Friday, April 30, 2010

In The Next Election, The Tories Will Run Against EKOS

Demands for an overarching narrative behind a government/opposition party's actions have always seemed misplaced to me: usually pols toss whatever stones are close at hand. But if the Tories are going to make bashing Frank Graves this central to their rhetoric, it must mean they're running out of the good stuff. I mean...Frank who? Outside maybe 2,000 blogging nerds in the Cdn. politics ghetto of the blogging nerdosphere, whose ever heard of the guy?

27 comments:

Steve V said...

Frank Graves wants to raise your taxes and let pedophiles work in elementary schools. Watch for it

Shiner said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Frank said...

Liberals can often be counted on doing it to themselves, like the 'beer and popcorn' moment. Or Gordon Brown's 'that women is a bigot' for daring to question Labour's open door immigration policies. That Liberal, smug, elitist leftist attitude will surface in the heat of a campaign. You folks just can't resist it.

Shiner said...

The battle of the pollsters, nice. Can't wait for the Allan Gregg ads making fun of Graves' weight.

By the way, I posted about [this at The Globe just now. It brings the stupidity of these Ask the Experts things at the Globe to a whole new level.

I hate to think about how much cash these attacks on the CBC bring in from the yokels.

Tof KW said...

Great, just wait for it:
"Frank Graves - He's just in it for himself."

ridenrain said...

The fact that everyone will immediately recognize Frank Grave as a Liberal supporter has already killed his credibility.

Steve V said...

Records show that Graves travelled to Quebec the same year the sponsorship money was being doled out. You do the math.

Oxford County Liberals said...

Funny thing is: Glen Mcgregor is pointing out on Twitter that Ekos and Frank Graves have been paid by the Harper government millions of dollars to do polling work for them.

"By my math, since #CPC formed government, "Liberal partisan" pollster Frank Graves has done $5,657,710 in work for Harper govt.

...Also, EKOS has done two polling contacts worth $131,440 for Privy Council Office under Harper"

CPC MP's and supporters might want to explain how that shows Ekos and Graves are Liberal partisans.

Shiner said...

Frank Graves and those Prius driving, beret wearing, latte sipping, Liberal elites in Ontario and Quebec want a culture war... why do they hate Canada?

Gene Rayburn said...

How do we explain Ridenrain's lack of credibility?

Is it his:

a) lack of factual evidence?

b) his consistent use of terms like "everybody knows" or "all Canadians" thus relegating his comment to anecdote at best, cliched talking point at worst>

c) it's ridenrain, dude's full of more shit than a Christmas turkey.

sharonapple88 said...

That Liberal, smug, elitist leftist attitude will surface in the heat of a campaign. You folks just can't resist it.

Sorry, but isn't this an example of the smug rightist attitude? ;)

The fact that everyone will immediately recognize Frank Grave as a Liberal supporter has already killed his credibility.

Like it's killed Alan Gregg's credibility. The one time time senior pollster for the Progressive Conservatives . His Strategic Counsel does political polls for CTV and the Globe & Mail.

Gene Rayburn said...

Hey elroy,

What's your explanation for things like the Paul Martin likes child porn thing from 2004? Seems like the Connies are prone to the same thing. You seem to be having memory problems elroy. Maybe you should see a doctor or have your IT guy install more RAM.

Ti-Guy said...

Do not make the mistake, BCL to assume that the Conservatives are doing something really lame just because, right this minute, they're focusing on a recent event and a name currently in the news and assume that's the end of this political tactic.

The larger issue is what we've seen the Conservative wrecking crew and berzerkers do before: turn what is arguably a strong and mobilising reaction to their politics into a silly circus in which everyone ends up rolling their eyes or laughing or OUTRAGED! at some minor detail (like Graves's work with the CBC) so that no one will notice that a culture war is what the Conservatives have waged and want to remain at the vanguard of while simultaneously making the idea so ridiculous that a good proportion of the public won't even listen to the arguments presented by anyone to suggest it explains quite a bit, including how disappointed the Conservative rank-and-file should be itself with its own party.

They haven't run out of the good stuff. They never had any good stuff to begin with except a culture war to use as a mobilising force to gain the power they needed so democratic and economic influence would shift from the East to the West before the West had either the democratic or economic heft to justify that all on its own.

Remember, the first thing these people do when you present a really good challenge is that they either laugh at you or they launch personal attacks to destroy you. It's worked remarkably well among those who the rest of us count on to articulate our ideas (and that's because our own public intellectuals are wimps, for the most part).

Just in this thread: look at how one of them (who probably isn't that stupid) brings up the stupid "beer and popcorn" incident yet again. That continues to haunt Scott Reid and the Liberals all out of proportion to what it was intended to communicate and in spite of the fact that it turned out to be even truer than anyone thought: the pittance the baby bonus offers is of even less utility than beer and popcorn money, despite it costing around 4 billion a year, I believe.

RuralSandi said...

It's a Harper tactic - to try to change the channel on his many other problems. Harper's followers are so gullible it's laughable.

Hey, Tory Teneycke is paid for by the taxpayers to be Harper's shill - he should be fired.

Gallahad said...

Elroy,

You ramble on about a leftist smug elitist attitude. You then bring up "beer and popcorn"

Let's go through some of the more memorable moments of the CPC.

MP, Cheryl Gallant compared abortion to terrorism.

MP, Scott Reid said official bilingualism was unrealistic and should be scrapped.

Randy White, indicated his willingness to use the notwithstanding, of the Canadian Constitution to override charter rights on same sex marriage.

Rob Merrifield suggested that women should have mandatory family counselling before they should be allowed to have an abortion.

Toews suggested that the Chiefs of police were a "cult" because they support the gun registry.

Stephen Harper, called Canada a "Third rate Northern European welfare state, and proud to be basking in that third rate status"

Pierre Polievre used the filthy term "Tar Babies" in the HOC.

If need be space cadet, I can give you some more, but that is probably all your tiny little brain can manage at one time.

Ti-Guy said...

Hey, Tory Teneycke is paid for by the taxpayers to be Harper's shill - he should be fired.

I predict he will be. I can see him pulling a "Mike Duffy" sooner rather than later. Although he's a lot smarter and slicker and his low cunning isn't that obvious, he's still a raging neoconservative whose basic instincts are vilification, defamation, lying and character assassination.

CTV might be able to get away with that, but I doubt the CBC can.

Tof KW said...

Silly me...
I thought it was only the common CPofC hacks, trolls and (at worst) the neanderthal MPs like Del Mastro that were questioning EKOS and the CBC's relationship with the Liberal party.

Can you believe the flippin' president of the Conservative Party of Canada wrote to complain to the CBC Ombudsman?!?!

CBC News letter to the Conservative Party chairman

Mon Dieu - the CPofC really is nothing more than a group of rabidly deranged, ignorant raving loonies.

Ti-Guy said...

Anyway, what really bugs me about this is how unprepared Frank Graves was for the inevitable Conservative backlash. He ended up personally embarrassed by Kory Teneycke (who can cow anyone with that hypersonic speaking style of his) and made the mistake of quickly apologising to save his own skin. Didn't he realise that Conservatives understand apologies as invitations for more abuse?

And then Ignatieff, who wouldn't recognise a class/cultural difference because his own class privilege is the very air he breathes jumped in to distance the Party from the very notion of a culture war.

Which, as I've said before is a *very bad idea* except as a tool to point out that it's the Conservatives who've been waging one, all along.

Ti-Guy said...

Mon Dieu - the CPofC really is nothing more than a group of rabidly deranged, ignorant raving loonies.

So's around 30% of the general public (and they're not all Conservatives; the CPoC has just been the only party to embrace them). That's the issue the rest of us are going to have to deal with, sooner or later.

I'm sure, for many, the condition is remediable. I just don't see any remedies on the horizon.

Gallahad said...

Did anyone at CPC headquarters ever complain about the impartiality of good year blimp Mike Duffy?

Since the CPC, seems to be so interested in ensuring that journalistic integrity is upheld, did the CPC, complain about what CTV, and Fat boy Duffy did to Dion?

Are the CPC, complaining about pollster Alan Gregg offering up his analysis on the "At Issue" panel on CBC. After all his ties to the Conservative party are well known.

If the answer is no to any of the above questions, the CPC brain trust are just hypocritical, and unethical wads.

Ti-Guy said...

Did anyone at CPC headquarters ever complain about the impartiality of good year blimp Mike Duffy?

Remember, the Right makes entirely irrelevant distinctions between bias in the corporate media and bias in the public media. They do so by arguing that since no one has any choice with the public subsidy CBC gets from taxpayers, it is to be held to a much, much higher standard of journalistic good practice than the corporate media, which...they claim...we are free from supporting financially.

It's that's last part that's the big lie. I have even less power and chance of pulling my financial support from CTV or Global than I do with the CBC. I would need to spend considerably more time and effort into boycotting the corporate media's advertisers, despite the fact that I'm sure those revenues, coming from the consumer, account for a lot more over the year than the amount of my taxes the pittance the CBC gets a year represents.

In the end though, I really do blame the CBC. It has never handled the Right's charges of bias very well, which I would have done by doing more programming on the difference between bias and accuracy and by showing that true bias can only be established over a longer period of time and with a significant body of evidence.

Shiner said...

Did anyone at CPC headquarters ever complain about the impartiality of good year blimp Mike Duffy?

Honestly, I'm sure they did at some point. Maybe not people on the Hill, but their constituency? Certainly. Duffy had a moment or two reporting actual facts and, for all the laughs it gets, reality does have a Liberal bias. That's why the media's always out to get them, because anything remotely close to accurate exposes them as the idiots they are.

Gallahad said...

Well just for shits and giggles today, I paid a visit to the blog of the Oakville crackpot.

He/she/it, is railing against the media. Particularly Susan Riley.

If anybody has an answer to this question, I would appreciate it.

Canadian Lunatic, has been banned on most sites other than BT ones.

Why is that asshole still allowed to post here?

Ti-Guy said...

Why is that asshole still allowed to post here?

I'll answer for BCL, since he's probably not paying attention.

You can't ban anyone on Blogger. And BCL kind of finds these loonies amusing or at best harmless (which they are *if* everyone ignores them). But he has deleted CanadianSense's comments from time to time.

bigcitylib said...

I usually give trolls one or two comments, but will delete after that if they're too assholish or stop being entertaining. Esp. if they're long comments I know they worked really hard on.

Tof KW said...

Gallahad said...
Well just for shits and giggles today, I paid a visit to the blog of the Oakville crackpot.

If you need to, heavy drinking should help kill whatever brain cells might retain those memories Gallahad. But know when to quit. After all if you stupify yourself to the point where your IQ reaches that of a common houseplant - CanadianSense's blog may begin to seem coherent and analytical.

Oxford County Liberals said...

YOu CAN ban.. but you need to install an external comment board interface on here which allows that.

Unfortunately, my pleading to BCL to do that continually falls on deaf ears.