When Parliament was last in session (after a week off, it returns on Monday), Ken Dryden made a valiant, if clumsy, attempt at invoking Richard Nixon and Watergate to Stephen Harper and the Chuck Cadman affair. Dryden tends to overplay his hand. To use another sports analogy, he’s comparable to a strike-out prone slugger in baseball (Rob Deer, perhaps). When he connects, it’s mesmerizing to behold. But a lot of times he’s going to swing hard and miss wildly, embarrassing himself in the process.
When Parliament was last in session (after a week off, it returns on Monday), Ken Dryden made a valiant, if clumsy, attempt at invoking Richard Nixon and Watergate to Stephen Harper and the Chuck Cadman affair. Dryden tends to overplay his hand. To use another sports analogy, he’s comparable to a strike-out prone slugger in baseball (Rob Deer, perhaps). When he connects, it’s mesmerizing to behold. But a lot of times he’s going to swing hard and miss wildly, embarrassing himself in the process.
Not that there isn’t a Nixon comparison to be made. Here, for instance, a pair of Canadians make the connection much more convincingly. In the pages of a British paper at that. The kicker: “Canadians should rightly wonder why their head of government has such a problem with so many Canadian institutions.”
Jeet Heer, in a previous life, was an arts writer at that well-known socialist rag, the National Post.
-To the massive conspiracy against Stephen Harper—which, at last count, included the RCMP, Elections Canada, the CBC, the Liberal Party of Canada and the Supreme Court of Canada—you can now add the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. Obviously.
-Oh, also the Conservative party’s own candidates.
–Simon Hoggart on the British Tory leader: “Being assailed by David Cameron must be like losing a pillow fight.”
-The National Post declares: “The war for control of the Liberal Party of Canada is back on.” Apparently that war they, and others, have been obsessively detailing for the last year and a half ended at some point recently.
-Some speculation on the next Supreme Court justice can be found here. Best line: “It’s time for Peter MacKay to stop prancing around in Afghanistan and get down to business on behalf of his alma mater.”
-And, finally, Esquire pays tribute to the rhetoric of city politics. (This clip, from the chambers of Toronto city council, made the rounds not so long ago.) If nothing else, this should serve to remind how much worse discourse in the House could yet get.