He swam menacingly around the shark tank. He couldn't make up his mind. He knew the Cons were hoping he'd liven up their deadly boring leadership race.
He knew they were desperate.
It is hard to imagine a race more boring than this one... As in any arena, strong competition breeds strong competitors. A field of strong candidates fight more forcefully for their ideas. Their weaknesses get tested.
And through the fire of a leadership contest – the hotter the better - you harden them into steel.
Step forward John Baird.
But when the time came, he just wasn't ready.
It's hard to believe that John Baird could even be considered as a candidate for the Con leadership, after his disgraceful behaviour during the dark years of the Harper regime.
But the Cons are desperate. With less than a month to go before nominations close, hardly anyone has applied for the job. As one of my readers said the other day, "They got NOTHING!!!!"
So Jason Kenney is now urging his good buddy Baird to run.
The situation couldn't be more dire or more dangerous.
Saudi Arabia's execution of 47 prisoners, including the well known Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr, has set off a firestorm in the region.
It's threatening to lead to an all-out confrontation between the Saudis and the Iranians.
And to make even matters worse, it turns out we're caught up in this madness, because Stephen Harper and his Con clowns didn't know what they were doing.
I honestly thought that I would never have to write another word about the Con clown John Baird. And it was such a great feeling.
I thought I had said all I needed to say about his shabby political career in this post.
But unfortunately I'm going to have to write another post to register my protest at the way the opposition parties fell over themselves praising him yesterday.
Or all but canonizing him. Making it sound like he was a saint flawed only by his partisan passion, instead of a political thug.
I can never forget the night John Baird tweeted that Thatcher was dead.
And how disappointed I was to find out, after consuming half a bottle of very expensive champagne, that it wasn't Margaret Thatcher, it was Thatcher his CAT !#@!!!.
But now I just wish I had saved what was left in the bottle to toast Baird's apparently imminent departure.
Whenever one of Stephen Harper's Con clowns leaves the country I shudder, reach for a paper bag to put over my head, and prepare for the worst.
Because I know they will make fools out of themselves, and shame us once again in the eyes of the world.
And in that regard John Baird's just concluded tour of the Middle East couldn't be a better example.
For it was, in descending chronological order, pathetic, humiliating, and shameful.
A few days ago I wrote a post pointing out that our ghastly regime had failed to say a word about Saudi Arabia's savage flogging of the blogger Raif Badawi.
After signing a deal with that reactionary kingdom to sell it $10 billion worth of armoured cars.
Well now Harper's faithful stooge John Baird has finally said something.
But only after it was revealed that he is planning a high-level meeting with one of its most powerful princes Turki al-Faisal.
He has always been his master's voice, Stephen Harper's most faithful stooge.
A yapping Con pitbull, the absurd Minister of Religious Freedom, a gay Thatcherite in a government full of filthy homophobes.
But these days nothing is more obscene than the way John Baird is pandering to the brutish settler regime of Benjamin Netanyahu, while attacking their long suffering victims the Palestinians.
Who can forget how Stephen Harper shocked the world a few months ago by suddenly and loudly declaring that the North Pole belonged to Canada?
Even though it actually belongs to Denmark.
But who knew the stunning proclamation also sent shockwaves through the cowed ranks of his own civil servants?
New documents suggest that Canada's last-minute decision to stretch its claim to the Arctic seabed all the way to the North Pole took federal bureaucrats just as off-guard as it did the rest of the world.
Or that this last minute Con production was such an absolute FARCE.
The situation in Ukraine couldn't be more ominous, with reports that some Russian troops have crossed into that country.
World leaders like Obama are calling for calm, refusing to call it an invasion, and ruling out military action.
The need for cooler heads to prevail has never been more urgent.
So what is our ghastly Con Foreign Minister John Baird doing?
Answer: blowing hot air out of every orifice, and fanning the flames of war.
The ceasefire is holding. The kids are playing again on the beach where four of their friends were killed while playing soccer, by shells from an Israeli gunboat.
But thousands of Palestinian children have been wounded...
The situation in the hospitals is so desperate they can't treat them in Gaza.
“Palestinian health authorities are planning to refer more patients to hospitals outside of Gaza to access life-saving treatment as well as to reduce the case load in the hospitals to a more manageable level.
And I still want to know why the Harper regime is STILL preventing 100 wounded Palestinian kids from being treated in Canada.
The other day I told you about a tiny candle of decency in the darkness that is Gaza.
Ontario's plan to bring wounded children to be treated in the province's hospitals.
The Ontario government is willing to provide medical care to 100 injured children from Gaza, it said Tuesday – several days after a Palestinian-Canadian doctor made a public plea to bring kids to Canada for treatment.
And I said that was MY Canada.
But sadly my Canada isn't Harperland, and the Cons are no better than beasts.
As if the situation in Gaza wasn't bad enough. As if the need for serious diplomacy to end the slaughter couldn't be greater.
As if Canada wasn't enough of a rogue nation in the eyes of the world.
And the last thing anyone needed was the Con clown John Baird pouring more oil on the flames.
It's taken me a few days to summon up the strength to write something, anything, about the horror in Gaza.
I just couldn't bring myself to look at the images of this latest war.
As rockets from Palestinian militants in Gaza continue to fly into Israel and Israel continues to strike hard at Gaza, the options for each side are hardening. Both sides are employing brinksmanship, carrying out their biggest raids yet this weekend and threatening much more to come.
Not when I'm still recovering from the images of the last one...
OK. Let me be clear, as we say in Harperland. I ALWAYS thought it was a bad idea to make John Baird Foreign Minister.
I couldn't help but feel that he lacked the necessary diplomatic skills. I never believed him when he declared that the Cons were human rights champions.
Not after the way the Cons are muzzling them in Canada. And not after he declared that human rights were good, as long as they were good for business.
And sure enough I was right eh?
Lordy. It's taken me a day to recover from this stunning sight. I haven't seen such a match up since El Macho met La Cuca in the finals of the Tijuana Wrestling League.
And I still can't believe it eh?
Was that really John Baird doing the right thing for once? By denouncing the anti-gay repression in Russia? Brother John?
And was that really the old homophobic haggis Gwendolyn Landolt, spewing and farting in his general direction?
Well I see Stephen Harper is back in Canada after his disastrous performance at the G8 Summit.
He was wrong about a Syria agreement. The other leaders did manage to cobble one together.
He was wrong about Vladimir Putin. He wasn't the odd man out at the meeting, Harper was.
He couldn't get a trade deal. Wherever he went Old Duff followed him. And when it was over all reporters wanted to know was, why is his PMO using OUR tax dollars to go after Justin Trudeau?
It was a wonderful Canadian moment.
One of my Canadian heroes, Romeo Dallaire, talking about another of my heroes, the late great Stompin' Tom Connors.
Telling Evan Solomon about the day when him, his U.N. soldiers, and about 200 civilians were in a Rwandan hotel under heavy enemy fire.
How he played Stompin' Tom's song The Blue Berets, and how it cheered them all up, had them clapping their hands and stomping their feet, even as the mortars and shells rained down on the hotel.
It was an extraordinary sight. John Baird sitting next to Julian Fantino at a committee meeting this morning, blasting the hideous anti-gay statements of a Canadian religious organization.
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird took aim Tuesday at "offensive" and "mean-spirited" statements on the website of an organization that gets federal funding to do aid work in Uganda.
A page from the group's website that has been removed, but is still available as a cached version, calls homosexuality and transvestism perversions and lists them along with pedophilia and bestiality.
A day after Fantino defended his decision to fund that organization's activities in one of the most anti-gay countries on earth. And fast tracked its approval.
Three days ago he was the mouth that roared. Lecturing U.N. delegates like some crazed televangelist, as if they were children.
Blasting the Palestinians for daring to ask for humble observer status, claiming it was an "impediment to peace."
But today after Israel delivered what the gentle Ban-Ki-moon described as an "almost fatal blow" to the peace process, John Baird was strangely subdued.
