Tom Brodbeck in the Winnipeg Sun;
One television report this week had Mulroney calling former Tory cabinet minister Joe Clark “stupid” in the book.
Actually, what Mulroney really said in the book was that Clark was a weak leader and didn’t have the capacity to manage his caucus when he was party leader.
“I’m not so sure that he does today, although if he hasn’t learned anything over the last seven or eight years, he’d be a very stupid man, and he’s not stupid,” said Mulroney.
The TV report turned “not stupid” into “stupid.”
Maybe Mulroney’s not so crazy after all.
Kind of verifies what Mulroney said about the press.
It was under Brian Mulroney’s tenure that the Quebec criminal underworld and the mafia moved into Ottawa and Toronto-so any comments from him regarding the competence of Joe Clark can be taken with a grain of salt. (Brian Mulroney still costs the CDN taxpayers about a million bucks per year in pensions and security, etc.)
Whatever else can be said about Joe Clark, he was an Honest and Uncorruptible Leader, ( which is why he was replaced in the first place.)
Oh my god! There was no Quebec criminal underworld and mafia before Mulroney was elected … that’s it!
I want to switch my vote to Turner!
Yeh right,replaced by the electorate with Chretian,a veritable icon of honesty and all things we as Canadians can admire.
Spike has it right.
Mulroney understood the biased mainstream media twenty years ago, a lesson Canadian are only coming to understand, thanks to the internet.
The gate-keeping on information in Canada is no longer the domain of mainstream media.
Brian’s apparent assessment of some named journalists is quite valid. Give that one to Brian.
“Whatever else can be said about Joe Clark, he was an Honest and Uncorruptible Leader…”
Heh, keep drinking that Kool Aid Dave.
FWIW: When the Tories were elected, I was a new (still non-Citizen) immgrunt with no axe to grind.
I noticed the beating the Tories took from the media. With them supporting a vicious Grit opposition, it was hard for the Tories to make headway on many things. It is obvious today that this is a congenital condition with the media.
On May 29, 2004, in the Toronto Sun, Greg Weston wrote:
“Just when it seemed federal politics couldn’t get any sleazier, Sun Media has learned that a group of powerful Tory and Liberal backroom operatives secretly conspired to bolster the Grit national campaign and skew the results in a number of ridings in the last federal election. Two weeks before Jean Chretien called the country to the polls in October 2000, reliable sources say, a small group of top Tory officials cut a secret deal to help Chretien’s ultimately successful national campaign for a third majority government.
“In return, the Liberals agreed to throw the vote in the Calgary Centre riding of then Tory leader Joe Clark. In what may have been a series of similar deals, sources say the Tories also agreed to “stand down” to help Liberal Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan hang on to her Edmonton seat, which she won by only 733 votes.
“[…] the Tories acclaimed Rory Koopermans to run, a then 25-year-old political neophyte with almost no money or organization. Koopermans says he knew nothing of any backroom deal, and that “If that happened,” Koopermans said of the deal, “that’s just terrible. It’s wrong.”
OT (?), this puckster votes for G-G Clarkson as MV GG ever: Come back, Gordie, Sid, Syl, Turk, Gump, Shack, Bentleys, Fred White, Howie, & et al: Down with the blue line! This is sexist discrim, no? By G-G, of all poisons.
Next: MV Sniper in the Army. A beautiful, majestic, silver bullet, upright on a walrus tusk base from the Akillyou tribe;gleamimg platinum bars, geilt, argent; inscribed with the number of kills; dates; wars; gules buffalo; au revenant. Perfect!>>>>
GG set to unveil trophy for women hockey stars
CTV.ca News Staff
Outgoing Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson is expected to announce Wednesday the creation of a trophy in her name for supremacy in Canadian women’s hockey.
“Whatever else can be said about Joe Clark, he was an Honest and Uncorruptible Leader…”
Okay….
http://www.ckln.fm/~asadismi/congo.html
Heart of Darkness
The destruction of the Congo says much more about the West than it does about the Central African country. It reveals most clearly that the West is largely a criminal enterprise, the prosperity of which is based on the genocide of Third World people and the theft of their resources. The Congo is perhaps the worst example of this but the West has followed the same policy in Asia, Africa and Latin America for centuries. In this sense, Western countries can be seen as a murderous mafia led by their godfather the United States government for which no amount of blood and wealth is enough. Today, the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide are being tried in Tanzania. It is time to try those responsible in the U.S. and Belgium as well for more than a century of genocide and plunder in the Congo. And that will just be the beginning of dealing with the West’s horrendous crimes against humanity.
According to the “Christian Science Monitor,” Laurent “Butcher” Kabila “adopted a circle of Canadian advisers.” Part of this “Congo inner circle” was Joe Clark, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and former Canadian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. In the mid 1990s, Clark became First Quantum Mineral’s special adviser on Africa. He stated: “The government of Congo knows that if it’s going to make progress quickly in terms of using assets that create jobs, mining is more likely to do it than other sectors.”
“The government of Congo knows that if it’s going to make progress quickly in terms of using assets that create jobs, mining is more likely to do it than other sectors.”
This quote seems rather innocuous in the absence of more context, even knowing that Clark was part of The Butcher’s inner circle. What was his intention in saying this?
If Joe Who wasn’t stupid, why did his wife have to line up a job for him when he left politics? Incidentally, that would also indicate that he probably wasn’t corrupt because most ex-politicians find soft landings into cushy jobs.
This quote seems rather innocuous in the absence of more context, even knowing that Clark was part of The Butcher’s inner circle. What was his intention in saying this?
Old Joe was pushing his own agenda: making a killing in the private sector tween guvinment gigs!
Cummon Kate, the damn MSM can’t get the weather right let alone make a factual book report…what were you expecting???
This is a kind of interesting test of Canada’s MSM…we should keep tabs on the discrepencies betwen what Mulroney is quoted as saying in the book and what the red media says he said….maybe there’s a book right there for Newman 😉
I’m always amazed that the conservative politicians even mention Brian Mulroney’s name – he single handedly destroyed conservative politics in Canada. Whether history treats him well or not remains to be seen – but the Bloc and the Reform party were a direct result of his policies, and we’re still fighting to get some respect. The only thing this book does is damage the conservatives, yet again, before they are even out of the gate.
WLM Redux wrote “…we should keep tabs on the discrepencies…” about the MSM, stemming from the topic in question, regarding Tom Brodbeck’s shoddy reporting.
Whether Mr. Brodbeck is biased against Mulroney, whether he made an error while pressed to meet a publishing deadline or something or whatever, it’s healthy and necessary to shine the light of scrutiny upon this sort of thing, as sometimes it turns out to be biased, perhaps even maliciously so, which is bad for democracy in that citizens receive false info.
I would direct everyone to the following, a post explaining the concept of the “blognet”, a subset of the huge, diverse blogosphere. This post includes two specific recommendations for those of us in the “blognet” to follow during the next Canadian election. Think about it. We do have the power to make a difference and really help to dethrone those powerful but bumbling bums in Ottawa. It’s serious, workable and simple stuff. Go ahead, see it for yourselves.
http://thecanadiansentinel.blogspot.com/2005/09/enter-blognet.html
Cndn Sentinel
You apparently didn’t read the article. It was Tom Brodbeck who was pointing out how the media were warping what was actually said by Brian Mulroney.
It seems it is not only the MSM that is guilty of lack of research and/or shoddy reporting.
I read the article. Too fast. Way too fast.
Thank you for catching ME in the blognet. It’s inspiring me already to be more careful.
See, the blognet works.
I just proved it. No one is impervious to error nor to having the light of scrutiny shone upon it. I submit to the power of the blognet. Thanx again!
TheCanadianSentinel, Nice recovery. Bend and you don’t snap.
Focus, and the Blognet idea… Excellent.
We talked about this on SDA before and the more of us who think about it, the more likely we can swing a cat.
Public perception of us as a large mixed cross section of Canadians is a good aim.
When Kate speaks of our net community on the talk-show ciruit and that mental public image of LARGE GROUP is developed, then the weight of our opinion becomes more effective…. and, oh yeah, check the oil at new spot. http://Anchorpin.Redpin.com ‘3s TG
Sheila said: “I’m always amazed that the conservative politicians even mention Brian Mulroney’s name – he single handedly destroyed conservative politics in Canada”
This may be true Sheila….It’s not so much Conservative politics he destroyed, universal conservative policies have been proven socially prudent and stand the test of time,..what Muldoom did do was piss away an oppotunity to undo PET’s secular, Canadian soviet statism and the corrupt official and “unofficial” patronage systems that supported it (which the Chretien-Martin regime has now entrenched and perfected). Mulroney had an opportunity to democratize parliament, clean up the corporate welfare patronage and renew confederal equity but he chose to play the same patronage networking game (typical for a Powercor alumnus)and he chose to do the reforming the wrong way…with a splashy legacy piece like Meech where he grandstanded as PET’s better and a JA MacDonald wannabe…then saw true democratic reform pissed away by trying to entrench confederal inequity with a one sided veto power for Quebec and rob the provinces of traditional constitutional jurisdiction…fortunately the west saw through the smoke screen of “unity” this revenue/juridicition raiding represented and we killed in a public referendum…they’ll never do that again….that is ask for the public to ratify institutionalized Federal power mongering, this is better done unilaterally and the Martin-Chretien regime perfected closed door 3rd option legislating with the SCC.
Muldoom was no prise, he made gestures like a democratic libertarian but acted lie another Liberal crook…he was the main reason Conservatives, particularly western conservatives, left the federal PC party in droves (and threw it out of power)…his only real legacy is his PMO patronage networking (and to a lesser extent Kim Campbell’s socialist ideals) was responsible for the Conservative party rediscovering its principles and roots in the new Refom party.
Frankly I never play partisan incrimination games with Canadain politics prior to the refom era because we have had so many dismally bad and draconian governments under all brand names…that is the Canadian political legacy of the past 200 years: over bearing autocrats, political networking profiteers and patronage politics…and Mulroney was no exception…but if the MSM is going to take openly partisan shots at him they should have the intellectual integrity and testicular fortitude to label it what it is: pure personal OPINION and not factual professional journalism.
Thanx, Tony G. Made an overenthused rookie mistake there.
Humiliation. Good thing if one knows what to do with it. That which does not kill one makes one stronger. Brett had me kicking myself.
Will check out that site.
WL Mackenzie Redux. Nice Post. Mulroney ran the liberal machine rather than dismantling it. And we’re all paying for that vanity now.
Although I like the candor of his comments:
On Jean Chretien: “The guy just swallows himself whole on NAFTA, nobody says a word. It’s just been an awful bloody piece of business. Only a mean, dirty bastard would do something like that, or a fucking stupid one. And you know what? He’s both. And he’s sucking in this bunch of assholes in the press gallery in Ottawa.”
On the Liberal Rat Pack: “The Rat Pack? These are Nazis. They deal in lies and calumnies. They are the worst kind. The Liberals developed this Nazi-style caliper – tell a lie often enough about somebody and people will believe it.”
How true.
As someone living and working on the Prairies at the time while I was ambivalent to Mulroney on a + and – basis his statement (if correctly quoted) to Newman on the CF 18 contract clearly won by Bristol in Winnipeg, on price and competence, that it was given to Bombardier to give Que. a 21st century industry rankles and burns and turns his so-so PM resume into a definite negative.
P.S. congrats Kate – Google has a new search engine on Blogs ( subject of interest or by Blog name) and SDA shows up several hundred times!