It's a horrible image. Erin O'Toole preening himself in a mirror, and suggesting decent people might want to join his Bigot Party.But he knows that a lot of Canadians don't know him from a hole in the wall, and that he must define himself before his political enemies define him first.
So he's trying to convince people that he's a nice guy, and definitely NOT Andrew Scheer.
But the more things change, the more they don't.
And I'm sure Scheer is loving this one.
It's got everything he would want.Is it time to stand up against the destruction of Canada’s history? 🇨🇦 👍 pic.twitter.com/gEoShGedbH
— Erin O'Toole (@ErinOTooleMP) September 1, 2020
Just so O'Toole can show Scheer and all the other SoCons that he means business.
But then of course, he had no choice. The SoCons who elected him are already letting him know that they expect their pound of flesh.
Social conservatives have shown themselves to be a large and determined segment of the Conservative Party of Canada. The party has been placed on notice that social conservatives will not tolerate, under any circumstances, the ignoring of their views or the talents they bring to the party.
Social conservatives will be watching Mr. O’Toole with a justified expectation that their support will be acknowledged and reflected in the party.
In fact, the SoCons are now so powerful, that as Thomas Walkom points out, O'Toole can't afford to ignore, or heaven forbid offend them.
O’Toole courted this faction assiduously. He couldn’t have won without its support. Indeed, social conservatives were arguably more integral to this leadership contest than they were three years ago when they helped elect Scheer.
What will they get from the new leader in payback? O’Toole notes that he is not a social conservative — that he supports a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion, and that he backs gay marriage.
But his own views are less important than the rules he lays down for his caucus. And here, O’Toole stands firmly with social conservatives.
Which explains this:
As well as explaining why he appointed the equally ghastly Candice Bergen as his deputy leader.Erin O'Toole was asked what he intends to do about the ghastly SoCon bigot Derek Sloan, and shamefully dodged the question. But the Con stooges @CBCNews failed to mention that. They're big on fake scandals, but on bigotry not so much.https://t.co/btPj7IBEmN
— 🇨🇦 Simon 🏴 🌈🏂 (@montrealsimon) September 2, 2020
But also because she's a nutty SoCon.
And when it was revealed that the brothers were only celebrating the fact that both of them were born on Christmas Day, responded like this:
15 comments:
I do worry about the media gaslighting and the Cons' use of token turncoats like Uppal (a Sikh), Duncan (a gay man) and Lewis (a black woman), to paint a rosier image of being "inclusive" and clearing the low bar that Scheer left in the dirt. The SoCons aren't all he's attempting to paper over. Racism is as severe of a rot in this party as religious wingnuttery. But the media is running interference again, because they know how racist they are and are circling the wagons to cover for themselves just the same. Look how quickly the Soros story was dropped and how they won't touch Poilievre.
The Real Women's group specifically articulated that the Cons intend to use Lewis as a "shield" against (credible) accusations of misogyny and racism. Ostensibly while projecting a bad-faith attack against Trudeau for window-dressing with identity politics and diversity hires. Yet it's her abhorrent views that matter, not her race and gender. She is the female version of Ben Carson. As Trump says, "there's my African-American." Now they're letting the old tool pretend to offer a "serious" Reconciliation platform, completely ignoring his Johnny Mac fanboying or the fact that he's basically just running Kenney's platform of buying off the Indigenous to shove dirty energy projects down their throats. If Trudeau's green recovery platform makes Indigenous groups stockholders in solar and wind farms, he, Kenney and especially Harper will each shit a bitumen brick.
Blarney O'Foole told West Block this weekend that there's no definition of systemic racism, therefore it's not a "thing" but an opinion up for debate. And also that some cops had their feelings hurt by the term. Oh, how sad. Well, I've got a definition for him: there's no clearer example of it than the political media in Canada. Besides their lying-through-omission retooling of Erin the Errand Boy, you never hear a peep about Kenney or the fact that he's using Erin the Unready as a tool to implement the Alberta (Dis)Advantage nationwide. The question is how to get the word out past the gatekeepers and Jeff's troll farm to alert people that this rainbow coalition isn't as sunny and colorful as the pale-faced petroleum press wants people to believe?
BTW: here's one more for you to add about Smurfy Brown. For all the QAnon style conspiracy theorizing about the K-bros' charity being a "cult" of Trudeau, Bergen and some other cons (including Harper) actually promote a real-live insurgency cult in Iran among the likes of U.S. war hawks. The kind of Bolton/Pompeo religious regime change fanatics who don't belong anywhere near the red button.
https://twitter.com/a_picazo/status/1301229648903319553
Chances of media asking O'Stool about this? Less than him sprouting a full head of Trudeau's curly locks. I say that only because Bergen is another high school mean girl who made fun of his hair. (But probably won't say anything if her boss starts wearing an orange toupee.)
https://twitter.com/IshatReza/status/1301326402814390279
And back to Johnny Mac: Weak Andy's first post-"leader" assignment was a field trip back home to Saskapatch, to defend the racist old drunk to a crowd of Indians whose votes he said he didn't need. Big surprise, it gets ugly. I wonder if, like the equally incompetent Jared Kushner "solving" the Middle East peace process for Trump, Andy will be put in charge of coming up with Eric's "serious" platform on Reconciliation? Way to start a race war, assholes, like Trump showing up for a photo op in Kenosha.
https://twitter.com/dponticelliTV/status/1301529289909829632
And speaking of weak Andy, another white guy at Postmafia opines that Toolio may use the "founding fathers" culture war as "strategy" to win over pure-laine types in Quebec. Because that's all that courting bigots ever is to these people, "strategy." Isn't that what Andy did when he started hanging out with La Meute?
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/chris-selley-toppling-of-john-a-gives-erin-otoole-shot-to-finally-woo-quebecers/
OT - sorry
This just in - the PMO reports that the changes Harper made to the equalizing payments to the provinces underpaid them by $12Billion. Way to go, Kenney!
UU
If I looked in the mirror and saw a conservative I'd seriously consider getting CONversion therapy. And a rug for me noggin. But seriously, if this isn't the most ridiculous ad ever, it comes pretty close. Errand, along with all his Harper era ReformaCons are the same old same old. People who may believe that this is the party of Joe Clark need to look in the mirror and ask themselves if they're racist, hate filled homophobes. If they are then they are a majority of today's conservatives. If not, well, that conservative party died a long time ago.
JD
Bloody H%$#
Candice Bergen also provided a (pre-recorded) speech to the annual MeK summit
Those guys are a full terrorist fanatic cult. They make Al Qaida look good in some ways but they have a long hitory of terror attacks in Iran and assassitated the Iranin PM in the early 1980's
I wonder if she actually understood who they are? More than one ultra-right-wing US politician has addressed them. She was suckered by someone?
I am all for O'Toole keeping Derek Sloan in caucus. Makes a nice target.
As to there being "no definition of systemic racism" check some of the US jurisprudence, maybe Brown v. Board of Education [1954] or Griggs vs Duke Power [1971 or something around there. You will find something.
BTW Justin needs a haircut but with Covid-19 and the US looking like it could disintegrate before our very eyes he may have higher priorities.
O/T but WTF. You have to see this. Just when you think the Cons have reached peak juvenile delinquency, the NDP says hold my beer.
Matthew Green retweets QAnon, half-apologizes for it. Proceeds to undermine relations with Canada's largest trading partner by saying their possible next U.S. president "sucks". Can't wait to see your next write-up on the "conscience of parliament" Simon, because this is not a serious party. This is how low they've sunk. Official NDP comms is now "Joe Biden is a stupid poopyhead." But but but but Trudeau's socks make him look like a child or something like that.
https://twitter.com/RealChangeBot/status/1301574714985533440
I still think Layton was a power-hungry saboteur, but Tommy Douglas was a statesman. I bet he or Ed Broadbent would be ashamed to see their party devolve into a bunch of shitposting performative wokeness trolls promulgating conspiracy theories and deep-fake videos, then concluding their messaging with "Biden still sucks." Or sharing content from Jeff Ballzinger's troll farms like Post Millennial and Canada Proud. I get that they want to attract the "youth vote" and portray the high school teacher as the mean old stuffy principal, but this kind of immature crap is why they're stuck at ~19% in the polls. What's next? Slapping a "Kick Me" sign on Trudeau's back, or putting a thumb tack or whoopie cushion on his seat in the HoC?
The Liberals are the only ones handling their social media in a professional manner. The rest have picked up the worst habits from Trump, Sanders and "Rose Twitter." For all their complaints about him, you never see Justin Trudeau using his Twitter account like a 13-year-old Reddit edgelord. NDP stands for No Damn Principles.
Charles Adler, a long time Conservative took a look in the Tools mirror and no longer liked what he saw for the same reasons that alarmed most of us once Harper formed a majority government and started the process of transforming Canada into a ReformaCon enclave. Nothing has changed the biblical reformers that stole the Conservative brand name are still looking for the special combination of lies, deception and division that will give them a second chance to complete the great Canadian leap into yesteryear.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7309114/charles-adler-conservative/
RT
I don't speak French and wish this RCI report had subtitles, but apparently some media in Quebec are on to Toolio's façade. (CBC French is clearly of better quality reporting than its English counterpart; surprised he only wants to defund the latter.)
Hopefully the Liberal war machine is tuned into all of it and rips off his nice guy mask sooner rather than later, to reveal the duplicitous liar and craven political hack with major debts owed to some very bad people. As the old song says, smiling faces tell lies.
"Ils ont misé sur Erin O'Toole : qu'attendent maintenant les militants proarmes et les anti-avortement? / They bet on Erin O'Toole: What are pro-gun activists and anti-abortion activists now waiting for?"
https://twitter.com/RadioCanadaInfo/status/1301333460594946049
BTW Simon, I saw your tweets this morning, but don't get too worked up about the Abacus poll yet. While it's important that progressives not get complacent, and work doubly or even triply hard in the coming months as Toolio has proven himself better at bullshitting than was Scheer, Lean Tossup says it's probably an outlier.
This is bizarre, and shows something is up with them, as it's the second such outlier Abacus has published in as many months. For the Liberals to be doing worse in Ontario under their panel than ARI doesn't make sense.
https://leantossup.ca/canada-when-even-angus-reid-is-this-liberal-friendly/
https://leantossup.ca/abacus-sincerely-close-probably-an-outlier/
Online panels are having some serious issues right now with their partisan "house effects": Leger favoring the Bloc, ARI favoring the Cons as usual and now Abacus telling both to hold their beer. The only reason they put out polls more frequently is because it's cheaper. I have no idea what Nanos reads, because I don't subscribe and haven't seen any leaked numbers on social media. But that article about Abacus indicates that phone polls tend to be more accurate, and the real picture isn't likely to show up until the actual writ period anyway.
The throne speech seems likely to be sufficiently ambitious to put a shiver in the spine of the Con media and even some penny pinching Blue Grits. If those predictions hold true (and I see no reason why they wouldn't), the Liberals might very well get a bump from it, especially if they can force their own defeat and an early election before Toolio makes an imprint one way or the other.
Right now, this is push pollsters trying to make fetch happen and engineering varying degrees of Toolio's dead-cat bounce. For Abacus, who I no longer trust because of this, once is an accident and twice is a deliberate pattern. Dale Smith even lamented how the media has developed an addiction to horse-race coverage, and I can vouch for the fact that they're doing the same in the U.S. trying to make the polls tighten between Biden and Trump.
Again, this means that complacency isn't an option in the least because Toolio does have the media gaslighting working in his favor (including that pathetic Globe editorial expressing frustration that their latest manufactured scandal is all but dead, and Trudeau proroguing has pretty well killed it, much to their chagrin). But it doesn't mean a death knell for the Tru Grits either.
I suspect the LPC are keeping their powder dry just to keep things interesting before unloading on him during an actual election. It causes cardiac arrest and panic attacks among his supporters, but for whatever reason Trudeau seems to enjoy walking tight ropes and lulling his opponents into a false sense of security. Wait and see what the throne speech entails.
Have a good Labor Day weekend after a mostly dreadful summer, and get ready for September 23rd. That's Bruce Springsteen's birthday, so here's a long-distance dedication to our Canadian prize fighter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_91hNV6vuBY
Hi Jackie....Yes, O'Toole has got the Canada Proud gang trying to boost his image, and make him look like Mr Nice Guy. Except that he's trailing his backward views behind him like a string of cans tied to the back of a car. And when you look at his platform it could have been written by Stephen Harper. It's appalling, and it's made worse by the way the Con media is trying to promote him and his "reasonable" policies. Honestly, sometimes when I think what the Cons and their stooges have done to this country, I wish I was far away...
Hi UU...I am following Jason Kenney's fall from grace closely. To see Trump, O'Toole, and Kenney all go down would be all I could ever wish for. I think the party would last for months....
Hi JD....It seems so obvious to you and me, but will pandemic addled Canadians be fooled into thinking he's a nice guy, and a Con they can trust? These days nothing would surprise me. And one can't underestimate the Canada Proud guys and old Harperites now directing his campaign. According to the latest polls, almost 40% of Canadians don't know what he stands for, and those are the ones who could determine the result of the next election. So progressives have their work cut out for them....
Hi jrkrideau....I think a lot of Canadians aren't aware of the influence Trump and his Republicans have had on the Cons in this country. They have absorbed his populist philosophy and have even started talking in his ugly language. And Candice Bergen is a fanatic if ever there was one. Her hatred for Trudeau is so extreme I'm surprised the RCMP lets her anywhere near him. But unfortunately too many Canadians are too provincial or too dumb to recognize what is happening to our country. And yes, I agree with you, Trudeau definitely needs a haircut, and should also shave off that scruffy beard. Every time he appears on TV looking like that I'm sure he loses a large number of older voters. Maybe Sophie likes him that way, but the country must come first.. ;)
RT...Yes I saw Adler's conversion on the road to Damascus or wherever. I was glad to see it, since that old Con is in a position to influence some of the older Cons. However he ruined it for me when I saw that one of his first post revelation radio guests was Warren Kinsella. I guess you can't have everything...
Hi Jackie...That RadCan report is less than it appears. But it doesn't really matter because the Cons are going to have a hard time gaining any traction in Quebec. O'Toole got a lot of support from SoCons and gun nuts in that province, but most Quebecers are against both. As for the Abacus poll, you're right, I probably overreacted. I'll deal with that in my next post...
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