adventures of oily the splot

I swear, you read this fundraising letter from Doug Finley, and it’s as though the Conservatives are actually afraid of the Insane Dion Permanent Tax on Everything(tm):

Last week, Stephen Taylor published a behind-the-scenes account of the life and death of Oily the Splot, the now-silenced spokestain for the Conservative Party’s anti-carbon tax campaign. In it, he suggests that the decision to release Oily into the wild was a deliberate attempt to get out ahead of the Liberals – who were still dillydallying over the launch of the plan – by pre-defining Dion’s “green shift” as a “permanent tax on everything” – a simplistic, cartoon-like approach to a substantial policy debate; but one that, they hoped, would poison the waters before the Liberal plan had even been announced:

UPDATE – Wells has the details of the contract – which does exist, although it is between the Conservatives and Retail Media Inc., Fuelcast and Retail Media Inc., which, presumably, would have bought the ads on behalf of its client, and which apparently was informed by Fuelcast this morning that the network doesn’t run political ads.

… actually, not all that well at all, and now it looks like we may not even get the chance. Not in Toronto, anyway, where Oily doesn’t seem to be welcome — not when he shows up on a gas pump video screen.

As reported by Inkless just moments ago, the tiny Tories have hit the streets in support of the Conservative government’s firm action on climate change to hand Oily the Splot.

UPDATE (But read the whole post if you’ve not done so already, or it won’t make any sense): If Fuelcast isn’t involved in the Conservatives’ advertising campaign, why are the commercials described as “fuelcasts” on the website? Given that “fuelcast” is a registered servicemark owned by Daktronics (which co-owns Fuelcast.com), it would seem likely to perpetuate the confusion over just what gas pump network is running the ads.

Okay, so I’m probably not exactly the target demographic for the new Conservative ad campaign – which is given far more thoughtful consideration by Colleagues Wells and Wherry. But really, how many undecided voters out there are going to give serious consideration to what an anthropomorphized glob of fossil fuel has to say about environmental policy?