Rosie is right. The Globe and Mail’s coverage of the robocalls scandal has been pretty limp. The National Post is where the action is at. It’s almost as if the G&M is feeling a little sheepish about giving Harper their endorsement, so now they’re reluctant to admit the horse they backed is a kingsized sleazoid.*
But a couple G&M writers did manage to churn out some worthwhile reads on the subject. First, Gerald Kaplan wonders just how dangerous Stephen Harper is exactly. His answer: pretty damn dangerous. Here’s a clip:
Mr. Harper’s Conservatives, many of us fear, have changed the entire game. In fact for them it’s not a game at all. Like their cherished American Republican role models, when they speak about their war room, they mean it. And in war, it hardly needs saying, there’s little tolerance for democratic niceties.
But my favourite piece from this week was an interview with Donald Segretti, one of the men involved in the dirty tricks campaign exposed in the Watergate scandal. (He was played by Robert Walden in All the President’s Men. Which is just about my favourite movie ever.)
Segretti, as it turns out, isn’t impressed by this robocalls thing.
“We never tried to do something that would, at the end of the day, take away the right of somebody to vote,” he said. “That goes beyond a prank. It’s just wrong, on many levels.”
Their dirty tricks campaign, Mr. Segretti claimed, was designed to disrupt the Democrats, not hoodwink voters.
So, one sleazoid to another: Robocalls is worse than Watergate. Wonder if we’ll get a big-budget, newsroom film out of it?
Yeah… probably not.
NOTE:
* See, how I went with “sleazoid” instead of “kingsized douche nozzle”? Pretty restrained of me, no?