“In politics nothing is contemptible.”
Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister (1874-1880)
At the risk of declaring the obvious, one thing is for sure: Disraeli wasn’t living in contemporary Ottawa. But if he were, it’s likely he would alter his view because Canadian politics has in fact descended to the contemptible.
How else can one explain the appearance earlier this week of what was described as a cartoon challenge on the Liberal Party of Canada website? Humourists near and far, neophyte and professional, were invited to submit amusing photo interpretations of Prime Minister Harper busily ignoring the dreary Copenhagen global warming summit, otherwise known as the global gong show. (More ominously, the Copenhagen rhetoric has of late become a conniving con game, formulated by developing nations in order to extract vast sums of money – reparations, the lesser nations now call them — from the wealthier countries, Canada among them).
Setting aside for the moment the bothersome little sidebar – for the Grits – that Harper is actually attending the Danish sham, and further that the Prime Minister is acutely aware this carnival has devolved into incessant bickering about how the third world ransom note should be composed, the mere facts of the Liberal presentation were (are) in themselves a denial of Disraeli’s assertion.
The cartoon chucklefest attracted a whole raft of submissions, all of which were reviewed by Grit deep thinkers bunkered in Ottawa, and some of which – the best of the best, we were advised – were then posted on the party website, with assurances a winner would in due course be declared. In all, there were 75 finalists.
One of them was based on a photograph taken in November, 1963, by Robert H. Jackson of the Dallas Times-Herald. Jackson pressed his shutter at the precise moment a sallow Dallas club owner named Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald: the picture caught Oswald’s face contorted in pain, as the bullet ripped into his abdomen and inflicted a mortal wound.
Oswald, of course, was about to be formally charged with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which if anything darkens the enclosure in which the Liberal party of Canada now cavorts. The Grits found it amusing, apparently, that one of the cartoon entrants had superimposed Stephen Harper’s head over that of Lee Harvey Oswald. I take it the effect of this was to produce gales of laughter among the Liberals serving as cartoon editors and gatekeepers, because against the background of a murdered United States president, and his alleged assassin subsequently shot and killed for all the world to see, the Grits went right ahead and published the doctored photograph on the party webpage.
Funny stuff, what? Stephen Harper taking a slug to the gut. For sure this one has to be in the running for best cartoon of all. (Never mind a second image, also posted on the Liberal web page, in which Harper was shown in what might best be described as an intimate moment with a dairy cow).
With apologies to Disraeli, these two cartoons taken together (but especially the Oswald effort on its own) precisely define the word “contemptible.” And they further strengthen my view that the Liberal Party of Canada is spectacularly unqualified to govern this country, with this cartoon challenge as prima facie evidence. Actually, there’s more to it than just this pair of grotesque parodies and I’ll get to that a bit further on in this essay.
To continue: belatedly, the Liberals removed the two “cartoons” after being overrun with protest from the blogosphere, from the mainstream media, from the public, and by his studied silence, from Stephen Harper, too: he would not, his spokesman said, dignify such rubbish with a comment.
But in the internet age, to remove images from an owned and operated website is to not remove them at all. That’s another element of modern society the Liberals don’t seem to grasp: that the web world is in many respects an anomaly of the old academia axiom that to survive in ivied halls you must “publish or perish.” The Grits don’t seem to have figured out that if you publish stupid or distasteful or offensive or gross material on the internet these days you damn well will perish because there’s no going back, no retrieval, and the twitching corpse of Liberal public relations strategy in Ottawa is the latest evidence. It’s incomprehensible that party factotums would in the first instance approve such ghastly samples of so-called humour, and would in the second post them – but they did, after no doubt vetting the material with quill pens scratching away by the glow of a guttering candle. One suspects their communications stupor was hastened by several flagons of mead.
But even though the Oswald cartoon, which if nothing else was a clear incitement to violence against the Prime Minister of Canada, and the cow have been excised, the stench of Liberal “humour” lingers on. That’s because of the remaining final submissions still decorating the Liberal Party website, three of them – on the pretext of slagging Harper – are in fact denigrating Alberta and all of us who live here. The images paint us as thick witted yokels and rubes, hillbillies, fat and happy in a bleak wasteland fouled by oilsands pollution, complacent and uncaring about the fetid mess we’re visiting upon the rest of the country, and therefore not especially good citizens of the greater and pristine Canada.
For my money, this anti-Alberta lampooning, vicious and with no basis in fact, is the real toxicity, the real bacteria of the Liberal web page. For me, the Grits bring on political acid reflux, because while they endorse demeaning insults against Alberta, they also claim to represent the entire nation, and presume in due course to once again become its government.
God spare us the thought, never mind the possibility, because in reality this is a party of slender and reckless thinking, uninterested in national unity except as it pertains to Quebec, and content to let wannabe cartoonists malign a major province which just so happens to be among the dominant propellants of the entire Canadian economy.
All of this is proof positive, in my estimation, that the Liberal Party of Canada is now populated by elitist parvenus wholly capable of behaviour which cannot, even by the most generous of interpretations, be described as anything but disgusting.
With that in mind, I’m further drawn to the sagacity of Benjamin Disraeli, who while he may not have foreseen the dreadful wash of sewage we call democratic politics in present day Canada, was nonetheless right on the mark with another of his observations 135 or so years ago.
“The hare-brained chatter of irresponsible frivolity.”
They way I look at it, that’s a phrase which as far as it goes neatly sums up this entire cartoon caper. But it doesn’t go quite far enough, which takes us back to that other entry from the Disraeli political logbook.
Contemptible.
