoric in recent days suggests that in the six months before the next federal election, the Liberal leader is not planning to rely solely on his “sunny ways” playbook of 2015. 

Yes, he still talks up climate change and the strength of Canada’s diversity. But he is more than willing to take the gloves off and hit his opponents hard.

With Tonda MacCharles who promoted the fake scandal with the intensity of a religious fanatic, dredging up analysts to condemn Trudeau.

While Andrew Coyne, who lost both his credibility and his marbles over that scandal, even suggesting that Liberal bots not Con bots are the real problem:


Which forced me to reply like this:



Because the fact is, as far as I know, there are no Liberal bots. If people like Coyne are allowed to get away with bullshit like that we might as well rollover and play dead. 

And the non fake news story all Con media outlets should be promoting instead is that Andrew Scheer has just been exposed, again, as a serial liar and a cheat.


Which is one more good reason why that creepy Con must never become Prime Minister.

And the good news?

Justin Trudeau is right. The next election is going to be “about what kind of country we want to live in, and who we want to be.”


Lynn Meyers/Tofino

With six months to go the battle to save that country has begun. 

And we'll get a chance to send the Cons not one but two messages.

This country belongs to us, Trumplings.

And bigots are not welcome...



19 comments:

  1. This is so sickening. It's like watching a team of doctors try to save a patient who's been given six months to live without treatment, while the other team is trying to suffocate the patient out with a pillow and kill the doctors at the same time. Why shouldn't Justin take off the gloves and fight hard? God, what the hell happened here? We Americans used to look to your country as a bastion of compassion and relative sanity when ours went horribly wrong. Instead, Canada went completely batshit insane in frothing, ballistic outrage over one guy. "Trudeaumentia." I worry that whatever the outcome in October, Justin Trudeau and/or someone in his family is going to be hurt or killed by the hate mobs the Cons and their agitprop mouthpieces are riling up. In that picture there he's just walking around there out in the open with his surfboard where someone could easily take a snipe at him. Why does politics have to be a shithole of hate? Hate of minorities, or women, of LGBT people, of high-profile candidates singled out as targets. He's a good man, like Charlie Brown. Good grief, why is everybody always picking on him?

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    1. “Why does politics have to be a shithole of hate?”

      Tying their brains in knots is the only way you can motivate some people to engage sufficiently to even bother to vote. Petty but often legitimate grievances are everywhere. The trick is to inflate them. Pick a few where the complexity is overwhelming to the ham-sandwich approach and the confusion therefore easy to compound; then slip them some easy answers and sell them a hat and tee-shirt. Otherwise they’d just stay home and watch Springer. Spiro Agnew called them the Silent Majority and they’ve been the right-wing’s lunch for almost fifty years.

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  2. Anonymous9:11 PM

    Now some pundit is accusing Trudeau of being a pedophile. WTF. They just hurl accusations like baseballs. Because the plan to do a gentle coup via JWR failed so miserably. How is this legal?

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    1. Julian Porter is going to have a big stack of cases to deal with after the election one way or the other, that's for sure.

      Is this a Jordan Peterson thing? I bet this is about that bizarro Superman sex cult the Bronfman girls got involved in, isn't it? Or that wacko MKUltra conspiracy theory the certifiable crank Henry Makow has been running with for years about Pierre?

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  3. Dear Jackie, I don't want anyone, not even Scheer, or the loathsome Trump, to get death threats. And certainly not Trudeau. But you have been spewing out a hell of a lot of hatred against the left, whether Bernie or the NDP. You would utterly freak out if you encountered the party I belong to, Québec solidaire.

    And yet, Québec solidaire, a very left NDPer and the Green Left Projet Montréal are the a majority where Ilive. I have zero reason to vote for a more rightwing party

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    1. I'm sorry if I let my anger get out of hand, Lagatta. I used to push back against the more fervent "Bernie Bros" on another forum that I since departed in 2017, and they had a disturbing tendency towards some really misogynistic venom about Hillary and female supporters of her. Especially women of color. And were generally intransigent about the consequences of not uniting behind the nominee. So there's a lot of lingering resentment from the Hillary camp towards the Bernie camp that's not likely to ever heal soon. I later signed up for Twitter for about two months to follow Canadian politics due to the shitshow of Trump world, and followed some of the more active participants on Liberal Twitter. There was a lot of angry rhetoric from self-declared NDP/leftists, a number of whom were of the "you only support the Liberals because you want to get in Trudeau's pants" mentality. I ended up quitting Twitter and generally consider it a cesspool. Now, it's entirely possible I fell for a sponsored trolling campaign and reacted to it. But when I see things like 26% of current Sanders supporters said they would vote for Trump because they've already dismissed the other Democratic candidates as "neoliberal shills," it brings back all the old rage and bitterness from 2016. Like Simon, and like Hillary, I'd rather the left and center-left unite against the common enemy. But that aside, I'm sorry if my own responses here were overly hostile or exhibited personal invective in turn. Olive branch.

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    2. e.a.f.3:56 PM

      Even within a party, opinions and policies vary. A provincial NDP member, in B.C. maybe quite different from an Alberta member, as we are currently seeing. Alberta's NDP is way more pro pipeline than those in B.C. In B.C. there has been a flow between the federal Liberals and the provincial NDP, same in Ontario. Other provinces not so much.

      Quebec, has had significant differences of opinions. In the early 2000s Jean Charest, a vibrant member of the federal Progressive Conservatives and federal cabinet minister switched to run as the leader of the Provincial Quebec Liberals. At the time many felt he had the best chance of winning the election and helping Quebec remain in Canada. That is what happened and he became premier of Quebec from 2003 to 2012. Now not all in Quebec may have been happy with that, but it worked. Had there not been enough flexibility within our political system, we would never have been able to accomplish that. It also meant that people in Quebec who had voted Conservative would then vote Liberal. what it demonstrated to me, living in B.C. was that the province was greater than politics.

      Canadians tend to stay with their home parties until they see a need to move to another or vote for another, for something they view as critical. its why its good to have several parties and when you have several 'opposition' parties, they do criticise each other. its part of the "game/job". What we saw in these cases, was not so much "crossing the floor" but rather doing what was best for all concerned.

      This is what is currently happening in B.C. The Greens currently have an agreement to support the NDP in confidence motions. they ciriticise the NDP and I'm good with that, because they're there for the NDP when really needed.

      this evening we will see what happens in P.E.I. it maybe that the Greens and Liberals have to come to some agreement on how to run the government. if there were only two political parties in Canada, we would never learn how to play well in the sand box of politics.

      As part of our political system, even very popular political leaders get slammed by their own. Leaders come and go, the party endures forever.

      I notice you refer to the "common enemy". there usually isn't a common enemy. it doesn't in my opinion make for good politics, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, type of thinking doesn't work well to accomplish things for the good of the country. We don't have common enemies. We have differences of opinions on how things ought to be done and why.

      In the last federal election, I spoke to many people I knew who were Conservatives. they always had been. What I spoke to them about was harper's treatment of Veterans. We lost more to suicide upon their return to Canada than in the fighting over seas. the harper Conservatives had cut the budget, very quietly, in the RCMP unit which fought against crimes against children. Those two points, worked. People found common ground, and we never saw each other as political enemies. Some people stopped voting Conservative because they couldn't accept their views on the LBGTQ community. They felt o.k. about switching to the Liberals and some to the Greens because, they weren't enemies. If we are to make progress, we ought not to view the other political parties as our enemies.

      Olive Branch, to Lagatta, good.

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    3. Yes, thanks Jackie. I'm a late-middle-age woman, not far from senior, and I've been involved in rabble and babble since their inception. I couldn't possibly be a Bernie bro - and I agree that such persons existed and I've seen them in other progressive groups. Actually Sanders has made a lot of changes in his staff to bring in more women and people of colour. While Sanders was active in the civil rights movement as a young student in Chicago - remembering his Polish-Jewish family who were wiped out by the Nazis - it is true that Burlington Vermont (very close to my city, by the way) is overwhelmingly white.

      Bros telling women (or gay men) that they support Trudeau because he is cute and want to get into his pants is not acceptable from any quarter.

      e.a.f., thanks for the olive branch. I've been an activist for about 50 years (I was very young, 13 I think - this was not odd in the era of civil rights and anti-Vietnam war activism, and this morphing into realising that there was also systemic oppression of Indigenous peoples here. I have several Indigenous relatives, from at least three peoples - I don't consider myself Indigenous.

      Right now we see kids as young as I was getting involved in the anti-ecocide movement and my old joints (bones and ligaments, not THC) struggle to keep up with them!

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  4. Anonymous6:18 AM

    It's amazing how deluded Coyne has become, or more likely, he's fulfilling his monthly quota of anti Trudeau rhetoric to satisfy his bosses and maybe win the "Hack Of The Month" award, again. Regardless, equating JT with Trump is utterly ridiculous. Now if one were to compare Scheer's modus operandi with Trump's you would find they are near identical in their use of cesspool politics. Dividing, hating, fearing, lying, cheating, stealing and projecting. The only difference is Trump displays his despicable ways in full view while Scheer tries to hide his odious agenda. As I said, tries.
    Canadians will be at a crossroads this October and will have to choose between a way forward, or regress to the Harper abomination under Scheer. The high road, or the shithole. Your choice, Canada.
    JD

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    1. If the worst happens at that crossroad, I just don't want Justin to be remembered as a pariah in his home country or a failure as PM. (Or chased out, a refugee himself from a weaponized RCMP wearing Con-branded armbands as the mob chants "LOCK HIM UP." Canada's Victor Laszlo.) I want him to be able to repair his public image at home and abroad. He really is a victim of railroading, swiftboating (-canoeing), and a Clinton-style Schmear campaign, and I want people to be able to see that, even if it's only in retrospect. That he's not a bad guy or the horrific caricature the media and the Cons make of him. (I'd like to know who the hell was that pundit calling him a pedophile?)

      I want the record books to show that he genuinely is a good person who believed in doing politics differently and still does, but politics was perhaps "just not ready" for someone like him. It wasn't ready for Notley, for Carter or for Obama either. Or the brothers Kennedy. It just doesn't seem to be a word synonymous with "public service" no matter how hard the idealists and humanitarians try to make it so.

      For anyone who is a true public servant, like an Obama, a Trudeau or a Carter to subject themselves to the torrent of abuse that is sure to follow, is a testament to courage under fire. The Trudeau legacy should reflect that. He really, really didn't want to get involved in the family business (and maybe he shouldn't have), but he did, and like you've said he deserves the utmost support this cycle in helping him crush the resurgent fascists. If that effort comes up short, it shouldn't reflect upon him as a failed leader or worse, but a consequence of this shitty Trumpian timeline we live in, where the public at large is experiencing a dearth of compassion and common sense. Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

      Justin Trudeau, the Right Honorable, is a hero and he lives up to the title. He may not have served on the literal battlefield like Talbot Papineau before him, but he has made a lot of sacrifices for his country in his own way. I hope and pray that he wins the war on the home front (and isn't subjected to the same fate of the ultimate sacrifice as Papineau -- or Jack and Bobby). But whatever the outcome, he deserves credit for his endeavors. Not scorn or shame for the all-too-human mistakes that we all make, or the fake news distorting his record. A humble teacher, a reluctant superstar born on a winter's day who rose to public attention preaching a message of "people-kindness." That's about the best example of humanity anyone could hope to live up to.

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    2. e.a.f.4:09 PM

      Trudeau won't be hounded by the lock them up type of chants because well we aren't that American. What we see in the U.S.A. in my opinion, is a form of mass hysteria. Hence the chants of locker her up. it was also a way to have fun for some of those people present. Trump sold himself as some one on their side and they didn't view Clinton as their friend. She represented an elite, they didn't like. We might want to remember she did not go to 5 critical states. Trump had help from foreign entities. They understand the nature of political advertising. Noahm Chomsky is not taught in American schools that I know of. Many people don't know when they are being manipulated by outside influences. An analysis hasn't been really done of the Ontario election regarding this issue either.

      I think the big difference between American and Canadian politics is demonstrated by the difference in how many security people the politicians have to have with them.

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  5. A "globalist" perspective Andy the Antichrist aka Barabbas Scheer might chafe at. If he actually RTFM, that is.

    Justin Trudeau the inside-outsider

    "Prophets are not without honour, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house."

    Mark 6:4

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  6. Hi all.
    Make sure you don't miss this, when filing your 2018 Taxes--you may qualify, depending on where you're located (which provinces; whether yours is a Rural designation). The article is correct--the claim is easy to overlook. I missed it until Simon's last post. Then, I checked it out. Too bad, this time, In my case I missed out by not many miles.) Next Year!
    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/carbon-tax-pricing-ontario-federal-1.5043558

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  7. Further to the mention I made about a week ago, in which I'd 'bumped into' two anti-Trudeau 'men' about town: ewww. MAGATS. near me!
    Ironically, on my entire roundtrip to/from T.O. over the weekend I saw not one single such 'soul' on the entire transit system. Just so you know. Not the GO, nor Union Station, nor subway, nor bus.

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    1. Anonymous2:36 AM

      Hi Brawnfire, congrats on your Trump-adian free trip. Further evidence that they are a small minority when compared to Trump's disturbed following. I'm in rural Ontario and come across many camo wearing type people, minus the anti JT garb but nonetheless guaranteed they wont vote for him. Otherwise decent people who've bought into Scheer's BS and are being nurtured to develop a simmering hatred towards immigrants with outright lies re: the UN immigration compact. Scheer sure likes to blow his little dog whistle at our most vulnerable citizens and that is not only wrong, it reveals a despicable coward stoking his deplorables into vilifying people who simply dream of a better life.
      JD

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    2. What's really bizarre is how they're so distrustful of the M$M and want to completely bypass it in favor of Hamish's two-minute-hate meme factory, when all the M$M has done is give their boy a free pass while crucifying Trudeau. If anyone is responsible for the worrisome decline in the Liberals' fortunes, it's the M$M, with their nonstop breathless coverage of the bullshit scandal and complete ignorance of Scheer's pandering to hate. They framed that yellow pest rally as "economic anxiety" about oil and gas. They won't touch Marshall and regard Scheer's connections to Deplorebel Media as tangential, "guilt by association" and a "desperate" tactic by the Liberals to "deflect" rather than a wake-up call about the barbarians at the gates. Freeland got hollered at by Leo Housakos when she brought up the disturbing rise in racism and other bigotries infiltrating mainstream Canadian politics. The M$M glosses over this or ignores it in favor of their pathological obsession with Trudeau. Like I've said previously: a Diana in the tunnel strategy. "Get" the people's princess or the people's prime minister at all costs. I honestly think a JFK moment would be their holy grail. Think of the ratings, Mr. Beale.

      It really goes to show you how completely irrational these people are that they've bought into this dangerously paranoid, Trumpian bubble about the "liberal media" when, just like our NYT and CNN here, they fall all over themselves to treat the Cons with kid gloves while battering the actual, decent liberal (small and big-L) candidates. Ostensibly to avoid accusations of "bias," which never actually go away because the Cons have figured out that crying "bias! bias!" gets the M$M to continue treating them favorably. That and they don't really want liberal governments to succeed, because their corporate masters want tax cuts and other perks above all else. People will die, but it matters not a whit to them as long as they get to hoard wealth. Actual liberals have no friend in the Western world. Everything with Cons is projection, which is why it's bitterly ironic to agree with the statement that the media really is the enemy of the people. Profits are truly without honor.

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  8. Jackie, I think you're gonna like this:

    https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212042263

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    1. Trudeau genuinely cares...

      And Trump hates stairs! :)

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    2. Anonymous1:03 PM

      "And Trump hates stairs! :)"

      But loves escalators with pretty 10 year old girls on them.

      https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/oct/13/trump-makes-inappropriate-remarks-about-10-year-old-girl-video

      Sad. No, sick.
      JD

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