Daily Blogger - Friday, May 16th, 2008
Posted on 16 May 2008 by Jack
Blue Like You | Chantal Hébert misses the mark
I’m having some difficulty deciphering Chantal Hébert’s column this morning - Canada’s Natural Opposition Party.
…Part of the reason for this self-defeating state of affairs may be that the Prime Minister and his coterie of advisers hail from the protest side of the conservative movement.
It is the first time in modern Canadian history that the right wing of the Conservative party produced a prime minister. Whatever institutional memory of government the party may have rests with its progressive wing. But while not all so-called Red Tories have opted to stay out of the tent, in Harper’s peculiar world, they are often as suspect as the Liberals.
Is she trying to say that the Conservative party’s fortunes in Government are adversely affected by a stronger ex-Alliance control at the expense of the Red Tories? If so, I can’t agree.
[…]
Popularity: 18% [?]
May 16th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Harper is your average family guy !
Harper is not some Rich lawyer from Quebec, like so many other
PMs.
MSM would be fawning over a Liberal PM with a young family
living in 24 Sussex.
Since Harper is not from snob ville central Canada he is
some how bad or not up to snuff !
MSM should get their head out of their A$$ before they go the way
of the dodo bird.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:59 am
What it appears she’s saying is the far right wing of the party, many Alliance people,still frighten many Canadians. Harper was able to muzzle them during the last election and it proved to help elect members where they could not before. These same people, it would appear have a much larger influence with our government than some people are comfortable with. An example would be the Christian group taking the credit for the bill restricting money that may go to some films.
Perhaps Timwest will tell us what his experience is with the snobs in central Canada and how calling people names furthers his argument. I would hardly call any prime minister of this country and “average family guy”.
May 16th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Thanks for the link, Jack!
Actually Larry, I think that the “So Con” wing of the party are somewhat disenchanted with this government. That said, there is not really a serious alternative.
Stephen Harper is successfully moving the CPC to the centre, which is forcing all the other opposition parties off to the extreme left.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
May 16th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
You don’t have to be Christian to not want your tax dollars going towards funding money losing porn films Larry, so why all of the sudden have you started listening so intently to whatever Christians have to say? The Christians aren’t really taking over so you don’t have to be so paranoid and can come out from hiding. It really is all in your mind and help is available. I do agree with you though that PM Harper is far above average.
Chantal’s problem is typical of the MSM in that if they don’t write about Harper’s accomplishments they don’t believe they happened.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Way off topic, but a very sad faced Susan Bonar is reporting that the RCMP has concluded its investigation and no charges will be laid in the Cadman affair. No wrong doing was found.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
I see a few things happening here and it is not all bad for the CPC. Hebert and others like Don Martin have always been considered relatively unbiased by most people. I’ve watched them abolutely refusing to budge from their ‘hate Harper’ agenda to the point where many are coming to realize that what they are saying is often unmitigated garbage.
A good example is my mother. She just won’t listen to people like Jane Tabor anymore. She doesn’t recognize that the MSM is biased but she does recognize that what they are saying does not reflect what is happening. This is creating dissonance and eventually this dissonace will lead to outright scepticism. This can only help the CPC.
The other thing that bothers me is the MSM constant holding up of Christians and their beliefs as ’scary’. What about the likes of Denis Coderre marching in lock step with the Hezbollah and wanting to mollycoddle the Taliban, talk about ‘war crimes’ by Isreal. Now those behaviors scary me but apparently the MSM haven’t got a problem with the Leftists. Cheers.
May 16th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Too many folks here suffer from a classic case of the frog in boiling water. Chantal is not balanced. She is a leftie, there is no way on earth she would ever vote Conservative, she is not on our side. So don’t get lulled into thinking she’s fair and balanced. She wants Harper out of office and works on it cleverly with all her columns.
For her to say that in the face of Sandy’s list of accomplishments “But now that the Conservatives are in power, they do not seem to be able to make the psychological transition from opposition to government.” … that is absolutely ridiculous.
To say that “One of the common threads to their adversarial dealings with the media, the public service and the institutions of Parliament is that power has exacerbated their opposition instincts” is to ignore a century of the NGP plus decades of PM’s from Quebec loading up our civil service with bilingual staff from the Ottawa/Montreal corridor where the mindset is more socialist than the ROC. Time and again we’ve seen leaks out of this civil service which cannot be trusted.
But even Conservatives will fall for the idea that Chantal is balanced. However, it is not balanced to say “It is the first time in modern Canadian history that the right wing of the Conservative party produced a prime minister”. Harper is not right wing, you’d have to be pretty left wing to think so.
May 16th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Well said, nomdeblog. I agree with everything you say, and you say what you have to say very well!
May 16th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Jema thanks, it isn’t often that Chantal is so blatantly caught out left. But as SOR said above, the left is going into a funk because these Obama wannabes can’t deal with real action or real accomplishments.
Once Conservatives realize that pundits like Chantal are not balanced then we’ll start to make some real inroads into changing this country and taking it back from unionized government employees and shrinking government which is what “the right” is really about.
Chantal and Jim Travers will always try to convince readers they were equally hard on Liberals when in power therefore we should treat them as balanced. They aren’t. If they were ever the least bit hard on Liberals it is only because these Liberal pundits saw themselves as the official opposition; perhaps with justification since opposition Conservatives were in total disarray for 13 years.
That was a period when Chrétien/Martin let the MSM dictate policy and sell it to the public; then and only then would the Liberals implement anything after it had already been sold by the Red Star. I wish I could think of an example of a Liberal policy or accomplishment other than just staying in power for 13 years. That’s what Chantal and Travers really miss, when they were keeping Liberals in power by being the devils’ advocates.
But once it becomes evident that these pundits are Liberals; then even Liberals won’t bother reading them. If a Liberal wants to read a liberal they’ll read Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. Why read liberal Travers if you can read liberal MoDo who’s world famous? That’s why the Toronto Star is in free fall.
May 16th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Chantel is one of the most intelligent writer in the country. I don’t alway agree with what she says, but she is no slouch, always worth reading. I have no idea how she’d vote. And yes, she is one of us, a concerned Canadian.
The some Christian would indeed like to take over the world, just like some Muslims. If they’d all just go to their churches or what ever and stop trying to tell everyone how to live the world would be a better place for all of us.
I didn’t say Harper is above average, just that any Prime Minister of Canada can’t be just an average family guy. Average Canadians are not Prime Ministers just a working guy with a family.
May 16th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Not long ago I was witness to a few of the same people applauding an article Hiebert had written that put Dion on the same level as duffus, now ripping her apart because she wrote something critical of Mr. Haroper and the CPC.
Let’s be a little consistant, I think she is one of the few journalists that calls it as she see it, regardless of your political colours.
I saw things in her report that I agreed with and other’s I didn’t, one can’t ask for much more than that…unless one is so totally biased for one party or the other they will brook no criticism.
May 16th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Guardsman,,IMHO Just because you write something good and true about the Conservatives one day,doesnt mean you have to write something bad and untrue about them the next to make yourself look like your not biased.If you have nothing bad to say about someone ,dont make up a story like Chantal did and what the Liberals are always doing.
May 16th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Guardsman is calling her a Liberal “ripping her apart ” ?
Admittedly if you called me a Liberal I’d be real hurt.
But she is what Larry says (with the insert) “Chantel is one of the most intelligent (insert LIBERAL) writers in the country”
But she is nowhere close to Steyn , Jonas, Fulford ,Gunter, Levant, David Warren … just my opinion.
Plus she mostly just comments on Ontario/Quebec and the historic co-dependency of Liberals and the Bloc.. has she ever been to the epicenter ..Calgary?